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    Sunnyside_LadyAnna Merlan
    7/27/15 10:14am

    Long Story: After reading the NY Times article, I def worried about my own salon. It’s dingy and in the middle of Queens but lots of the local women go there and its very friendly. A Korean woman and her husband owned it and they were there ALL the time but it was mostly staffed by our newest immigrant group - the Tibetans/Bhutanese. Well, I had become friendly with Jharma, my Tibetan manicurist, who was so excited for my pregnancy (she had 4 children back in Tibet living with her parents and one here - she was saving up to bring the others over. She hadn’t seen them in 4 years!).

    Again, this all spells bad news right? She’s probably not legal? She’s probably being paid nothing? So I hadn’t been back in a long time and I stopped by last week and the place is now called “Lhamo’s Nails” (Lhamo is Tibetan for some sort of opera singer/dancer from what I understand). Turns out Korean lady sadly got very ill suddenly (which is awful, she was very nice), and so Jharma and a couple of the other Tibetan/Bhutanese women pooled their money and now own the place! Jharma couldn’t even do my nails, she was too busy managing the store :-)

    So yeah, I think I probably got very lucky with my nail salon. It’s nice to see them making the most of their American experience :-)

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      AspenSunnyside_Lady
      7/27/15 10:26am

      It definitely worth doing your research and trying to find an ethical place. It would be a shame for Jharma and women like her to lose business because potential patrons are afraid they might be subsidizing slave labor.

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      NomNom83Sunnyside_Lady
      7/27/15 10:28am

      There’s still a lot of gray area there regarding wages, treatment and legality, but it sounds like things have turned out pretty well for them. I hope they carry-on (or start) treating and paying their employees fairly. Hope the original owner is going to be okay.

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    EldritchAnna Merlan
    7/27/15 10:23am

    Yeah, and I bet if you asked the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory they would have said everything was totally fine and dandy there too.

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      junwelloEldritch
      7/27/15 10:27am

      Probably even after the fire.

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      LosingMyMonkeysEldritch
      7/27/15 10:32am

      As a labor lawyer, this post gave me the feels.

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    SqarrAnna Merlan
    7/27/15 9:59am

    Rich guy getting rich off slavery thinks getting rich off slavery’s cool?

    I guess that’s that, then.

    Better not argue with him lest he whips out his little John Galtcock.

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      someone on the internetSqarr
      7/27/15 10:07am

      Pretty much.

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      WIncredulousSqarr
      7/27/15 10:31am

      I am shocked by that. Shocked, I say!

      *clutches pearls*

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    SuffersfoolsgladlyAnna Merlan
    7/27/15 10:26am

    He sounds shady as fuck. If you are running a legitmate business, treating your employees well and want to brag about how great you are, fine, but why would you rush to defend an entire flawed industry? It’s just odd.

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      festivusaziliSuffersfoolsgladly
      7/27/15 11:00am

      Seriously. A way more effective response would have been along the lines of “This is how we treat employees at my salons, here are some resources/tips for evaluating the employment practices of your salon, here are my ideas for reforming the industry.”

      The head in the sand, nothing to see here response just invites everyone to ignore you.

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      SprocheteSuffersfoolsgladly
      7/27/15 11:18am

      He’s making the logical fallacy that because it’s not a part of his immediate experience, it’s not real. He doesn’t beat his wife, therefore no women can be taken seriously with reports of abuse. He’s not poor, therefore anyone who is poor just isn’t trying hard enough.

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    The Real UnsharerAnna Merlan
    7/27/15 10:04am

    It’s not like this guy has a vested interest in keeping nail salon wages unfairly low, right?

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      NematodesUnitedThe Real Unsharer
      7/27/15 10:17am

      And of course if he feels he is treating his workers well it must be true, for both his salon and all other salons. The findings if the investigation and the interviews with workers were totally fabricated/exaggerated/exceptions

      /sarcasm

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    Violet BaudelaireAnna Merlan
    7/27/15 12:27pm

    If they pool their money, as many immigrant families do, their combined earnings could be several hundred dollars a day or more.

    Okay, working at 10 dollars a day, you’d have to have 10 people pool their money together to make 100 dollars a day. Which would be 10 working adults, and he mentions families, so lets assume there are maybe 5 kids. That would be 15 people living on 3000 a month in NYC.

    Not to mention that that is assuming that a person has a large pool of family members or support system that they can pool with, and trust (which let’s not discuss that enormous cultural assumption right there).

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      Cocopop!Violet Baudelaire
      7/27/15 12:56pm

      Also, dude, that is not how it works. The minimum wage is not calculated by how many adults live in your home. Pooling money has nothing to do with it. The minimum wage is the minimum wage. Period.

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      LynxViolet Baudelaire
      7/27/15 1:18pm

      Yeah, there’s this mentality that immigrants pride themselves on their thrift, but in reality, it’s just a race to bottom, and no one benefits from that. :/

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    LynxAnna Merlan
    7/27/15 10:09am

    I, too, have Chinese in-laws and um, yeah...I think a lot of people would like to think that NYC doesn’t operate like BFE China, but I hate to break it to you....

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      I Still DreamAnna Merlan
      7/27/15 10:00am

      The NYRB is normally fantastic, I’m really disappointed that they ran this.

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        The Ghost of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ AKA BabyStepsI Still Dream
        7/27/15 10:18am

        The confusion on my face when I read that it was the New York Review of Books that published this piece:

        GIF
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        myownworstenemyI Still Dream
        7/27/15 10:21am

        I am so puzzled by this, too. I kept reading hoping for the twist where the NYRB was like “PSYCH! This guy’s a sweatshop owner too!”

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      HarrietBonk-GreenAnna Merlan
      7/27/15 10:20am

      A sample size of one is statistically significant, right?

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        SqarrHarrietBonk-Green
        7/27/15 10:27am

        Well, actually, it’s a sample size of however many dollars he’s worth.

        Because corporations are people and that’s how voting works now.

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      kentuckienneAnna Merlan
      7/27/15 10:23am

      This section drove me nuts: he claims that contrary to the Times, his salons are inspected twice a year, and that “between May 2014 and May this year, there were 5,174 inspections of “appearance enhancement” businesses, which would include ordinary beauty as well as nail salons.” Which is a totally meaningless statistic if we don’t know how many “appearance enhancement” businesses there are in New York State. If we’re including hair salons and spas and tanning salons and barbershops, in addition to nail salons, I would wager that 5,174 is only a small proportion of the businesses eligible for inspection. I’m not guessing if 5,174 is 5 or 50 or 15%, because I don’t know. And neither does this guy, apparently.

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