As an Asian immigrant, I can attest to the fact that more well-to-do & established immigrants are fully capable of fucking over their own people if they know they can get away with it (language barriers, less education, etc.). Privilege is a powerful thing.

I don’t think you are taking taxes (1099) into your equation, and that some techs are required to pay for supplies.

My Vietnamese boss locked the doors on a Latina girl until she cleaned all the chairs and didn’t let her leave. They also only paid her 20% comisión because they thought she was illegal. (She was an American citizen) so no, I think all ethnicities are capable of wrongdoing.

Your family claims yoir workers as independent contractors while they are truly employees, thus putting the tax burden on them. So they have to save to pay taxes, so they make even less. Not to mention that those long hours that the employees spend cleaning up and opening and doing extra stuff are not paid at all. At…

Just a quick note that this “best case” is still $55K/year with 50+ hour work weeks, no benefits, and no paid vacation/holidays/sick time. That annual net income gets chipped away with insurance premiums, plus every illness or injury. And heaven forbid a worker wants to take a few days off to just enjoy life.

So your counter-argument is, “That detailed article about a year-and-a-half long examination of hundreds of salons in New York City is inaccurate because I know some people in Chicago who don’t do that.”

Your statement checks out with my statement, considering that mine reached $56,000 while being generous. Therefore, I would say we’re in agreement there.

Nonetheless, where I disagree with you is in your original statement. The article isn’t wrong—it just isn’t your personal experience. The screencaps found online and…

I’d like to take the numbers offered within this post, and see where they take us.

I think another difference between the two is that McDonald’s can’t just out-and-out break the law like these nail salons have been doing. This is not to say, of course, that McDonald’s doesn’t exploit their employees, but they tend to do so within the confines of the law (that they likely wrote/lobbied for).

the jobs you describe are not good, fair, or legal working conditions, even for independent contractors. While it may be true that being employed under shitty conditions is better than not being able to find work at all, it is still unfair to work without breaks, overtime pay, benefits, etc. That doesn’t mean it…

My parents were landlords who treated their tenants with respect and dignity, therefore all landlords are that way, right? Can’t see past your own driveway, can you?

I guess what I’m pissed off about is all this fervor small business get for being “exploitive” and today I watched a grown man throw his food at a woman working at McDonalds and then spouted off a bunch of Xenophobic racial slurs at her before I screamed and chased him out. Her managers, if they existed, did nothing.…

The governor made good on his promise: in August, the state inspected 182 salons, 43 percent of which were found to not pay minimum wage or overtime. 87 percent neglected to provide employees with wage statements or pay stubs, and approximately three out of five nail salon employers admitted they did not maintain…

Also nothing more American than fighting for your right to exploit others in the name of PROFIT. Indeed, welcome to the American Way (tm).

Er, to me, this is a matter of basic math. I have lived in NYC for 8 years and the NY metro area for my entire life. I have gotten my nails done in many different places, and when you start doing the addition at most of them, the price for your manicure starts to not add up to anything near what would be a livable…

THIS. My family from the Spanish speaking Caribbean, and boy, the absolutely exploitative assholes we were surrounded by- brothers and sisters from back home!

A while back, when the NYRB published the rebuttal. Nir tweeted out some images of ads from here research, and they did indeed say what she claimed. I don’t know why people keep brining this up. The Times certainly have people on staff who can read Chinese, and if this was something Nir couldn’t verify, her career…

The argument about whether their newspaper ads are advertising wages or the typical price of a service is interesting, and I wonder which answer is correct (if not both).

As a former “fresh off the boat” immigrant (what people have called me and my family) I completely believe the nytimes article. You want to meet people who exploit immigrants? Look at their closest community first and foremost. Talk about brutal. This is one area where I think that the “evil white man” is only one of…

Nothing more American than exploited workers protesting in defense of their abusive employers because the desperation of our economy has mind-fucked them into Stockholm Syndrome. Welcome, immigrants, you have assimilated in the most important way.