Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn joined Boston Public Radio on Tuesday, and she spoke about New York Times writer Sarah Maslin Nir's reporting on New York City nail salons. Koehn is the author of Ernest Shackleton Exploring Leadership.
Questions are paraphrased, and Koehn's answers are edited where noted [...].
Some of the conditions of nail salons documented in the Times piece are horrific.
The labor practices are quite shocking. They employ largely immigrant labor. [...] It's very, very common practice to not pay a worker. [...] You work 10 or 12 hours a day for months without pay, [and] when they are finally paid, often two, three or four months [later], the average pay [...] seems to average somewhere about $30 or $40 per day.
Clearly what they're doing is illegal.
Most of us would call some kind of abuse. It is a dirty, nasty, very — I'm sure for a lot of consumers — surprising picture. [...] The second story, which is equally shocking and frightening, is about the chemicals [...] that these women absorb day after day, taking off nails, putting on acrylic nail polish.
And there's a demand driving this, right?
For many, many consumers this will be big news. [...] When did nails, pedicures and manicures, become a de rigeur, must-have thing for the middle class? [...] I went through a period in my life where I had my nails done every week, and it was almost as important as putting on makeup!
You're certainly not the only person who's visited a salon.
In many neighborhoods in Manhattan, nail salons are much more prevalent than Starbucks! [It's an] industry that has a very, very low cost to entry. So if you're a young entrepreneur, [...] you can set up a salon [very cheaply]. It's not very capital-intensive, not an industry with very high barriers to entry. [It's] conspicuous consumption. [...] Do we want to see that as consumers? Do we want to know the backstory?
Sarah Maslin Nir's reporting prompted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to set up a task force to look into abuses. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of people — many of whom are immigrants — who have been potentially victimized.
We're so worried about certain immigrants, and we're so unworried, so halcyon, with this situation with illegal immigrants. [...] Many of these workers live in apartments that are one room with twelve people [...] it is something out of Theodore Dreiser. There's other parts of the economy, other parts of the supply chain [where] this is not new news. But it does raise this question, [...] What is really going on with everyday, low, low prices?
We've seen sea changes in other industries, like when César Chávez led the Delano grape strike. Could we see it here?
You think about organic-made or cage-free hens, [...] or some of the ways in which a more humane treatment of our meat supply is beginning to come in, and that may [happen in other industries].
Will this change anybody's behavior, realistically?
I have read a lot of comments on [the article]. A lot of women said, 'That's it, I'm done. I'm not having another manicure.'
>>Nancy Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School, and the author of Ernest Shackleton Exploring Leadership. You can hear her Tuesdays on BPR. Sarah Maslin Nir's piece is called "The Price of Nails."
