Nail Salons: What the NYT Got Wrong

Rarely does a newspaper story get the kind of response that The New York Times front-page exposé of wage-theft at nail salons prompted this spring. Profiling at length the experiences of a woman named Jing Ren—a twenty-year-old recent immigrant who was paid no salary for her first three months on the job and was shockingly underpaid after that—the nearly 7,000-word article asserted that “rampant exploitation” afflicts “a vast majority” of the many thousands of manicurists in the more than 3,600 nail salons of New York State. The article said it drew on interviews with more than one hundred salon workers, nearly all of whom “had wages withheld in ways that would be considered illegal.” It also suggested that these practices have been systematically ignored by city and state authorities.

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