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 T heodore 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."
