Thursday, November 26, 2020

Nail Salons, Lifeline for Immigrants, Have Lost Half Their Business
Juliana Kim
Thu, November 26, 2020
NYT
Nail polish at the Beverly Nail Studio in Queens on Nov. 11, 2020. 
(Jeenah Moon/The New York Times)

NEW YORK — On most days, Juyoung Lee is the only person inside Beverly Nail Studio, the salon that she owns in Flushing, Queens. It is often eerily quiet, and when no customers come by, Lee at times sits at her work station and weeps.

“Maybe, just maybe, tomorrow will be busy,” she said. “I’m waiting.”

Like nail salons across New York City, her business had to close when the pandemic hit in March. There was a brief surge in demand after the lockdown was lifted in July, but then appointments started dwindling. Often, customers requested cheaper services. Now, they hardly come at all.

The beauty industry in the city seemed well positioned to bounce back after restrictions ended. After all, many customers had spent months without professional grooming. But now, many of these businesses are on the verge of collapse — a drastic hit for an industry that is an economic engine for immigrant women.

Some nail salons have had a difficult time persuading customers that it is safe to come in. Others, especially those in Manhattan business districts, have yet to see regular customers come back because many of them had left the city or are working from home.

With 26 years of nail salon experience and 20 years of savings poured into her own business, Lee, 53, said there was nothing else that she can imagine doing. But she’s barely staying afloat.

“Even though it was hard before, I was always able to pay the bills. But now, no matter how hard I work, I make no money,” she said.

Nail salon visits in the state have dropped by more than 50%, and sales have fallen by more than 40%, according to an October survey of 161 salon owners conducted by the Nail Industry Federation of New York.

The New York Nail Salon Workers Association, an advocacy group affiliated with the union Workers United, said less than half of 594 workers surveyed had returned to work as of August. In New York City, there were 4,240 nail salons in 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Three percent of the country’s nail salons are in Brooklyn, and 2% are in Queens.

“The workforce is primarily immigrant workers living paycheck to paycheck, supporting children and in many cases sick and aging family members in their own countries,” said Luis Gomez, the association’s organizing director. “Add the recession and the effects of the pandemic on top, and we anticipate that many workers will fall even deeper into poverty.”

In Queens, Rambika Ulak KC, 50, said she had so much business shortly after reopening in July that she hired back all 10 of her employees part time. But now, she sees only about four customers a day.

Ulak dropped out of college in Nepal to come to the United States. When she developed carpal tunnel from giving manicures or was berated by customers frustrated by her poor English, she would fix her eyes on the photos of her daughter taped to the wall. Now, as her business erodes, she finds herself looking back at the photos even more often.

“That’s why I work so hard,” Ulak said. “So I can tell her, ‘Don’t think of my future, just be happy and focus on your studies.’”

Salons were able to reopen in July at 50% capacity, with waiting rooms banned and walk-ins discouraged.

While indoor services pose more risks for virus transmission, Dr. Joshua Zeichner, director of cosmetic and clinical research at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, said that if everyone wears masks and customers are properly social distancing, they’re “somewhat safer than with indoor dining.”

Still, many industry leaders worry that salons won’t be able to win back customers’ full confidence and subsequently recover until a vaccine is in wide use.

Eighty-one percent of the national nail salon workforce are women while 79% are foreign-born, according to a 2018 report conducted by the UCLA Labor Center.

Older women may have less career flexibility should the industry continue to crater, said Prarthana Gurung, campaign manager at Adhikaar, a Nepali work center that assists nearly 1,300 Nepali-speaking salon workers in New York City.

“There is a subset of women who’ve been in the nail salon industry for decades, and this is it regardless of what happens,” Gurung said.

Hannah Lee, 60, is one of those women: Since she arrived in the United States, she has worked only in nail salons. Lee reluctantly left South Korea after her husband persuaded her there would be better jobs here, she said.

Though she missed South Korea, she didn’t complain — as a salon worker, Lee learned English on the job, saved enough to put her son through college and always paid her rent on time.

Even now, Lee recognizes she is lucky to be hired back at salons in Queens and Manhattan, where she worked before the pandemic. But she said both salons rarely have any customers these days. She often receives only a few dollars in tips, sometimes nothing at all.

Her pay plummeted from $1,000 per week to $300. She’s behind on rent and is barely able to afford groceries, she said. But she said she refused to look into other industries and is on the hunt for a third nail salon gig despite her worries about her health.

“I just want to feel comfortable with my life. I don’t want anxiety when I go to work about whether customers will come today or not, whether I will get the virus today or not,” she said in Korean.

In Jackson Heights, Queens, Mariwvey Ramirez, 38, recently went back to work after being furloughed for a second time at the Rego Park salon where she worked because of the neighborhood closures.

The first time, back in March, was financially devastating for Ramirez, who is undocumented and therefore ineligible to collect unemployment. Even now, Ramirez, a single mother, was only hired back part time. Her wages went from $700 a week to $400.

Ramirez moved to the United States from Mexico 18 years ago to be with her brother, who moved to the country first, and worked in the salon industry for 17 years.

“I don’t know how to do anything else, for all these years, I worked in nail salons — really my whole life,” she said in Spanish.

The only silver lining has been that now that she has free time, she has enrolled in a class to learn English — in part to broaden her job opportunities, but mostly to advance in the nail salon industry once the pandemic subsides.

Juyoung Lee, the owner of the Beverly Nail Studio, moved from South Korea to New York City 30 years ago. When she arrived, she could only find work in the dry cleaning, garment and nail salon industries because of her limited English.

She first landed a job at a sewing factory, but a few years later, it closed down. She tried her luck in the nail business, saving up for more than two decades to open up her own salon.

When Lee first toured the vacant storefront that would become her salon in 2014, the real estate agent told her he couldn’t imagine the worn-down space turning into a nail shop, she recalled. But Lee could see it — the pink walls, a row of plush pedicure chairs, a collection of nail polish in every conceivable color.

“This was my dream,” Lee said. “Really, this is every employee’s dream to open up their own salon.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Less-educated Asian Americans among hardest hit by job losses during pandemic

Brian Cheung
·Reporter
October 7, 2020·

In May, Kang Vanchiasong lost her job on an assembly line at a medical device company in Georgia. To make ends meet, she started selling lemongrass from her farm in Jefferson, opting to sell on Amazon (AMZN) after the local farmer’s market shut down due to the pandemic.

Vanchiasong, a Lao immigrant who moved to the United States 45 years ago, represents one of the communities hardest hit by the pandemic: Asian Americans with no more than a high school education.

“The ones that don’t have work right now, I don’t know what else they [can] do,” Vanchiasong, 63, told Yahoo Finance. “I have my farm, so I survived with that.”

recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago notes that 77% of Asian men and 56% of Asian women with a high school degree or less were employed before the pandemic.

During the depths of the crisis, employment among those subgroups dropped to 46% and 32% respectively — worse than other groups when controlling for the same education level.

The Chicago Fed used microdata from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and found that Asian men and women with no college degree suffered the steepest job losses in the pandemic. (Credit: David Foster / Yahoo Finance)

“There is a huge disparity across groups, including all minority groups, but the group that was hit hardest in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic is Asian Americans with no college education,” Chicago Fed senior economist Luojia Hu told Yahoo Finance.

For workers like Vanchiasong, questions loom over why the Asian American community has been so deeply affected — and the consequences for years to come.
Breaking down Asian unemployment

The unemployment rate in September for Asian Americans was 8.9%, worse than the white unemployment rate of 7% but better than the Black and Hispanic unemployment rates of 12.1% and 10.3%, respectively.

But as the Chicago Fed research shows, the headline unemployment rate for Asian Americans may be masking the economic fallout for low-skilled, less-educated workers.
Kang Vanchiasong working on her farm in Jefferson, Georgia. Photo: Zepha Gerber

report from consulting firm McKinsey notes that Asian Americans have the highest within-group income inequality in the country — the top 10% of earners make 10.7 times the income of the bottom 10%.

“Oftentimes, the narrative comes back: We don’t need to worry about Asians, they’re actually great, they all go to Ivy League schools,” McKinsey partner Emily Yueh told Yahoo Finance, adding that the Asian American community is not a monolith.

The McKinsey report adds that Southeast Asian and Pacific Islanders are less likely to have a high school diploma and tend to suffer from higher unemployment rates than East Asians.
A report from consulting firm McKinsey cites U.S. Census Bureau data (2018 American Community Survey 1-year estimates) in describing the demographic differences among different Asian American subgroups. (Credit: McKinsey)

At first glance, one might conclude that the steep job losses in the pandemic may have something to do with high Asian employment in high-contact settings like restaurants, the heart of many Asian communities and a major employer for lower-educated workers.

But the Chicago Fed researchers still observed the wide differences even when controlling for occupation and industry, suggesting other forces are at play.

Another explanation may be the significant drop-off in business activity in Asian communities. Memories of the SARS virus in 2002, in addition to fears of xenophobia, pushed communities like New York City’s Chinatown to close before nationwide shutdowns began.
Job retraining

Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell has warned that “long stretches of unemployment can damage or end workers' careers as their skills lose value.”

With small businesses closing their doors for good, the concern is that less educated workers face a steeper road to finding new work — even when a vaccine arrives.
People in masks walk past a closed shop in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan during the coronavirus outbreak in New York City, New York, U.S., March 18, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Segar

The Chinatown Manpower Project, a New York City nonprofit, offers English language instruction and job training courses with a focus on helping new immigrants and low-income workers.

Since the onset of the pandemic, CMP has shifted its job retraining resources toward helping the jobless apply for unemployment insurance. CMP executive director Hong Lee said he is hopeful that workers will be able to get back to jobs.

CMP held a virtual job fair on Sept. 24, which included hirings for low-skill work, and attracted about 350 attendees and 16 employers, down from past job fair attendance of about 500 people and 35 employers.

“They are slowly trickling in [back to jobs], but not as big a spike as the reverse. Not the same as the amount of people applying for unemployment,” Lee told Yahoo Finance.

In Georgia, Vanchiasong made ends meet with her lemongrass and the federal government’s $600-per-week bonus unemployment insurance — which she says “helped a lot.”

Her employer called her back in July, the same month the government’s $600 unemployment bonus expired. But Vanchiasong recalls how scared she was when she was initially furloughed, uncertain about when or if the company would call her back.

“Largely I depended on what God planned for me,” she said. “So I prayed a lot for that.”

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