Like thousands of other Vietnamese-American women in California, Emily Micelli started painting nails to support herself. She turned that weekend job into a two-decade-long career as a manicurist, and now offers her own nail art designs at an upscale Newport Beach salon.
This year, she found her livelihood upended by a few words in the state labor code.
Like other workers in the beauty industry, state-licensed nail technicians were granted an exemption from Assembly Bill 5, the sweeping 2019 law targeting the gig economy that required many employers to classify workers as employees rather than independent contractors.
For nail salons, the exemption was temporary. When it ended on Jan. 1 this year, thousands of manicurists across the state found themselves in legal limbo over their employment status. Many, like Micelli, value their working conditions as independent contractors where they can choose their clients and set their own schedules and are unwilling to be reclassified as hourly employees of the salons where they work.
Lawmakers, backed by unions and workers’ advocates, are now rushing to extend the exemption again — but still only temporarily.
Labor groups say the law targets an industry with an exploited workforce, and they still want to address that. One estimate by UCLA and the California Healthy Nail Salons Collaborative advocacy group says that more than 80% of nail salon workers are immigrants, the overwhelming majority of whom are Vietnamese women. The report’s authors said those workers are vulnerable to worker misclassification, below minimum wages and other labor violations.
Salon owners and some manicurists say that scrutiny is discriminatory. A group of Vietnamese-owned salons and nail technicians, including the Blu Nail Bar where Micelli works, sued the state this year. They claim it is racial discrimination to exempt every beauty profession from stricter employee classification laws except the one made up largely of Vietnamese licensees.
“I feel like they singled us out,” Micelli said. “For hair, they can choose (to be an independent contractor). For nails, they don’t allow us to.”
The debate has exposed two vastly different sides of a ubiquitous industry. Many of the women filing, shaping and painting Californians’ nails in over 6,000 establishments statewide say they deserve to be viewed as independent, professional artists the same as their peers across the beauty industry — even as they acknowledge grueling work conditions in some salons.
Micelli said other salons that have employed her in the past imposed assembly line-like conditions and rushed her to perform more services.
As an independent contractor, she buys her own supplies to stay nimble with trending styles, manages her own appointment hours and sets her own prices. She splits the proceeds 50-50 with the salon, giving the salon a higher cut than normal for its upscale environment.
She most enjoys having a flexible schedule so she can chat with her clients, one at a time.
“It was 30 minutes for a manicure and then you have to move on to the next one,” she said of other salons. “I hope the government doesn’t force us to go into something where I have to comply with a salon. I consider myself a nail artist.”
‘More complaints specifically’ in nail salons
Manicures, once a luxury service, have exploded in availability over the past half-century to become synonymous with everyday indulgence.
That’s due in part to new tools and acrylic nails, and to the proliferation of immigrant-owned nail salons. Beginning with a group of refugee women in Sacramento who learned how to do nails from Hollywood actress Tippi Hedren’s personal manicurist in the 1970s, nail tech work became a go-to rung on the economic ladder for Vietnamese American workers and entrepreneurs.
The number of licensed manicurists in California has more than tripled since 1987, to more than 125,000 in 2023. Nearly half of those who take the licensure exam each year do so in Vietnamese, said Jaime Schrabeck, a Carmel manicurist and industry advocate who analyzed data from the state Board of Barbering and Cosmetology.
In 2015, the New York Times drew national attention to workplace abuses. Its investigation, which focused primarily on Korean-owned nail salons in New York City, found workers were underpaid, trafficked and toiled with dangerous chemicals.
A customer looks over her color options as a nail technician gives her a pedicure at Leann’s Nails in Alameda on April 27, 2018. Photo by Laura A. Oda, Bay Area News GroupState labor regulators had also tangled with nail salons. In one 2013 suit, the state accused the Southern California chain Happy Nails & Spa of wrongly classifying their workers as independent contractors instead of employees based on how much control the businesses had over manicurists’ hours and work. The state lost. The chain is now among the businesses suing over AB 5.
Lawmakers in California took notice, holding a hearing that year on the industry.
Employees are more expensive because they are subject to protections like minimum wage, overtime, meal breaks, workers’ compensation and sick days.
“We found out there were more complaints specifically about misclassification and more findings about misclassification in manicurists than overall cosmetology,” said former Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, who convened the 2015 hearing.
When Gonzalez introduced AB 5 in 2019 to apply even stricter worker classification rules, many beauty professionals who rent booths in salons lobbied to keep working independently.
They were exempted from the law and could remain independent contractors, provided they could prove that they took their own payments, booked their own customers and maintained their own businesses separately from the salons where they worked.
The exemption was temporary so lawmakers could evaluate efforts to educate the largely immigrant business owners on how to correctly classify workers.
In 2021, lawmakers extended the temporary nail salon exemption to 2025. But after Gonzalez left the Legislature to lead the California Labor Federation, the issue fell by the wayside. A subsequent bill to grant the exemption permanently died without a hearing, catching manicurists by surprise.
Nail workers scramble to comply
Janice Luper was renting space in a Tehachapi salon where she had her own key and city business license when she found out the law was about to change.
Gonzalez said such arrangements are clearly independent, and would not be considered employment under AB 5. But Luper, a self-described rule follower, said the law makes it hard to prove she’s not an employee, requiring that a contractor’s work be “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.” Because the salon owner also did manicures, Luper worried her own services wouldn’t be considered separate enough.
So she moved out. By the end of the year, she and a hair stylist opened their own salon — a $30,000 investment Luper is keenly aware many other nail technicians can’t afford.
Assemblymember Tri Ta proposed a law this year to permanently exempt nail salons from the workplace requirements of AB 5. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMattersOther manicurists and salon owners got the attention of Republican Assemblymember Tri Ta, who is Vietnamese and represents Orange County’s Little Saigon. He introduced a bill this year to permanently exempt nail salons from AB 5. The Assembly Labor Committee never granted it a hearing.
Instead, the committee, chaired by Hayward Democrat Liz Ortega, in June introduced a different bill to extend the exemption until 2029. The Employment Development Department and Labor Commissioner’s Office would be required to study the rate of labor violations in the nail industry to develop rules that “ensure manicurists enjoy equal rights under California law.”
“These are hard-working immigrant women who put in long hours in often toxic environments where their hours and wages are controlled by shop owners, just like any other employees,” Ortega said in a statement.
But the nail salon operators are often immigrants themselves, and in an interview, Ta chafed at the idea that those owners were uniquely violating labor law, saying there are bad actors in any industry.
“You cannot, because of one bad actor, treat everyone unfairly,” he said.
‘This is how everybody does it’
The UCLA report found a third of nail technicians are independent contractors, three times higher than the rate for all workers. But what some say is a common, legitimate business model, others call widespread misclassification.
One Southern California manicurist, who spoke to CalMatters on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her job, said she learned of the practice 10 years ago when she started working at a salon in the Inland Empire.
The Chinese-American manicurist said she felt the Vietnamese owners passed her over for the more expensive services, limiting her to basic manicures. She was paid a 40% commission on each service and issued a 1099 form for contractors, even though the owner set her hours and handled payments.
When she asked to be classified as a W-2 employee, her boss refused.
“She said, ‘This is how everybody does it,’” she said. “‘We’re just doing what everyone else is doing.’”
She returned to manicuring in December 2023, and bounced around for a year in several salons with similar arrangements. She now works at a salon in Monrovia, finally as a W-2 employee. But she said she’s still paid a 60% commission.
“It’s not hourly, which I don’t feel is fair because I’m there over 10 hours” per shift, she said. “Sometimes when customers come late, we have to stay late.”
On an average day, she said she makes about $100 before tips — a rate far below California’s $16.50 minimum hourly wage.
She recently drove down a boulevard in Rowland Heights, stopping in every nail salon she saw to look for a new job. The responses she heard in a half-dozen businesses were the same: No W-2 jobs, no hourly pay.
She’s never reported it to state labor officials.
“I need a job, and this is how they’re doing it everywhere,” she said.
The costs of employment
Six months after opening her own salon, Luper now finds herself on the other side of the business equation.
The overhead costs have been much higher than renting a space, and as the only manicurist in the building, she’s too busy with her own clients to handle walk-ins. She wants to bring in another nail technician — ideally a booth renter – to take customers off her hands and offset costs.
But she’s held off with the legal situation up in the air. She never envisioned being an employer, and said she can’t afford to take on payroll taxes, workers’ compensation insurance and paying an hourly wage regardless of whether there are customers. Besides, she said, she doesn’t think she could pay enough to attract an employee.
“No manicurist is going to work for the minimum wage,” she said. “That’s not why we went to school.”
She wishes the state worked harder to investigate bad actors and enforce existing classification laws rather than complicating a business model that worked for her. In the past year, the state Labor Commissioner’s Office has cited one nail salon for misclassifying workers, spokesperson MariCarmen Estudillo said.
The Monrovia manicurist said she’d love to make the hourly minimum wage. But she, too, is wary about AB 5. Business isn’t busy like it was at her first salon, where customers would crowd in and she would work the whole day without a break. If nail salons had to pay all the costs of formal employment, she doesn’t think they’d survive.
“I want to get paid for the time there,” she said. “At the same time, I don’t know how long I can have this job at this place if this continues.”
And without the job, she can’t build up clientele to work independently, as she dreams. She wants to offer her own nail designs, specializing in the builder gel technique that’s become a popular alternative to acrylics. And she’s studying for an esthetician’s license so she can also do facials.
Then she wants to rent her own studio in a quiet salon, with just one chair and one client at a time.
CalMatters is a nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization bringing Californians stories that probe, explain and explore solutions to quality of life issues while holding our leaders accountable.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Why nail salons are being targeted in fights over gig worker laws )
Also on site :