\u201cLook at where you be in hair weaves like Europeans\/ Fake nails done by Koreans.\u201d\u2014Lauryn Hill, \u201cDoo Wop (That Thing)”<\/p>\n
\u201c[W]e need to show how capitalism operates in the United States to occlude the racism of its practices by creating social structures that pit people against one another.\u201d\u2014Vijay Prashad, \u201cThe Merchant is Always a Stranger,\u201d Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I had a brief stint as a waitress and line cook at a small bistro at the foot of the Philadelphia Art Museum a few years ago. The owners\u2014a married straight couple\u2014both had other jobs, and the guy\u2019s mother would come help out around the kitchen. She and I had a good rapport, and we often conversed while I swept and refilled ketchup bottles, talking about Philadelphia of the 60s and 70s or my family back home in New York.<\/p>\n One Sunday morning, a group of about 8 people came in for brunch after a night of partying. They\u2019d arrived before the restaurant had opened, and I rushed in at the start of my shift to take over serving. They left $4 and loose change as a tip on an order of about $100. Later that day, Mary\u2019s husband accused me of stealing money from the business, saying that his mother had seen me pocket all the tips for the day even though his wife had taken the first table\u2019s orders. He then accused me of stealing $20 from the register the day before. This humiliation, in addition to the irregular hours (I had to be on call almost day-to-day for my next shift), and that my tips\u00a0rarely met\u00a0the minimum hourly wage (and I was never paid the difference\u00a0as per the law), was the last straw.<\/p>\n More recently, as a bartender at the landmark Fat Cat Billiards and Jazz Club on Christopher Street, the never-there owners were so concerned with squeezing every last dollar out of the business that pipes would be held together with duct tape; we used the same dish rags for years, air drying them in a moldy hallway because there was no\u00a0dryer; and, they pocketed all our tips\u2014amounting to $3 million over the last few years<\/a>. For the customers (hipsters, Wall Street frat boys, college students, and tourists), our crappy work environment was just part of the\u00a0\u201cdive\u201d ambience where they could enjoy their $3 PBRs and feel like they were part of New York in all its former grit.<\/p>\n In addition to tip theft and unsafe conditions, many female staff left over the\u00a0years because of abuse from male customers and resulting inaction by the manager and bouncers. Female bartenders would frequently be working the front of the house while the male bartenders chatted with the manager or checked\u00a0their phones in the back\u2014earning more of the tips that would be shared with the male bartenders, who typically had the choicest shifts. On two separate occasions drunk and aggressive customers made violent threats at me from across the bar. The manager\u2019s solution was to tell me to go stand 4 feet away from the customer and \u201cleave him alone\u201d because \u201cthe customer is always right\u201d and \u201cwe need our customers\u201d.<\/p>\n What both of these very different businesses had in common\u2014and the nail salons<\/a> recently in the news\u2014is that they all \u201cemerge through a complex chain of customer demand for cheap, quick services, lack of regulation, lax enforcement of existing laws, globalized labor migration flows, and ultimately, the bottom line of profit-driven, winner-take-all markets and mentalities,\u201d to borrow from Miliann Kang\u2019s recent response to the New York Times expose on salon practices<\/a>\u00a0(Kang, “Trouble in the Nail Industry<\/a>“).<\/p>\n Rather than coopting the wage theft frame (an anti-capitalist framing victory) by recasting it as primarily an\u00a0interethnic conflict (always a reliable disguise for white hegemony), the conditions Times writer\u2019s Sarah Maslin Nir describes are symptomatic of New York City as \u201cneoliberalism-on-crack\u201d (h\/t May Takahashi). NYC is\/has been\/continues to be devoured by private developers, gentrification (and its accompanying \u201cquality of life\u201d policing), and gentrification’s incessant demand for cheaper and cheaper amenities (think\u00a0Groupon<\/a>).<\/p>\n As with the $5 dollar shoes for sale along 82nd Street in Queens, or .99 cent discount stores on Fordham Road in the Bronx, we as consumers have to ask ourselves how much the factory owner is paying that worker for those shoes to cost $5 (and\u00a0perhaps why\u00a0we\u00a0can only afford $5\u00a0shoes).<\/p>\n The same goes for those of us who “need” get our nails did and brows threaded every week: how much is the owner paying workers if your\u00a0mani-pedi is\u00a0under $20 and your brows\u00a0are only\u00a0$5? As with anything within a capitalist patriarchy, third world women\u00a0usually pay the highest price for\u00a0first world\u00a0luxury or self-maintenance (and the growing interchangeability of the two)\u2014whether they\u2019re from down the block or across the globe.<\/p>\n The endemic labor abuses\u00a0of\u00a0nail salon workers by exploitative \u201cmiddle men\u201d small business owners\u2014what Nir irresponsibly labels an \u201cethnic caste system\u201d\u2014is symptomatic of a mutual class struggle<\/a> (through interaction) in which the primary beneficiaries are shielded from view.<\/p>\n Instead, Nir relies on every anti-Asian trope in the book\u2014Nepalese workers are crying, enduring victims of exploitation; Koreans are greedy, decadent, shrewd, and conniving; Chinese workers are crammed into tenement-style apartment with strangers or extended family members. Nir\u2019s sensational portrayal of Koreans smacks of media coverage around the time of the so-called L.A. Riots (and, for that matter, early 1900s representations of Japanese and Chinese Americans, whichever was more politically convenient) and does nothing to dismantle familiar paradigms of racial triangulation that \u201cultimately serv[e] to reinforce White dominance and privilege\u201d (Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans<\/a>“).<\/p>\n The danger with these tropes are that they are lasting\u2014embedded in narratives that can be found anywhere and easily accessible in the minds of most Americans\u2014and construct a lasting stereotype\u00a0of a monolithic group.<\/p>\n Rather than an ethnic group that includes workers (many undocumented) struggling for basic rights in the workplace, like those at Kumgansan Restaurant<\/a> who are organizing alongside their non-Korean coworkers to fight against \u00a018-hour shifts with 7-day work weeks, Nir\u2019s Koreans are two sides of the same model minority<\/a> coin. Her attempts to distinguish good immigrants from bad immigrants among the \u201cthickets of young Asian and Hispanic women on nearly every street corner\u201d are sloppy and irresponsible. I\u2019m just saying, White-on-Other White Wage Theft is rarely called out in the news.<\/p>\n By emphasizing interethnic conflict rather than labor organizing, Nir\u2019s framing does serious harm to the tentative\u00a0work of solidarity building across ethnic lines in what is, at its core, a class struggle. Because the players are non-White, Nir racializes this struggle in her portrayal, distracting from the enlaced roots of capitalism and white supremacy. For example, in describing the living conditions and overcrowding faced by Chinese workers, Nir completely excludes the role of private development and the housing crisis in Asian communities in Flushing, Queens<\/a> and Chinatown<\/a>.<\/p>\n The powerful story<\/a> of nail salon workers\u2019 organizing should be front and center, but is overshadowed by Nir\u2019s tale of \u201cthose who would prey on their own kind\u201d. By the time Nir wraps up the article with a big American Dream bow, she has missed multiple opportunities to expose the collusion of unjust labor\/housing\/immigration policies in an interlocking system of oppression\u2014one that millions of workers are rising up to tear down across the country.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For more information on the ground up efforts of nail salon workers in New York, visit the NY Healthy Nail Salons Coalition<\/a>, Workers United<\/a>, Adhikaar<\/a>, and New York Committee for Occupational Safety & Health<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cLook at where you be in hair weaves like Europeans\/ Fake nails done by Koreans.\u201d\u2014Lauryn Hill, \u201cDoo Wop (That Thing)” \u201c[W]e need to show how capitalism operates in the United States to occlude the racism of its practices by creating social structures that pit people against one another.\u201d\u2014Vijay Prashad, \u201cThe Merchant is Always a Stranger,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1416],"class_list":["post-9406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9406"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10470,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406\/revisions\/10470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9406"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/sites\/default\/files\/new_york_healthy_nails_salons_coalition_otu_img.jpg\")
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