The result is that workplaces remain unsafe. Brophy tells me that the ventilation he found in most auto-plastics factories was limited to ‘fans in the ceiling. So the fumes literally pass the breathing zone and head to the roof and in the summertime when it’s really hot in there and the fumes become visible, they will open the doors.’ It’s the same story in Canadian nail salons, says Rochon Ford. ‘It’s a Wild West here. Anyone can open a nail salon. It’s only recently that you even needed a licence.’ But even this is ‘pretty lax’. There are no ventilation requirements, there are no training requirements. There is no legislation around wearing gloves and masks. And there is nobody following up on the requirements that do exist – unless someone makes a complaint.
But here we run into another difficulty: who is going to make a complaint? Certainly not the women themselves. Women working in nail salons, in auto-plastics factories, in a vast range of hazardous workplaces, are some of the most vulnerable, powerless workers you can find. They are poor, working class, often immigrants who can’t afford to put their immigration status at risk. And this makes them ripe for exploitation.
Auto-plastics factories tend not to be part of the big car companies like Ford. They are usually arms-length suppliers, ‘who tend to be non-unionised and tend to be able to get away with more employment-standard violations’, Rochon Ford tells me. It doesn’t help that Windsor, Ontario, the heart of the auto industry in Canada, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The result is that workers know that if they demand better protections the response will be ‘Fine, you’re out of here. There’s ten women outside the door who want your job.’ We’ve heard factory workers tell us this in the exact same words,’ says Rochon Ford.
If this sounds illegal, well, it may be. Over the past hundred years or so, a framework of employee rights has been established. They vary from country to country, but they tend to include a right to paid sick and maternity leave, a right to a set number of hours, and protection from unfair and/or sudden dismissal. But these rights only apply if you are an employee. And, increasingly, many workers are not.
In many nail salons, technicians are technically independent contractors. This makes life much easier for the employers: the inherent risk of running a company based on consumer demand is passed on to workers, who have no guaranteed hours and no job security. Not enough customers today? Don’t come in and don’t get paid. Minor accident? You’re out of here, and forget about redundancy pay.
In 2015 the New York Times reported the story of manicurist Qing Lin, forty-seven, who splashed some nail-polish remover on a customer’s patent Prada sandals.8 ‘When the woman demanded compensation, the $270 her boss pressed into the woman’s hand came out of the manicurist’s pay’, and Lin was fired. ‘I am worth less than a shoe,’ she said. Lin’s story appeared in a New York Times investigation of nail salons which revealed ‘all manner of humiliation’ suffered by workers, including constant video monitoring by owners, verbal, and even physical abuse.9 Lawsuits filed in New York courts include allegations of sixty-six-hour weeks at $1.50 an hour and no pay at all on slow days in a salon that charged manicurists for drinking the water.
Following the publication of the New York Times investigation a licensing system was introduced in New York. Workers there must be paid at least the minimum wage, and nail salons must display a ‘bill of rights’ in multiple languages.10 But workers elsewhere in the US, and elsewhere in the world, are less lucky. In the UK, regulation and licensing of nail bars is largely voluntary11 – which in practice means largely non-existent. A 2017 report described the predominantly female Vietnamese workforce as ‘victims of modern slavery’.12
Nail salons are the tip of an extremely poorly regulated iceberg when it comes to employers exploiting loopholes in employment law. Zero-hour contracts, short-term contracts, employment through an agency, these have all been enticingly rebranded the ‘gig economy’ by Silicon Valley, as if they are of benefit to workers. But the gig economy is in fact often no more than a way for employers to get around basic employee rights. Casual contracts create a vicious cycle: the rights are weaker to begin with, which makes workers reticent to fight for the ones they do still have. And so those get bent too. In the UK, which has seen one of the fastest growths in precarious work in the EU,13 TUC research uncovered a work environment that was rife with employers using casual contracts to illegally undermine workers’ rights.14
Naturally, the impact of what the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has termed the ‘startling growth’ of precarious work has barely been gender-analysed.15 The ITUC reports that its feminised impact is ‘poorly reflected in official statistics and government policies’, because the ‘standard indicators and data used to measure developments on labour markets’ are not gender-sensitive, and, as ever, data is often not sex-disaggregated, ‘making it sometimes difficult to measure the overall numbers of women’. There are, as a result, ‘no global figures related to the number of women in precarious work’.
But the regional and sector-specific studies that do exist suggest ‘an overrepresentation of women’ in precarious jobs. In the UK, the trade union Unison found that by 2014 women made up almost two-thirds of low-paid workers,16 and many were ‘working multiple jobs on precarious contracts to make up lost hours’.17 According to a recent Fawcett Society report, one in eight British women
