On Tuesday morning, Yanelia Raminerz, a manicurist who has worked for Envy Nails for the last eight years, stood outside one of the New York chain’s Bronx locations. The shop’s sign, rendered in a delicate curlicued script, rose behind her. “If I am afraid, and I don’t speak out,” she said in Spanish translated by an interpreter, “no one will.”
Whether or not you’ve been to Envy, perhaps you’ve been to a nail salon like it: a long row of chairs and tables paired with a long line of workers, almost always women, bent over their customers’ fingers and toes. At Envy, customer reviews are terrible nearly across the board. They cite “awful customer service,” a staff with an “attitude,” and a lack of English-language skills. “The girl had no passion for the job she was doing at all,” wrote one reviewer recently, noting her manicurist was “distracted” by her young daughter in the shop. “The chemical small was overwhelming,” wrote another: “Holding my breath wasn’t an option since I’d breathe it set in on Day 2 of the Freedom Fast… – Coalition of Immokalee Workers when I passed out.”
You could see these reviews as a sign that Envy employees are poor workers. In another, perhaps more plausible, reading, they are indicative of an overextended and underpaid workforce buffing nails in hazardous conditions.
https://jezebel.com/nail-salon-workers-are-still-fighting-the-same-toxic-co-1838020887
