The Times’s series on worker abuse at New York City’s nail salons hit big when it was published earlier this year. Accompanied by a huge social media campaign, it resulted in almost immediate action from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to crack down on the salons for underpaying and mistreating workers, usually immigrant women.
The series has won praise but also drew criticism in The New York Review of Books from Richard Bernstein, a well-respected former Times reporter, who owns salons with his wife. He said its methodology was flawed, and its conclusions not recognizable to him as an insider. Top Times editors issued a strong point-by-point response.
In a previous post, I wrote that I thought that Mr. Bernstein made some points well worth considering, but I found the Times editors’ defense persuasive.
Now, Jim Epstein, reporting for a magazine with a libertarian bent called Reason, has written a three-part series questioning the investigation. And, in recent weeks, salon owners and workers have demonstrated outside The Times building in Midtown Manhattan, saying that the series unfairly hurt their business and their livelihood because of the state crackdown that followed.
Until now, The Times has not responded to that series because editors believe they defended the nail salon investigation fully when they responded to Mr. Bernstein’s complaints, and because they think the magazine, which generally opposes regulation, is reporting from a biased point of view.
This week, I asked editors involved with the nail salon investigation for response, particularly to one point that struck me as particularly troubling. This had to do with the employment ads that The Times said — toward the top of its first article — were plentiful in Asian-language newspapers in New York City. Mr. Epstein’s translations of the ads don’t jibe with how The Times has read some of them, and how the ads were portrayed in the Times editors’ defense.
The metro editor, Wendell Jamieson, and the projects editor for the metro desk, Michael Luo, met with me for about an hour on Thursday to go through some of the objections that have been raised. Mr. Luo spent some of this time translating for me the Chinese-language ads in question; they have been examined by others at The Times, too, who he says are more fluent than he.
Mr. Epstein reports that the ads that The Times (in its letter defending the series) described as advertising a $40-per-day wage actually described a $40 manicure/pedicure. That was included in the employment ads as a way to suggest that the tips would be high. They don’t prove low wages but rather suggest high tips, he wrote.
Both editors emphasized that they remain proud of the investigation and believe it is fundamentally solid, though they might have done some minor things differently now that they have had the benefit of hindsight. Giving more acknowledgment to the salons that do it right, emphasizing the ways that these low-paid jobs can help new immigrants get a toehold in their new country and dialing back some of the wording of the employment ads are among those things. I think they are right on all of that.
The editors objected to many elements of Mr. Epstein’s reporting, including his apparent defense of practices that allow undocumented or illegal immigrants to work in salons.
The attention to the employment ads has been one of the main focuses of criticism. It is, critics say, a linchpin of the series and it’s not accurate. High up in the first day of the nail series, this paragraph appears: “Asian-language newspapers are rife with classified ads listing manicurist jobs paying so little the daily wage can at first glance appear to be a typo. Ads in Chinese in both Sing Tao Daily and World Journal for NYC Nail Spa, a second-story salon on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, advertised a starting wage of $10 a day. The rate was confirmed by several workers.”
Mr. Epstein takes up the $10-a-day wage, reporting that this is an amount paid to apprentices who never work on clients. The Times editors say that their reporting showed otherwise, and that it’s not uncommon for sources to change their accounts after an article has been published.
One can argue about the wording of individual ads and what they meant. It seems to me, though, that at the very least, too much credence was given to them, both in describing papers as “rife” with them and in interpreting what they said.
Mr. Jamieson noted that every investigation angers and disturbs someone.
“Any big investigation of an industry is going to prompt pushback in those who have a vested interest,” he told me. “We’ve taken the owners’ complaints very seriously, and re-examined every charge.”
Mr. Epstein also counters in his reporting the impression given by the second part of the series, which lays out claims of harm to workers from chemicals used in the salon materials. Although it included some important caveats in the text, the article — with its anecdotes about salon workers having miscarriages and other illnesses — gave an overstated impression, partly because of its headline about “poisoned workers.”
Mr. Epstein argues, convincingly I think, that in any population of young women, miscarriages are far from uncommon. Scientific evidence does not appear to fully support the impression created by the article.
My take: The series and its author, Sarah Maslin Nir, had admirable intentions in speaking for underpaid or abused workers. And the investigation did reveal some practices in need of reform. But, in places, the two-part investigation went too far in generalizing about an entire industry. Its findings, and the language used to express them, should have been dialed back — in some instances substantially.
To its credit, The Times has been covering the protests from salon owners and the resulting disagreement in Albany about reform measures, including a costly new form of insurance that some salon owners say is putting them out of business. It should continue to report on all sides of this issue.
There is a legitimate and important subject here about low-paid work done by immigrants in New York City — not just in nail salons. It includes, for example, the food-delivery business and many other services that affluent New Yorkers take for granted. I’m always glad to see The Times take on situations in which the poor and voiceless are exploited. But, in doing so, it must protect its reputation for accuracy and rigor above all.
My recommendation is that The Times write further follow-up stories, including some that re-examine its original findings and that take on the criticism from salon owners and others — not defensively but with an open mind.