When Yashoda Rai left Nepal in 2017, it was because the U.S. was her “dream country,” she said. She had won the visa lottery and came to New York to start a new life. Needing a way to support herself and her two children, Rai soon found work in nail salons, which employed many of her Nepali-speaking peers in working-class Queens.
Dressed neatly in the scrubs she wears for her second job as a medical assistant, Rai sat at a table inside a community center operated by Adhikaar, a workers-rights organization based in Woodside, and explained that while the nail-salon industry keeps her dream of making it in America alive, she is exhausted and eager for change. “It’s not easy to survive here,” she said.
Through a translator, another nail-salon worker, Shanti (who asked to go by a pseudonym for fear of retaliation) added, “I think in every industry there are good things, then there are bad things. I don’t think that’s unique to the nail industry. But, sometimes, I think about how we’ve invested so many years” — 12 years on the job in Shanti’s case. “Sometimes I question, What are we getting out of it?”
Rai and Shanti shared complaints one by one: Their hours are unpredictable, and their breaks aren’t fixed. They work daily with harsh chemicals that dry their skin. When COVID struck, the small salons that employed them often failed to provide adequate protective gear like masks. Finally,...
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