Brabara Ehrenreich's excellent Nickel and Dimed had been a highlight. Going undercover to try to live the lives of the low-paid in America for three months. An excellent chronicle of the vicissitudes of low pay but also of unprotected labour. I wonder how Ehrenreich's fellow workers have fared and so has she, revisiting them and writing an afterword in the 2011 edition. Also Polly Toynbee's surprisingly good Hard Work offers a broader perspective of kinds of low-paid work in the UK.
I've been lucky enough to come to Sarah Nir's detailed account of the humiliations routinely faced by primarily Asian and Hispanic women in the nail salons of New York. Unpaid labour, docking of tips, and physical abuse of migrant workers are accompanied by severe health risks from toxins, long hours, highly-regimented and disciplinary working conditions and poor accommodation. A highly precarious, hyper-exploited, deeply gendered, unprotected workforce in the classed and racialised environment of the New York salon. Slavery is also a feature of UK nail bars, with investigations and prosecutions ongoing for almost a decade, traffiking and forced labour remains hidden in plain sight in the salons, car washes, brothels, fields, factories and cannabis farms of the UK.
I've been lucky enough to come to Sarah Nir's detailed account of the humiliations routinely faced by primarily Asian and Hispanic women in the nail salons of New York. Unpaid labour, docking of tips, and physical abuse of migrant workers are accompanied by severe health risks from toxins, long hours, highly-regimented and disciplinary working conditions and poor accommodation. A highly precarious, hyper-exploited, deeply gendered, unprotected workforce in the classed and racialised environment of the New York salon. Slavery is also a feature of UK nail bars, with investigations and prosecutions ongoing for almost a decade, traffiking and forced labour remains hidden in plain sight in the salons, car washes, brothels, fields, factories and cannabis farms of the UK.