Hair Salons Are Almost as Bad as Nail Salons

The very day my hair is long enough to put into a bun-like shape, a guy at my swing dance class says I look like a sexy librarian.

That’s it, I tell myself. It’s time to cut it all off again.

I had been putting off getting my hair cut for several months, due to everything that’s happened with my income and expenses this year, and although it is time to head back to the Great Clips with a selfie in hand and say “make it like that again, please,” a new story from ThinkProgress suggests getting a haircut is almost as bad as going to a nail salon.

In a 2008 survey that NELP conducted of workers in New York City, 45 percent of the hairdressers and cosmetologists the researchers talked to were paid less than the minimum wage and more than 98 percent weren’t paid overtime for the extra hours they worked. Most were also made to work off the clock before and after their shifts and denied meal breaks.

Hair stylists are often independent contractors, but they are that particular type of independent contractor who is still required to show up at a certain time, follow an employer’s rules, and pay the employer for use of the tools required to do their job.

A lot of us probably know that stylists rent their chairs from salons, which is to say that the stylists pay the salons for the privilege of having a space at which to cut hair. But I bet most of us don’t know that many stylists also have to pay the salons for the products they put into your hair. ThinkProgress reports that one salon “was deducting product charges as well as taking the stylists’ tips and counting them as part of the pot of commission they were paid.”

Of course, if clients are unhappy about their cut or color, the refunds they receive come out of the stylists’ pay. And while we’re on the subject of clients: they belong to the salon, too. Their contact information goes into the salon’s database. If a stylist leaves the salon, that stylist has to walk away from a whole catalog of regular, satisfied customers and start from scratch somewhere else.

We’ve all had the experience where we’re getting our hair cut and our stylist leans in to whisper “hey, I’m moving to this other salon next month,” right? That is how hair stylists do marketing and promotion.

So why not make these stylists employees, if the salon is going to control the hours worked, the dress code, the products used, and the client information? You guessed it: the salons don’t want to pay employment taxes. (Not to mention that sweet, sweet chair rent.) As ThinkProgress puts it:

It makes sense for employers to keep stylists on 1099s instead of W2s. Owners aren’t on the hook for paying their share of contractors’ Social Security, Medicare, or unemployment insurance, nor the employer’s share of income tax. The workers also aren’t covered by employment and labor laws like workers compensation or discrimination protections.

And the rest of us can’t do much about it, because a lot of us need regular haircuts, and unless we’re getting our hair cut under the table, we need to have our haircuts performed by a licensed professional. So it’s not like we can walk away.

There are stylists, by the way, who join up to create co-op hair salons. They own the salon and are able to keep their resources and income. Arguably there is more risk in renting a storefront than there is in renting a chair, but if you want to leave the owner/contractor system, that’s pretty much the way you have to go.

What’s your hair stylist situation like? Do you go to a hair co-op? Have you ever followed a stylist to a new salon because you really liked the way they cut your hair?

And do you think there’s any way out of this growing “independent contractor” system where so many people, from Uber drivers to housecleaners to hair stylists, pay to perform their own jobs while the company owner receives the benefits?

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