Justin Fox, Columnist

Nail Salons Create Jobs, But Not Very Good Ones

Some of the lowest wages are in high-paying New York.

June 8, 2015 at 12:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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Doing other people's nails can be pretty crummy work, we all learned last month from Sarah Maslin Nir's epic New York Times investigation of the work conditions in New York area nail salons. But it has also been a booming job category, as is clear from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll-employment data:

That's right, there were 20,000 people working in nail salons at the beginning of 2000 and as of April there were an estimated 74,000. In the great scheme of American employment, that isn't much -- Friday's jobs report puts total payroll employment at 141.7 million. But with overall job growth of just 8 percent since the beginning of 2000, the almost four-fold increase in nail salon employment is pretty remarkable.