For those of us with family working in the nail and beauty industries, historical and economic inequities against Vietnamese salon workers are highlighted by the coronavirus. I wrote this article feeling frustrated while helping my brother apply for pandemic unemployment benefit. This piece was originally published as a part of UnMargin’s series on COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on Asian Americans.
If a terrible condition exists long enough, you adapt, develop a coping mechanism, numb yourself, and it becomes your normal. For Vietnamese-American nail and hair salon workers, they’ve done that all their lives carrying the burden of intergenerational trauma and poverty. I’m talking about thousands of years of war and occupation, a century of colonization, a lifetime of oppression and poverty, forced displacement from their homeland, living an existence where they get used to feeling left out, unimportant, picking up scraps and getting by when all the rules are made against them. The COVID-19 pandemic is just a cherry on top.
My older brother is a self-employed independent contractor at a hair salon, his wife is a nail technician at a nail salon. They work 10-12 hours per day, 6 days a week. Some days business is better than others, but on average, including tips, they make $7-$11 per hour pre-tax, which means they can make below minimum wage if business is slow. No paid sick leave, no paid vacation, no paid breaks, no healthcare coverage, no life insurance, no retirement contributions, no pension, no inflation-adjustment raises, no merit raises, no unemployment benefits, no workers compensation coverage. Nothing.
Their dream is to save enough money to open their own hair and nail salon someday. One might wonder, if it’s not good job, why do they keep doing it? That question assumes that the only thing standing between a shitty circumstance and a better one is personal choice, as privileged people pre-pandemic would insist.
The [unemployment benefit] system is designed with the assumption that cash-strapped, unemployed workers are lazy.
Angelina Tram Nguyen
Born in the most intense years of the Vietnam War, my brother grew up fatherless because his father was drafted to fight a war for the first eight years of his childhood. When the war was over, his father was imprisoned as a prisoner of war for ten years. His mother raised three kids on her own in a war-torn broken economy, which meant he didn’t have an opportunity to pursue a college education. He did whatever job he could get to help his family make ends meet. He came to the U.S. in his late 20s not knowing English, with kids to raise and the responsibility of sending money back home to Vietnam. A salon job made practical sense.
Then COVID-19 happened. Him and his wife needed to keep working & risked getting sick until salons were mandated to close. They don’t speak English fluently, so I helped them apply for unemployment benefits under the recently passed CARES Act. Me, who has a graduate degree and who works for state government, found the unemployment application process extremely convoluted and difficult to understand. How could someone not fluent in English navigate that confusion to access their benefit?!
The system is designed with the assumption that cash-strapped, unemployed workers are lazy. It creates obstacles through which applicants must jump or else get punished, from applying the same week they’re unemployed, to indicating a desire to work within 3 days by navigating an overcomplicated website to build a resume and apply for jobs, to keeping a detailed job search journal and reporting its content, to asking for unemployment payments every week or else lose it for that week. As I walked my brother and his wife through the mandatory steps, he asked questions about a system designed against people like him, “What is a resume?”
It has been more than a month since they’re out of work and still they are nowhere close to getting unemployment benefits. Under this pandemic condition, an overburdened system requires an applicant to apply for regular unemployment first, wait to get rejected, then apply for pandemic unemployment by calling numbers that are constantly busy, beeping and hanging up on them. Poor people who work hard and do everything according to the rules still can’t pay their bills on time while corporations are getting $500 billion bailout and their multi-millionaire and billionaire executives are still getting paid opulently.
My brother and sister in law’s situation is not unique. Behind every salon worker is a strong warrior who have won more battles than they can count. COVID-19 pandemic is just another battle. Scarcity and rules that shut them out or not designed for them have existed so long that they normalize this trauma. “If unemployment benefit is too much of a hassle, never mind,” he said with an exhausted resignation. His alternatives are to go without some essentials, to borrow money at a cutthroat interest rate meant for those who don’t have a credit history, to take from his savings and thus moving further away from his dream of owning a salon, and to go back to work as soon as possible regardless of covid-19 contagion, because he expects the system to fail him as it always has.