Back when she began sanding fingernails and lacquering toenails for a living – back when she was younger – Tammy Ly didn’t worry so much about the throbbing headaches, teary eyes, and cramping hands.
“Years passed and I had more headaches, my vision became worse, my hands hurt,” said Ly, who has spent 14 years waxing, polishing, and buffing customers, most recently as proprietor of Tammy’s Nails in Codman Square, where spindly plants from her native Vietnam fill the windowsill, put there to cleanse the air.
“My workers have headaches and sore eyes, too. If someone could help us, that would be good,” she said.
In Boston and across the United States, emigres from developing nations occupy jobs – and, often, own businesses – that expose them to toxins and tasks linked to wheezing lungs, foggy brains, and sore limbs. Three years ago, Boston health authorities embarked on a novel campaign to protect the health of workers in auto-repair garages, a field frequently occupied by immigrant men.
Now, the Boston Public Health Commission is expanding its Safe Shops initiative to the hundreds of nail salons that dot the city, businesses overwhelmingly staffed by women from Southeast Asia. They are shops where the tart perfume of nail polish and other chemical-laden beauty products hangs heavy in the air.
Starting in January, health agency representatives will venture into salons, stressing the importance of proper ventilation, demonstrating the correct use of gloves and masks, and urging owners to switch to safer products that have emerged in the past year.
The campaign, underwritten by a $300,000 federal grant, is an official acknowledgement of what has long been known by small business owners and their workers: Service industry employment is often the modern-day version of what Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair once described: jobs with long hours, cramped conditions, and only nominal government oversight.
“These women are being exposed all day long to solvents and similar chemicals in the products they’re using that can have a variety of effects. It’s a smorgasbord of chemicals,” said Paul Shoemaker, an environmental health specialist who will run the city’s nail salon campaign.
A study of Boston area nail salon workers, released last month on the website of the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, found that 31 of 71 workers reported respiratory symptoms, including troubled breathing, persistent coughing, and sinus woes. Those symptoms occur at higher rates than in the general population.