The fact that most of these businesses are owned by immigrants and staffed by even more recent immigrants is a major factor in how they can operate so blatantly in defiance of the laws.<p>The article mentions in passing that the Labor Department has a severe shortage of investigators who can speak the languages the manicurists speak (mostly Korean and Chinese -- they have more people who can speak Spanish). But even if they could, what would they find out?<p>Every major Western city has at least one Korean-run website with an informal classified section (usually just a forum), where employers proudly announce below-minimum wages as if they were doing a great favor to the hapless kids who end up working for them. Ditto for the Chinese, and I'm sure other immigrant communities have them, too. Why aren't people reporting these ads to the Labor Department and/or IRS? Yeah, those posts aren't in English, but nothing a few minutes of Google Translate can't fix.<p>It's because immigrant kids really have nowhere else to work, with their abysmal English skills and zero knowledge of the American job market. Many of them are international students who are at risk of deportation if the authorities find out that they've been working. A friend or relative probably introduced them to the nail salon, so if they ever betray their employer, the friend or relative will be very disappointed and they'll have a hard time finding another job through that channel ever again.<p>Moreover, insular communities like Koreatown don't look kindly upon "traitors". Even though Korea itself has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years, most Korean communities in large Westerm cities are stuck with the mentality that early immigrants brought with them 50 years ago. That means the employer is doing you a totally undeserved favor by offering to hire you for $3.50/hr, no pay for the first 3 months, and oh, you gotta return the favor by paying your employer a $100 fee when you start. It's seriously backward. It would be difficult to get away with shenanigans like that in Seoul. But in LA, in NYC, nobody questions it. And if you do, good luck walking around Koreatown with a straight face ever again. Your parents will be ashamed of you, etc. etc.<p>Still, there's some good news. Younger Koreans no longer give a shit about what their parents think an ideal employer-employee relationship should look like, and they can often just go back to Korea if they aren't happy with life in America. The Chinese are still suffering massively, as the article describes at length, because they don't have that luxury. But if an abusive Korean business owner ever hires a non-immigrant kid, which they increasingly do because so many American youngsters are out of jobs these days, that's a ticking time bomb to a massive lawsuit.<p>The article mentions a Korean nail salon owner who finally got sued and was ordered to pay $474K. A few weeks ago, a Korean restaurant owner in NYC was ordered to pay $2.6M to his abused and overworked employees. More of this needs to happen, and more of it <i>will</i> happen. It's about time the Korean immigrant community stopped giving a bad reputation to Korea.