Bottleneckers. William Mellor

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СКАЧАТЬ products and training. Braiding salons operate in cities large and small all over the country, and the number of women (and some men) who braid for money out of their houses may comprise even more people.

      HAIR-BRAIDING BOTTLENECKERS

      In 2005, Jestina was one of those women.¹⁸ When she fled Sierra Leone, she had already been braiding hair regularly for more than a decade. So, when she began looking for ways to make some extra money for her family, circumstances in her small Utah town provided the answer. Her community of about fifteen thousand people had no professional braiding salons, and there was demand for braiding services. Some families in her town had adopted African or Haitian children and had no idea how to style their hair.¹⁹ Jestina quickly picked up twelve to fifteen clients and made, in a good year, about $4,800.²⁰ She braided in her home, mostly on Saturdays, while Paul cared for their children. “It’s not like it was bringing me millions, but it was covering groceries,” she explained.²¹

      After earning her degree, she considered taking a job in an office but instead decided to open her own hair-braiding business.²² As Jestina recalled,

      I did apply for jobs and had interviews, and I could make 12 to 16 dollars an hour, but the costs of childcare would have meant making about two dollars an hour, plus all of the family responsibilities and added stress, it was just not worth it. But if I could continue to braid, even though it’s not a lot of money, I could do it from home and I could care for my children and not add things in my life I didn’t need.²³

      So Jestina advertised her hair-braiding services on a local Web site and slowly began growing her business—until the day she received a fateful message.²⁴ While checking her business e-mail account, she came across a chilling anonymous note: “It is illegal in the state of Utah to do any form of extensions without a valid cosmetology license. Please delete your ad, or you will be reported.”²⁵

      Jestina was stunned. When she first began braiding for money, she had checked the required credentials and was told by a state regulator that she did not need a cosmetology license as long as she did not cut or use chemicals to style hair.²⁶ Additionally, she had been braiding for years without a single complaint. Her modest income certainly posed no serious threat to established cosmetologists in town. And besides, she wasn’t even doing cosmetology. She thought, “I’m not using chemicals. I’m not doing cosmetology stuff”²⁷—the practices the regulator had told her required a license.

      To confirm what the regulator had said, she contacted the state cosmetology board, and this time the answer she got differed. To her disbelief, she was told she had to get a government-issued license requiring two thousand hours of training and the successful completion of a licensing test.²⁸ That disbelief turned into dismay when she began calling cosmetology schools in her area: “I called about six schools along the Wasatch Front and they told me that they don’t teach braiding and that . . . if I want to specialize in braiding[,] I would have to get independent help with that.”²⁹

      Like Kim Powers Bridges, the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey, and Pastor Craigmiles, Jestina was caught in a bottleneck. To get the license and continue working, she would have to spend two thousand hours in classes that would cost her up to $18,000³⁰ and teach her nothing about braiding but only about skills completely irrelevant to her work.

      The cosmetology laws were not specifically designed to block hair braiders; indeed, they typically contain no explicit language about hair braiding. In this way, they are very different from casket laws, which were created for the express purpose of limiting sales of caskets to funeral directors. In hair braiding, the requirement to get a license is the result of the initial adoption of cosmetology laws in the early twentieth century, at which time African hair braiding as a specialization, let alone an occupation, was unheard of. As the demand for and supply of professional hair braiding increased in the latter half of the century, cosmetology bottleneckers did not bother to change laws in their own favor. They simply used the power of licensing boards, through the vehicle of license creep, to achieve their ends.

      LICENSE CREEP

      License creep is a phenomenon in which regulators expand the scope of an existing licensing regime to cover a different occupation—one that presents new competition to the established trade.³¹ In the case of hair braiding, license creep was the result of expanding cosmetology licenses to cover those who offer only hair-braiding services. Because regulatory boards that are established to oversee a licensing process are typically made up of current practitioners in a field and funded by licensees’ dues, the boards have tremendous incentives to adopt and enforce a broad interpretation of a license’s scope. The boards fight to preserve their power and the status quo rather than allowing seemingly complicated innovations that could disrupt the status of current service providers and force them to adapt or work harder. All too often, the result is that new business models or techniques are choked off as the would-be innovators are forced to undergo costly and irrelevant training or testing, or are effectively shut down with threats of fines, injunctions, or even criminal prosecution.

      Hair braiding has not been the only target of license creep by cosmetologists and their regulatory boards. Also targeted has been the all-natural grooming practice of South Asian and Middle Eastern eyebrow threading, in which practitioners remove unwanted facial hair by forming a loop with cotton thread and then quickly brushing it along the face of a client to remove hair. Like hair braiding, this increasingly popular service has existed for centuries and requires no heat, chemicals, or sharp objects; it merely uses thread that it glides along the surface of the skin. Yet cosmetology boards in several states require that eyebrow threaders obtain expensive and irrelevant Western-style cosmetology licenses.³²

      Dentists, too, have joined the trend of license creep. In a number of states, dental boards and dental associations have pressed for laws that require entrepreneurs who sell, provide guidance, and host the application of over-the-counter teeth-whitening kits to be fully licensed dentists. Yet it is perfectly legal for someone to take the very same products home and use them without supervision. On average, a dentist can earn $25,000 annually by performing teeth whitening, and in states where nondental entrepreneurs can still whiten teeth, dentists routinely charge two to six times more than nondentists.³³

      Elsewhere, veterinary boards have tried to sweep the traditional practice of horse-teeth floating into their domain. Because horses’ teeth grow throughout their lifetimes, it is necessary to file them. Floating is a safe, proven, and painless procedure for doing this, and the trade has often been passed down in families through the generations. Although floating has been practiced for centuries without requiring a government-issued license, state veterinary boards in Minnesota and Texas blocked their less expensive—and often far-better-qualified—nonveterinarian competitors from offering the service. This bottleneck is imposed even though few veterinary schools provide significant instruction in dentistry, let alone teeth floating.

      In yet another example, Texas regulators, at the behest of politically powerful private investigators, defined the practice of private investigation so broadly that it even included a variety of computer repair services, forcing computer technicians in the state to obtain a costly private investigator’s license before servicing computers—or else face steep penalties. Thanks to the fallout from a legal challenge, that bottleneck was cracked open and is no longer imposed.

      BEATING BACK THE CREEP

      A defining characteristic of license creep is the tenuous-at-best relationship between the targeted occupation—like hair braiding—and the requirements of complying with the licensing scheme imposed upon it. Indeed, in Jestina’s case, she found the incongruity so stark that she thought an appeal to the state board would be sufficient to resolve the matter. Armed with a detailed PowerPoint presentation, she displayed illustrations of the discrepancy for the state licensing board for cosmetology/barbering, СКАЧАТЬ