7 ms·

Occupational licensing has gone way too far, and is in-fact a regressive tax on the poor. Both on the part of the worker and the consumer. In California you ne

• vorpalhex 8y ago
  Because improperly sanitizing barber tools can absolutely spread disease and you're waving sharp objects near somebodies face, including a child who may not sit still.
  • ashelmire 8y ago
    Not wiping your ass properly and washing your hands can absolutely spread disease. I think we need a license for using public toilets.
    • vorpalhex 8y ago
      Yeah, so you might manage to spread the flu through secondary contact and that wouldn't be great. It's not as bad as spreading lice, or several serious bacterial or fungal infections that can do a lot of damage. We should also really encourage people to wash their hands because that's super important, especially in environments like hospitals and daycares.
    • dv_dt 8y ago
      We have restaurant food and safety inspections as the non-hyperbolic implementation of this as applied to preparers.
      • hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
        Fine, which is good, but none of those restaurant workers had to go through hundreds/thousands of hours of training to get licensed.
  • Matticus_Rex 8y ago
    And literally no one who knows anything about the industry thinks that requires more than a few hours of classes.
  • conanbatt 8y ago
    Just make the barbers that are "certified by the state" on one side, and "the others" on the other side. Then people pay for their preferences.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    By that standard we should also require 1600 hours of training for driving a car.
    • mywittyname 8y ago
      Commercial Drivers Licenses are a requirement for anyone driving a vehicle over 26,000# or towing more than 10,000#. You're plenty free to cut your own hair and that of your friends and family without a license. And you can drive your family around with minimal licensing. But there's a threshold you cross where licensing becomes mandatory.
      • maxxxxx 8y ago
        Driving is not like cutting hair at home. I can drive a car in public and kill other people, not only my own family. Considering how safe cars are today it's even more likely my family will be safe while I kill other people.
        • mywittyname 8y ago
          Driving a car requires licensing though. I needed to go through a driving class, 24h of driving with a certified instructor, and six months of supervised driving under provisional permit before being granted my driving license. That's pretty rigorous considering how easy driving is. Granted, these requirements loosen after a person reaches a certain age. But they still need to demonstrate an ability to drive and knowledge of the rules of the road before being licensed. A CDL takes a lot training to earn, and you have to demonstrate a clean driving record for the previous 10 years.
          • CryptoPunk 8y ago
            Safely driving is far harder than safely cutting hair and the consequences of failing at it are incomparably worse than the consequences of failing at safe hair cutting. Driving is one of the most dangerous things that ordinary people engage in. You're hundreds of times more likely to kill someone driving than doing any other activity, by virtue of the relative deadliness of motor vehicle accidents, and how much driving the ordinary person does. That you need 1,600 hours of instruction to cut hair in California, far in excess of what any jurisdiction requires to get a license to drive, is the most blatant demonstration of the injustice of occupational licensing.
  • austin_y 8y ago
    Restaurant employees, preparing or serving food, could spread disease or cause harm, but are not obligated to be licensed. Would you support requiring cooks, servers, wait staff, etc., to undergo licensing?
    • jackpirate 8y ago
      They most definitely are licensed at the state, county, and city level. They require food handlers permits, and possible other certifications depending on the specific activity. That said, these licenses are typically about $10 and can be completed by online website in about an hour. I would expect something similar could work for hair cutting as well, but probably not for all the more exotic things like hair dying.
      • moate 8y ago
        Former Chef here from the great state of NJ: I have never been licensed. I've worked for some of the better restaurants in the state (including NYT 4 star reviewed and James Beard nominated chefs). I've never known a licensed chef. The restaurants require licensing out the ass, and I know there are ABC (alcohol handling) certifications required for servers, but cooks don't. At least one person (typically a manager) needs to be ServSafe certified, but that's not a requirement for every worker. Meanwhile, a hairdresser must be licensed before they can step into a salon and do work. My sister and wife both worked in the industry, and I promise you they would both scoff at the idea of a 1 hour form/test for someone cutting hair. There's a ton of hygiene related things that they need to know to prevent disease transmission from cutting and handling hair daily.
        • jjulius 8y ago
          Whether or not you need a food handler's card is likely state-specific.
    • jjulius 8y ago
      Cooks and other individuals have to get their food handlers cards. The class is fairly simple - you show up for a few hours and then take a test - but they still have to have a valid food handlers card in order to be employed.
  • lambda 8y ago
    From what I have gathered, much of the reason behind the licensing process for barbers is for shaving, with a straight razor, which does have considerably greater risks of cuts and infection. However, very few people go to a barber for a shave anymore. It used to be that most people would go to a barber for a shave, and shaving yourself was unusual. Since the advent of the safety razor, cartridge razor, and electric razor, it's the other way around, where it is unusual to go to a barber for a shave. But in many states, training on shaving is a large part of the training for barbers. In fact, it also used to be the case that barbers were the surgeons as well, though I don't know how much of that time overlapped with the licensing era. I don't know how much of the remaining licensing process for modern barbers has to do with actual safety concerns, or is just inherited from the times of barbers being surgeons or doing the majority of shaving with straight razors.
  • jdietrich 8y ago
    The question is not just whether licensing is necessary per se, but also whether those licensing requirements are reasonable, proportionate and effective. Do you really need 1,600 hours of training to learn how to sanitise a pair of scissors? Does that training actually make people less likely to stab someone in the head? Are there alternative routes for hairdressers to demonstrate their competence? To my mind, it seems far more reasonable for these issues to be addressed through routine inspections and the prompt investigation of complaints. Qualifications may provide supporting evidence for the competence of a practitioner, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient.
    • jandrese 8y ago
      1,600 hours does seem excessive. That's basically a full year full time course with a summer break. There is a lot to learn beyond how to operate a pair of scissors (how not to chemically burn people when doing dye jobs for example), but it seems incredible that there is enough material to fill a full school year. Maybe a big chunk of it is an apprenticeship? You learn the skills over a few weeks and then spend the rest of the year practicing before you're fully licensed?
      • lightedman 8y ago
        "but it seems incredible that there is enough material to fill a full school year." Ever try doing a professional hairstyle? It takes several hundred hours just to learn one. It takes several hours alone just to perform one, many times. I used to be a hair model. I had to sit in a chair in front of about 6,000 students at a casino while the designer explained his haircut to them. That was five hours alone, and my hair hadn't been touched. The next four hours were spent actually working on my hair.
        • jandrese 8y ago
          It seems kind of crazy that you would have to go through a catalog and learn each individual style instead of learning a toolbag of techniques and piecing each do out of a combination of those techniques.
• Jarb 8y ago
  It depends. I would argue for licensing in fields where improper training can affect lives, safety, and welfare, e.g. Doctors, Mechanics, Engineers, Pilots, etc. We need some kind of way to verify that an individual who proclaims to be a professional in potentially harmful fields has received proper training and can demonstrate that they can perform their work safely. I don't know enough about the intricacies of hairdressing, but I could definitely see the case be made for at least some kind of training, given that they regularly handle caustic chemicals (think relaxers), heating devices, and sharp objects (i.e. straight-razors). Maybe a certificate would suffice, but I don't know. On the other hand I would agree that requiring a florist to be licensed, as the article mentions, is probably going too far and most likely used to stifle competition.
  • arcbyte 8y ago
    Do you inspect the license of the person who cuts your hair every time you get a haircut? No, you don't.
    • Jarb 8y ago
      How do you know what I do? Admittedly, it doesn't happen very often, but you can bet your butt I'll at least take a cursory glance at a barber's licence before I trust him/her with giving me a straight-razor shave.
      • arcbyte 8y ago
        I can print one off in 5 minutes.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • emn13 8y ago
    I wonder if licensing really even is the right way to avoid harm even in industries like aviation and medicine. At least: licensing in its current form, which is pretty all encompassing. If licensing were merely focused on knowing your own limitations, avoiding harm, and transparency rather than being all mixed up with general education and sometimes extremely overbroad vocational training that is only tenuously connection to the actual vocation... I'd be less skeptical. Obviously simply dumping licensing and having a snake-oil free for all is probably not an improvement. But the choice shouldn't need to be "no regulation at all" and "status quo regulation".
• reidjs 8y ago
  That actually seems pretty reasonable to me. If cutting hair were easy then barbershops wouldn’t exist right? It’s a perfectly valid trade and I don’t see a problem with enforcing certification.
  • Consultant32452 8y ago
    How does the difficulty of the trade imply the need for state enforced certification? In my personal opinion, I'm happy to rely on the reputation of a branded salon/barber shop/individual stylist. I've had both good hair cuts and bad hair cuts from state certified barbers. As far as I can tell the state doesn't provide any value to me other than limiting my choices. To the extent we might be concerned about poor people cutting people's hair without the state's permission, and doing so with non-optimum sanitary practices... well... poor people are already doing this and it doesn't seem to be causing any real public health crisis. I say we give it a shot in some locales and see what happens.
    • mcguire 8y ago
      I'll wager you also haven't had chemical burns to your scalp, either. Weirdly, there was just a thread on Berkson's paradox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18667423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18667423
      • Consultant32452 8y ago
        I feel like this is a bias first world people have. I grew up poor, got plenty of haircuts from "a lady in the neighborhood" and never got chemical burns on my scalp, never had lice, etc. Sure, anecdata, but travel to basically any third world country where regulation is either nonexistent or unenforceable. Countless people do this every year. These things just aren't a real problem. You can get a haircut, you can get street food, etc. Basically just eat where the locals are eating and be careful about water/drinks that haven't been boiled. In other words, drink hot tea instead of water, or bottled stuff.
  • mywittyname 8y ago
• fjp 8y ago
  JFC it's because hair stylists use chemicals that can be dangerous if used incorrectly!!!
• tropdrop 8y ago
  The argument to rid licensing for music therapy or florists (as per article) seems stronger than for a hair salon. Do you know the difference between cutting straight, thin hair and thick, curly hair? What about kinky (usually African American) hair? If you would like your market to be more than just those clients that request an Army buzz cut, you need to know those differences. My hair, for instance, looks terrible if given a straight chop with scissors. Because it's wavy and thick, it needs "thinning" all throughout its length to make it lie flat. Enforcing practicing on mannequins how to do just that without ruining someone's actual hair seems reasonable to me.
  • moate 8y ago
    The purpose of licensing here isn't to ensure quality of work (how good or bad your haircut/highlights are). It's there to make sure disease isn't transmitted, and physical harm isn't inflicted. The hours requirement could be scaled down, and the process more streamlined certainly, but the point of going to cosmetology school isn't really to learn how to style hair, although that happens, it's to pass state boards. Then you can assistant in a salon and learn how to do something economically useful.
    • InGodsName 8y ago
      Cutting hair in a way that doesn't trasmit is actually a quality of work. So, licensing does ensures the minimum quality.
  • kalleboo 8y ago
    You're arguing for some kind of private quality assurance scheme or yelp reviews, not a mandatory government license.
• int_19h 8y ago
  The worst part is, we then enforce these laws with SWAT raids. "In August 2010, for example, a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black- and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. More raids followed in September and October. The Orlando Sentinel reported that police held barbers and customers at gunpoint and put some in handcuffs, while they turned the shops inside out. The police raided a total of nine shops and arrested thirty-seven people. By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for “barbering without a license,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida. The most disturbing aspect of the Orlando raids was that police didn’t even attempt to obtain a legal search warrant. They didn’t need to, because they conducted the raids in conjunction with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Despite the guns and handcuffs, under Florida law these were licensure inspections, not criminal searches, so no warrants were necessary." (Radley Balko, "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces")
  • vertexFarm 8y ago
    This is one of the most quintessentially American paragraphs I've read. Jesus.
    • int_19h 8y ago
      That entire book is filled with stuff like this. I would highly recommend it to anybody interested in the subjects upon which it touches (war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, police militarization in general). Here's another interesting case that I found about from the book, but which was notable enough to even get its own Wikipedia article. You be the judge of how quintessentially American that is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor%27s_residence_drug_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor... For me, the most scary part of it was the final words of the person responsible for it: "Quite frankly, we'd do it again. Tonight." Another interesting thing was the long-term consequences. Because the target of the raid was a well-off, politically connected individual, they used their clout to mobilize support for a bill that required Maryland to produce an annual report on how its SWAT operates - where it is deployed, legal authority (arrest warrant, search warrant, exigent circumstances etc), what kind of crime, if any, it was targeting, and whether entry was forced or not. There's some eye-opening stuff there, like the fact that most SWAT deployments are serving search warrants for non-violent crimes, but they use forced entry more often than not: http://goccp.maryland.gov/reports-publications/law-enforcement-reports/swat/ http://goccp.maryland.gov/reports-publications/law-enforceme... But even more interesting was the reaction of law enforcement agencies (and their unions) in the state to this bill - they were all adamantly opposed to it. It passed anyway, but only with a 5-year sunset clause as a concession; it was never renewed.