Alaska Final Board of Barbers And Hairdressers regulations concerning the deadlines and documentation necessary to obtain a courtesy license to practice body piercing, tattooing, or permanent cosmetic coloring and the standards applicable to receiving an instructor’s license were adopted last month and become effective on September 26, 2024.
New Hampshire The House Executive Departments and Administration Committee has scheduled an October 17, 2024, Executive Session on HB 1408 and HB 1271. Since November’s election will determine 2025 control of New Hampshire’s closely divided legislature, the Committee session may portend a lame duck legislative session.
HB 1408 would merge and reorganize various occupational boards. It includes a provision that would reduce the size of the state’s Barbering, Cosmetology, and Esthetics Board from seven to five members by eliminating the school owner and tanning salon owner seats. HB 1271 would combine the advisory board of massage therapists with the advisory board of reflexology, structural integration, and Asian bodywork therapy.
New Jersey The Department of Labor and Workforce Development adopted and filed state “gainful employment” rules with a non-substantial change not requiring additional public comment or notice.
The Department’s summary of public comments indicated “some commenters maintain that the earnings of those who graduate from cosmetology and hairstyling schools, as that data is reported to and collected by the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), are ‘profoundly understated owning to the cash-based nature of cosmetology earnings.’ The commenters characterize as ‘industry standard practice’ the substantial underreporting of income to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by salon and shop owners, adding, ‘BLS data is collected through surveys…[and] it stands to reason that those willfully evading taxes do not report their actual earnings to a government institution [like the BLS].’ The commenters, therefore, suggest that use of BLS annual salary data for the purpose of establishing the ‘average annual earnings’ of cosmetology school graduates is unfair. Nevertheless, the commenters recommend as an alternative to using the 25th percentile of the annual salaries in New Jersey for cosmetologists, that the Department ‘use the top quartile [the 75th percentile] of reported BLS earnings data,’ to compensate for the supposed underreporting of cash earnings by cosmetologists. The Department responded by indicating that the rules establish a uniform “minimum acceptable level of performance,” for all private career schools. “That means the student cost component of the ‘minimum acceptable level of performance’ calculation will for all private career schools be based on tuition, fee, and institutional grant aid information obtained by the Department from the private career schools (subject to verification by the Department through monitoring and inspection pursuant to existing N.J.A.C. 12:41-4.6) and that the average annual earnings component of that calculation will for all private career schools be based on the amount indicated for the 25th percentile of the annual salaries in New Jersey for the occupation at issue according to the most recent Department Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates for All Industries Combined. The Department will not establish a special method for calculating ‘minimum acceptable level of performance’ for a single type of private career school or instructional program; especially not for the reason suggested by the commenter, namely, to account for supposed underreporting of taxes by certain employers and employees in one industry. That is, the Department will not create a special method to calculate ‘minimum acceptable level of performance’ just for cosmetology schools to account for the unsupported assumption by the commenters that if some of their graduates supposedly don’t report cash wages to taxing authorities, they must also be omitting that information from their responses to BLS surveys, which are the source of the data used to calculate earnings outcomes pursuant to the proposed Department rule.
Incidentally, in opposition to the earnings-based metric used in the recently published Federal ‘Gainful Employment’ rule, cosmetology schools made virtually the identical argument — that to evaluate the value of cosmetology programs is unfair because cosmetologists receive a significant portion of their earnings as tipped income (often in cash), and that this income is underreported to tax authorities, which are the source of the data used to calculate earnings outcomes pursuant to the Federal rule. However, a recent joint report from George Washington University, Columbia University, and Student Defense, estimates that while approximately eight percent of cosmetologists’ income is not reported to tax authorities, adjusting for this underreported income would not substantially change the failure rates for cosmetology programs pursuant to the Federal government’s debt-to-earnings metric of the 2014 version of the Federal ‘gainful employment’ rule, because many cosmetology graduates’ earnings are so low that even with an adjustment, the programs cannot pass the Federal debit-to-earnings test.”
New York The Department of State filed a final rule – effective September 9, 20224 – permitting appearance enhancement licensees to apply products containing silver nitrate color additives to tint eyelash or eyebrow hair. “All licensees offering or providing services containing silver nitrate color additives, to tint eyelash or eyebrow hair, shall also be required to apply such products as expressly directed by the manufacturer.”
After publishing the proposed rule in the State Register earlier this year, 14 public comments – all in support – were received. “The comments neither raised issues nor suggested alternatives to the proposed rule as a whole or any part thereof. Accordingly, no changes were made to the rule. The comments characterized the Proposed Rule in different ways, varying from ‘common sense,’ ‘long overdue,’ and ‘timely.’ The comments also stated the Proposed Rule will benefit appearance enhancement businesses, will increase safe access to services, is a solution for a growing demand, and reflects the continuous evolution of services.” |
