Judge denies wages to beauty-school students

A federal judge has denied wages to beauty-school students who did hair stylings without pay at salons in San Francisco and Las Vegas while their school collected the revenue from the customers.

The stylists-in-training at Marinello Schools of Beauty said the school put them to work five days a week, with little supervision, and encouraged them to sell salon products when they weren’t cutting and braiding hair. The students filed a class-action suit against the school, which has 57 locations in six states, seeking reclassification as employees entitled to minimum wages and overtime.

But U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco said Friday that the trainees had presented little or no evidence that they were working as employees — that Marinello designed their program mainly to benefit the school and not the students.

“Clinical work is an essential part of these students’ training,” Chhabria said in dismissing the lawsuit, noting that state cosmetology boards require many hundreds of hours of training to qualify for a license. The fact that they “worked in a realistic salon environment isn’t enough to show that their work served a business purpose over an educational purpose. ... Working on paying customers has obvious educational value in preparing students for careers.”

Chhabria said the students offered only “vague and sparse” evidence to back up their claim that Marinello failed to provide supervision or training: One student, for example, said instructors were present “sometimes,” while another said instructors were available six times out of 10. Without more specific evidence, he said, “no reasonable juror could conclude that the schools subordinated the educational function of the clinics for the purpose of making money.”

Edward Cramp, a lawyer for the school, said three federal judges elsewhere have dismissed similar suits against other beauty schools. At least two of those rulings are being appealed.

Leon Greenberg, a lawyer for the students, said anyone who works for a for-profit business that competes in the marketplace, like Marinello, should be considered an employee entitled to wages.

“They’re selling the students’ labor ... in competition with other salons,” he said.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko