NEW YORK >> Hundreds of volunteers fanned out across New York on Thursday morning as part of an outreach campaign for nail salon workers organized by city officials, with the goal of reaching by day’s end thousands of manicurists and educating them about their rights and how to protect their health.

The scale of the campaign was ambitious — city officials said they visited over the course of the day more than 1,000 nail salons in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. The volunteers, as well as city employees, were armed with fliers and packets of information in different languages for manicurists about wages, their right to paid sick leave and how to limit their exposure to potentially harmful chemicals in nail products.

The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, put together the effort, calling it a “Nail Salon Day of Action,” after an investigation by The New York Times published two weeks ago exposed widespread exploitation of nail salon workers and the serious health problems many of them endured.

The campaign began early at subway stops and on street corners across the city where manicurists congregate before heading out for long days at salons.

In Queens, about a half-dozen volunteers, along with Julie Menin, the commissioner of the city’s Consumer Affairs Department, passed out fliers near a subway stop.

A manicurist, Jenny Guo, 31, sped past the volunteers on her way to be picked up for a salon job about an hour’s drive away in Massapequa, on Long Island, where, she said, she worked 11-hour days. She had heard nothing about the new rules for nail salons instituted Monday by the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, such as a requirement that workers wear gloves. But she said she welcomed the changes, particularly those relating to ventilation and safety measures.

“It would be great for every salon worker to wear gloves when they are working,” she said in Chinese. “Many customers have fungus. It usually ends up with us being infected.”

Some who took the fliers swiftly dumped them in the nearest trash bin. But others asked for extras to give to relatives and friends who work in the industry. One man stopped volunteers to ask about what to do for his mother. He said that she was a cosmetologist at a Manhattan salon who was home sick and that her boss had threatened to fire her when she asked for paid sick leave.

Under the rattling trestle of the No. 7 train in Queens, Dahime Asencios, 45, handed out information with five others. Asencios, a Peruvian immigrant, said she volunteered because she was a manicurist herself at Green Tree Nails, a salon in midtown Manhattan. Recent media attention on the industry, she said, served as a light switch, opening the city’s eyes to the day-to-day grind of the immigrant worker.

Four manicurists walked up to the group, who eagerly placed fliers in their hands and hurriedly explained the risks of chemical exposure associated with salon work.

“During the 14 years I’ve worked in the industry, the city has never come to see how we are doing, how things are going in the salon,” Asencios said in Spanish, after the women hustled away. “No inspections. Nothing. Nothing. I’m completely unprotected.”

She added, “I have come to realize that we’ve been completely abandoned, those of us who work in salons.”

Later in the morning, teams of city employees moved on to visit nail shops in about 70 neighborhoods.

In the Wall Street area, Menin and Councilwoman Margaret Chin, a Democrat who represents the area, carried clipboards with maps showing local salons. They ducked into small establishments or tramped up narrow stairs to second-story shops. At AA Nails Spa, the manager, who gave her name only as Sophia, expressed surprise when she read the leaflet outlining a worker’s right to paid sick leave.

Menin said she could not recall a time when the city had undertaken a door-to-door outreach campaign of this size before.

“Obviously there is an endemic problem,” she said.

In some shops on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, manicurists rose from their tables and fled to rooms out of sight when the teams approached. Some owners accepted the information gratefully. Others, like Dawn An, expressed annoyance not just at the visitors who plied her with fliers but also at the onslaught of new regulations and other changes that have only just begun to play out in shops across the city, confronting owners and manicurists with an industry whose landscape is swiftly shifting.

“We are immigrants and didn’t receive education in the States, so it’s hard to even understand whenever the rules change,” she said to Amit Bagga, the deputy commissioner of the Consumer Affairs Department. Her voice rose, startling customers seated in pedicure chairs: “I’m trying my best, but we’re not perfect!”

But the decision to use an assortment of city employees to approach shop owners, rather than inspectors given the task of investigating wrongdoing, was strategic, Menin said.

“We are not looking to be punitive,” she said. “This is meant as really a business education canvass.”

The city’s ability to regulate salons is limited. It is state agencies that are charged with rooting out wage violations and making sure salons and workers are licensed. Thus, the approach by the de Blasio administration is different in tone from the steps announced by the Cuomo administration last week. Those included instituting emergency regulations like immediately requiring respirator masks and gloves for manicurists and ordering that signs explaining worker rights be posted in every nail shop.

On Wednesday, leaders of various state agencies and elected officials held an educational forum on the rules for workers and owners in midtown Manhattan. Just a few dozen people who worked in the industry attended the event — primarily salon owners. Tables in a corner showcased the special masks that are now required for tasks like sculpting acrylic nails, and another was piled with mock-ups of the new signs. Leaders of various agencies gave presentations on issues like the state minimum wage and required overtime pay.

When a slide appeared on the screen explaining that the minimum wage in New York was $8.75 an hour, hands shot up in the audience, holding cellphones to snap pictures of the slide, apparently to remember for later.

In the audience were past and former leaders of the Korean American Nail Salon Association, some of whom sat in a corner at one point, trying on the new respirator masks. The city’s salons are overwhelmingly owned by Korean immigrants.

The day before, several of the same association leaders had stood before Alpha Nails & Spa, a salon in Queens, alongside Rep. Grace Meng, D-Queens, and Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat who represents the area, in a news conference pledging to improve the conditions in nail salons. The event offered a sharp departure from the group’s initial angry response to The Times’ account of the widespread fraud within the industry.

Of particular issue for the city’s Korean community was the revelation that a race and ethnicity-based caste system pervades the industry, privileging Korean manicurists and putting Chinese and then Hispanic workers beneath them in terms of compensation and even day-to-day treatment.

Despite all of the changes, some manicurists expressed skepticism Thursday that the industry could be reformed.

Samoa Nail Salon in Brooklyn was among the shops visited by city employees. Two manicurists, Cindy Shin, 62, and Maria Ganzhi, 38, sat leafing through the information the group had dropped on their desks.

Although they both started at the salon two years ago, Ganzhi, who is from Ecuador, makes $20 less per day than her colleague, who is originally from Korea.

“I don’t know if anything will change,” Ganzhi said.

© 2015 The New York Times Company