They Made Women Clean Toilets For Free

In 2018, a federal class action lawsuit landed in Denver. The named plaintiff was Lisa Miles, a nail technician. The defendants were BKP, Inc. and three limited liability companies operating under the name Ella Bliss Beauty Bar across the Denver metropolitan area. The complaint’s central allegation was blunt: the employer ran its business on stolen labor.

The lawsuit alleged violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Colorado Wage Claim Act. These are not obscure legal technicalities. These are the laws that say workers must be paid for the hours they work. Ella Bliss, according to the complaint, treated those laws as optional.

Two law firms, Killmer, Lane & Newman, LLP and Towards Justice, filed the case. On the same day, attorney Mari Newman stood at a press conference and said exactly what the complaint alleged, in plain language, so that every worker who had been through this could recognize their own experience and know that something was being done about it.

A Business “Founded on the Exploitation of Its Workers”

The class action complaint did not mince words. It described Ella Bliss’s business model as one “founded on the exploitation of its workers.” That phrase did not come from a press conference or an attorney’s opinion. It came from the legal filing itself, grounded in the specific, documented practices the employer used every single day.

The complaint alleged that Ella Bliss did not pay Lisa Miles or any other service technician at any of its three locations a single dollar for the hours they spent cleaning the salon and performing other mandatory chores. The salon did not employ janitors or a cleaning service. Instead, it used its nail technicians to do that work, off the clock, for free.

In addition, the complaint alleged the employer failed to pay workers for downtime, failed to pay for work done before and after scheduled shifts, and failed to pay contractually required commissions. All of this combined to produce unpaid overtime the workers were legally owed and never received.

The Tip Weapon

Of all the alleged practices, the tip withholding stands out as a particularly calculated form of control. Tips are workers’ money. Customers leave tips for the person who served them. Ella Bliss, according to the lawsuit, held those tips back to compel service technicians to finish their unpaid chores.

Think about what that means in practice. A worker finishes her paid shift, exhausted after a full day of physical labor. She still has to clean the salon, including the bathrooms. She gets paid nothing for that cleaning time. And if she does not do it, she does not get the tips that customers already gave her. The choice is comply or lose income you already earned.

The complaint also alleged the employer “co-determined the policies, procedures, and rules” covering the service technicians, meaning this was a system designed from the top. These were not rogue managers or isolated incidents. This was policy.

The Non-Financial Ledger

Scrubbing Floors on Your Own Time, on Their Dime

Nail technicians perform skilled, physical, client-facing labor. They spend their shifts bent over hands and feet, handling chemicals, managing difficult customers, maintaining precision for hours at a stretch. When that shift ends, these workers were not going home. They were picking up mops and cleaning products to scrub the salon that profited from their skill, without a cent of additional pay.

The court documents describe this as mandatory. Not optional. Not rotating. Mandatory. Ella Bliss Beauty Bar chose to pay for no janitors and no cleaning service. The complaint states directly that the employer “relied exclusively on the unpaid labor of its nail technicians and other Service Technicians to clean the salon.” The owners made a deliberate business decision: let the workers pay for the cleaning with their own time and energy.

There is a specific indignity in being made to clean a toilet for someone else’s business without pay. These were women, many of them immigrants, working in an industry the court documents specifically acknowledge employs “populations they think they can take advantage of.” The employer did not stumble into exploitation. The complaint, echoed by the attorney at the press conference, describes a business aware of exactly who its workers were and what it could get away with.

Your Tips Are Not Your Tips Until You Comply

The tip withholding allegation reveals the mechanical cruelty of this system most clearly. Tips represent gratitude from customers. In service industries, they often make up a substantial part of a worker’s actual take-home pay. Holding tips back as a lever to force unpaid labor is a form of coercion that blurs the line between a wage dispute and something closer to forced work under financial duress.

The complaint also alleged the employer failed to pay for pre-shift and post-shift work, meaning workers were clocking in and out around a narrower paid window than the actual hours they spent under the employer’s control. Time spent setting up, cleaning up, waiting between clients, doing mandatory tasks before or after the scheduled shift, these hours allegedly vanished from the paycheck without explanation or recourse.

The workers the complaint describes were “low-wage, hourly workers who are unsophisticated, are unlikely to seek legal representation, cannot realistically navigate the legal system pro se, and whose small claims make it difficult to retain legal representation if they do seek it.” The employer allegedly knew this. The complaint frames the entire arrangement as the exploitation of people the employer believed would not, or could not, fight back.

Then They Sued the Lawyers Who Tried to Help

Exactly one year after the class action was filed, Ella Bliss filed its own lawsuit, targeting the attorneys who had represented the workers. The claims were defamation and intentional interference with contractual relations. The target was not the workers themselves. The target was the legal team that gave workers a voice.

This is a documented playbook. When a company with money faces a lawsuit from workers without money, filing a countersuit against the attorneys raises the cost of representation and signals to other lawyers that taking these cases comes with personal legal risk. The Colorado Supreme Court, citing prior case law, described this dynamic directly: parallel litigation by defendants can impair valid claims by “disrupting access to counsel,” “intimidating counsel with an almost certain retaliatory proceeding,” and “dampening the unobstructed presentation of claims.”

Legal Receipts: The Exact Words That Condemned Them

Societal Impact: This Is Bigger Than One Salon

Economic Inequality: The Math of Stolen Time

Low-wage service workers in the beauty industry operate with essentially no margin for error in their household budgets. When an employer strips away pay for cleaning time, pre-shift preparation, post-shift duties, and overtime, the resulting underpayment across every worker, every week, every year, compounds into thousands of dollars stolen per person, spread across an entire workforce.

The workers in this case are described as low-wage and hourly. That means no salary buffer, no paid time off to absorb losses, and no savings cushion. Every unpaid hour the employer captured was an hour those workers could not afford to lose. The beauty industry employs a disproportionate number of immigrant women and women of color, a fact the court documents acknowledge directly when the attorney observes that exploitation is “fairly common in industries that employ populations they think they can take advantage of, like women or immigrants.”

The class action structure itself reflects how economic inequality distorts access to justice. The complaint acknowledged that the individual workers had “small claims” that make it financially difficult to hire a lawyer even when you know you have been wronged. Class actions exist precisely to aggregate those small individual losses into a case worth fighting. Ella Bliss’s decision to sue the attorneys was a direct attack on that mechanism, attempting to price workers out of the only legal tool scaled to their situation.

Public Health: The Hidden Cost of Unpaid Labor

Nail technicians work with chemicals that carry documented health risks. Acrylics, polishes, adhesives, and solvents produce fumes that, with prolonged exposure, are linked to respiratory damage, reproductive harm, and skin conditions. These workers are already managing elevated occupational health risks during their paid shifts.

Adding mandatory, unpaid cleaning duties extends that exposure time. Cleaning products introduce additional chemicals into a workspace that is already chemically burdened. Workers forced to stay late scrubbing surfaces after a full shift spend more cumulative time in that environment, without any additional pay, without any additional health protections specified for that work, and without any acknowledgment in the wage calculation that this time cost them anything at all.

Exhaustion compounds these risks. A nail technician who works a full client-facing shift and then performs unpaid janitorial labor is physically depleted in ways that affect everything from immune function to injury risk during the commute home. The wage theft documented in this case was inseparable from a public health burden placed on a workforce with limited power to resist it.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric: What the Employer Saved

They Tried to Silence the Lawyers. It Did Not Work.

The legal battle that followed the 2018 class action filing was not about whether Ella Bliss underpaid its workers. That question remained in federal court. The lawsuit Ella Bliss filed in 2019 was against the attorneys, and it targeted the act of speaking publicly about the case.

The employer argued that going to the press was defamatory. The Colorado Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling issued September 11, 2023, disagreed completely. The court found that every statement made at the press conference and in the press release either repeated, summarized, or paraphrased allegations already present in the class action complaint.

The court ruled that the litigation privilege, which protects attorneys’ ability to communicate about active cases, applied fully and absolutely to those statements. The purpose of the press conference, reaching other service technicians who might not know they had legal rights or that a case existed, was exactly the kind of communication the privilege was designed to protect.

What Now: Who to Watch, What to Do

Corporate Entities Involved

• BKP, Inc. — Parent corporate entity named as defendant in the federal class action
• Ella Bliss Beauty Bar LLC — Location 1, Denver metropolitan area
• Ella Bliss Beauty Bar-2, LLC — Location 2, Denver metropolitan area
• Ella Bliss Beauty Bar-3, LLC — Location 3, Denver metropolitan area

Regulatory and Legal Watchlist

• U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division (WHD) — Enforces the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law Ella Bliss allegedly violated. File a wage complaint at dol.gov/agencies/whd.
• Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics — Enforces the Colorado Wage Claim Act. If you worked for this employer or one like it, this is where state wage theft complaints go.
• Towards Justice (towardsjustice.org) — The Denver-based workers’ rights law firm that co-filed this case. They specialize in wage theft and low-wage worker exploitation in Colorado.
• Killmer, Lane & Newman, LLP — The co-filing law firm. Attorney Mari Newman was the public voice of this case.
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) — Nail salon chemical exposure is a documented occupational hazard. Workers facing health risks from unregulated chemical exposure in salon environments can report to osha.gov.

What You Can Actually Do

If you are a current or former nail technician or beauty service worker in Colorado, document everything: your hours, your tasks, your tips, your pay stubs. Wage theft is routine in this industry precisely because employers count on workers not having records. Connect with Towards Justice or your local worker center. If you are not in Colorado, find your state’s Department of Labor wage complaint portal. Share this article with every service worker you know. The class action exists because workers like Lisa Miles came forward. The more people who recognize this pattern, the harder it gets to hide.