> They’re all well-funded, growing rapidly, and have competitive salaries for interns.
Excellent. Unpaid internships should be illegal.
Excellent. Unpaid internships should be illegal.
https://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-law-and-human-r...
1) The determination if an intership covers a function they would have otherwise performed is very deferential to the company.
2) Interns do not have the resources to litigate if they believe their position is illegal. Even if they did, they would likely recover less than their costs. They also do not uniformly have access to competent labour regulators who follow-up on these matters.
3) The protections offered vary by jurisdiction as well as by industry/profession.
4) Interns also require networking and references in order to gain the full benefit of their work. Sounding the alarm on a company's hiring practices is a great way to poison the well.
The person you are responding to is not at all claiming the companies are driven By "altruistically" trying to shape the wealth dynamics of society.
Their claim was that the goal is to self-select for a certain type of desirable intern, not to give a certain type of person an overall economic advantage.
I don't buy that paid vs. unpaid internships offer a significant enough difference in cost to companies to be able to dismiss non-cost motivations as "not primary" without actual evidence.
With these internships, it's possible that the person in charge of hiring interns decided an easy to way to have impact is to reduce the salaries of interns. They do it and at the end of the year claim in their performance review "reduced the cost of the intern program to $0 while not compromising on quality". Great, here's your bonus.
Another possibility is that some folks need interns but don't want to go through the hassle of fighting other departments in the organisation for budget. The workaround is to offer unpaid internships that cost nothing.
And then there's just plain greed. The Kardashians run a business empire that makes hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue annually. They offered an unpaid internship as a gopher because they were stingy and knew people would do it anyway.
All of these strike me as more plausible motivations for unpaid internships rather than wanting to shape society. I'm sure that exists in some places, like elite law firms, but I think the scenarios I highlighted are much more widespread.
Again, nobody made the claim that the goal is to shape society.
> With these internships, it's possible that the person in charge of hiring interns decided an easy to way to have impact is to reduce the salaries of interns. They do it and at the end of the year claim in their performance review "reduced the cost of the intern program to $0 while not compromising on quality". Great, here's your bonus.
There are legal requirement for what you must do to offer an unpaid internship.
The most likely result is not a bonus, but being reprimanded / fired for switching to an illegal internship program and exposing the company to unnecessary liability and loss of reputation.
If that hiring manager is able to do this at zero additional cost while adding no legal risk and suffering no reduction in quality of work.... well they deserve that bonus.
However, this is a work of fiction and as such does nothing to support your argument.
> They offered an unpaid internship as a gopher because they were stingy and knew people would do it anyway.
You are stating this as a fact, do you have evidence for this? I find it equally plausible that the Kardashians were intentionally trying to select for fans who are loyal, devoted and well off enough to accept an unpaid internship.
GP claimed that unpaid internships are offered by folks who want to select for candidates from wealthy families. I agreed that this was possible but it was more likely that a company would want to save money. Either because every little helps, or because it makes budget planning easier. You said "big companies don't care about small savings". I pointed out a scenario where they could. You dismissed it as fiction.
You claimed that there's some massive legal risk associated with this. There isn't. If someone from the Department of Labour asks about your unpaid internship, simply say "the student earned college credit for this, so there was an educational component", even if all they did was fetch groceries for you.
You pointed out that the Kardashians could have wanted a loyal, devoted fan for their unpaid internship. Sure, that's entirely possible. That's just as valid a reason as wanting to save money. I'm sure there are plenty of companies that justify it to themselves this way. "We don't want people who are in it for the money, we want them to be really passionate about the useless widget we're building"
> You said "big companies don't care about small savings".
I did not say that. I said that the savings are relatively small enough that you can't just assume they are the primary goal without evidence.
> You claimed that there's some massive legal risk associated with this.
I did not characterize the level of legal risk. There most certainly is some legal risk and college credit alone is not enough to absolve you of that liability. https://www.unpaidinternslawsuit.com/
Where exactly did I say that? I'm pretty sure I didn't speak in hyperbole. Unpaid internships are a very easy way to have a large group of people remove themselves from consideration. Many of these people are considered undesirable by the people offering the internship.
It's more often than not a money issue.
People don't want to pay if they don't have to.
And forcing paid internships will reduce the number of internships available.
If you allow unpaid internship, then employers will abuse this for fields where there is a lot of unemployment. And jobless people will be forced to accept those internships because they can't find any other job due to lack of experience.
Some slaves were ok to work for free and be owned by someone. Does it mean slavery should be authorized because some slaves are ok with it?
Which is better? Giving the choice of an unpaid internship or no choice at all?
The only legitimate reason that comes to mind is that they actually cannot afford to pay the intern. In which case, they really should not offer any internship positions at all.
I mean, seriously now. Do you think an executive in a company that's that new and/or that strapped for cash is going to sit there one day and think "You know what's on top of my mind right now? Training an intern, showing them the ropes, offering them some quality career experience!"
My guess is that it's more along the lines of "Man, I really wish I had some cheap labor right now".
EDIT : actually, now that I think of it, I know a friend who did exactly that. He even said to me that he preferred this unpaid internship to the one he got one year later, paid, but bad environment and no mentorship.
There are definitely points in my life where I would definitely tell someone who had an opinion like yours to go F themselves, because I want do make decisions for myself, and not have someone else get in the way of my own consenting decisions.
You can decide not to care about the opinion of the legislative bodies that came up with those rule (and tell them to "go F themselves"). You can be the best driver and 100% certain that driving 180mph at this particular moment does not pose any danger. If you get caught, you are still in serious trouble.
The reason is simply that people have determined that, in most cases, driving 180mph in a residential area is not a good idea. Most probable situations where it might be a good idea, e.g. if you are doing it while driving an ambulance, are already accounted for. Not every such situation is covered by an exception, but the alternative of letting people drive 180mph in residential areas and sort it out for themselves does not work out.
If you want to live outside of society, in an anarchy where anything goes as long as two parties consent to it, you're free to move to there.
This is because it has a large chance of hurting people around you. not because it would hurt the individual.
> If you get caught, you are still in serious trouble.
No, actually. You will not get in legal trouble for accepting an unpaid internship.
My point being that your opinion is extremely patronizing, and that maybe you should let people decide for themselves what jobs that do or do not want to accept.
This is an especially important concept to understand, when the people that you are trying to "protect" tell you that they do not want your "protection", which involves trying to prevent them from accepting jobs that they want.
In the car analogy above, they are the ones that have a large chance to get hurt by your driving.
Just be careful who's opportunities and jobs you try to take away from people. That might have been their only shot.
(Also, what are you trying to do with the overly emotional aspect of bringing up your friends here? How is that supposed to work, should I bring up a tearjerking story of people who are "extremely insulted and upset that they were not able to afford an internship because affluent people would intern for free"? And then repeat your last paragraph, verbatim?)
That said, it's definitely underenforced. Most unpaid internships probably don't follow the rules. When it is enforced, the penalty is typically no more than a slap on the wrist + back pay at minimum wage.
that is correct, yet totally not useful as a statement.
Well they can't because all of the other intern positions are only available for those to do it for free. So maybe don't act like interns have any real choice here.
There should be a very high bar for making illegal any activity between two consenting parties where there's no obvious and severe externalities. I don't see how this harms anyone outside of the intern/company, both of which should be free to make their own decisions.
perhaps it harms ppl who cannot afford to do an unpaid job?
But then again I went to a highly renowned university in Germany, which I also could not have afforded if it wasn't completely free.
So, I was not free to make the decision to take unpaid internships.
If you're not free to make the decision of internships how did you choose the company you went into ? Also, I guess the company and their managers, because they have a budget to respect, are not free either to make decision, by the same logic ?
Exactly, "everyone" did. And I probably already paid it back with my taxes already. And, one can dream, maybe in another way too, through the work I perform.
Had university or my internships been very costly, it's not unfathomable that I would have a lower salary, in addition to performing lower-quality work (in terms of knowledge going into it).
I am done discussing with you. The viewpoints that you have presented so far seem shortsighted and detrimental to society to me. Luckily, you are unlikely to have any effect on standing law.
Why is "obvious" a requirement? A hidden or indirect but severe externality is fine?
Source ?
Numbers probably aren't including housing, which in Silicon Valley puts a ~$7500 monthly salary roughly up to $10k.
Meanwhile, the top HFs and prop traders will pay the same or better (often higher pay, no housing). Jane Street is a big one (esp. if you go to Brown), Citadel isn’t even top-notch and will offer that, and then obviously D.E. Shaw, Renaissance, Two Sigma, and so forth.
https://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-law-and-human-r...
Unless a Trump Department of Labor changes it's mind about implementation again, I guess. There was some point in the last decade where the Dept of Labor got more serious about enforcing this, not sure the current enforcement environment.
If the institution doesn't care and the company expects the intern to do work they'd expect from an (however underperforming) employee, which is what all too often happens, then the case is clearcut and I fully agree.
But if the institution expects the company to show the student around and give them a lot of tutoring, then the case is less clearcut. I've mentored a few interns in that scenario myself, and it can easily take a day per week on average. Requiring companies to pay such interns more than something symbolic can make the companies a lot less willing to take interns to begin with. The side effect of that is that it then reenforces the early career problem of "all jobs require x years experience; how am I to get those years of experience if I can't apply to any job?"
As a YC founder who's raised millions of dollars and employs dozens of people, I got my start - and may not be where I am now - without an unpaid internship.
Unpaid internships are a vastly lesser evil than demanding a four year degree for an entry level job. Those four years could have been spent earning as well as learning. A six month unpaid internship is a hell of a lot cheaper than an associate’s degree, never mind a Bachelor’s.