Want an Unpaid Internship So You Can Get Valuable Experience ? – Screw You

Yes, I agree, this isn't about me. I have the luxury to avoid unpaid internships, which not everyone does. There are situations where unpaid internships are good, and situations where they're bad. I'm arguing that the bad heavily outweighs the good.

Whatever happened to treating people like mentally competent adults capable of making their own life decisions?

Strawman. By that logic Ponzi schemes should be legal.

Now, the laws for unpaid internships are actually protecting the interns from non-internships. Based on the description in the blog, what they wanted as an army of people to compile a bunch of information without any direct supervision. This provides no benefit to the interns. They get the benefit of being immersed in corporate culture, but they are not receiving any relevant training or exposure to the field they would supposedly be interning for. This is exactly what the law is to protect against. If I'm a software development firm and get 15 unpaid interns to load servers into a moving van to change data centers, and all they do every day is load the van and unload it, they are directly providing benefit to the company with nothing in return, except they know that DL585's are heavy. Now, if they were part of the transition process, involved with the documenting and preparing for migration of the data center, document each step, what moves when and how, then the cabling/racking and bringup of machines at the new data center, they have suddenly learned some invaluable skills that are not taught in school. The point in the law is to defend against these situations by guaranteeing recompense for the student, whether it's invaluable skills (by guaranteeing they won't be used as free labor), class credit (helps towards degree), or a paycheck.

First of all, if you have a minimum wage law (which we do), it has to be enforced. Allowing people to work as "unpaid interns" is a half-assed way that corporations take to work around that law. You can argue about the efficacy of minimum wage laws, but it seems like real empirical studies (instead of just theoretical arguments) have been pretty inconclusive. And overall, the point is that you can't just let people create a massive loophole in that law by just deciding not to pay people at all.

Secondly, from a simple ethical standpoint, unpaid internships privilege people who are already well enough off to be able to give their labor away for free (i.e. generally middle-class or wealthier kids whose parents can support them). You don't get a lot of poor kids applying for unpaid internships at age 20 or 22 because, guess what, they need those 40+ hours a week to actually earn an income. So the tradition of unpaid internships in certain traditionally white-collar industries tends to be a subtle form of class discrimination.

And recasting it as a "volunteer" thing is also a total cop-out: you volunteer for a non-profit charity, not a for-profit corporation.

We don't. The government takes the logical position that all such internships are illegal, so regulators don't need to make that subjective judgment.

In this light, the answer to your second question is "yes" -- the government is erring on the side of worker safety. It's a judgment call, and you can disagree with it, but both sides of the debate have perfectly reasonable arguments.

I believe the law protects people (specifically young people starting their careers) from exploitive practices. It also hurts them by penalizing non-exploitive and beneficial practices. I personally beleive the protection outweighs the potential benefits in this law, and thus agree with this law.

Is this a little big brother'ish? Perhaps, but nonetheless I would vote in favour of it.

Is it really? Is SM play "an equal partnership" between master and slave?

But consider the hypothetical in another industry. Someone gets a shot at an unpaid internship, they do really well, the company they are associated with gives them a recommendation, and immediately after the internship they get an offer for a position in that industry. Or: Someone does not get an internship, it is a competitive industry, the person ends up working an $8 / hr job for the next some odd years until they get an opening in the industry. It would seem the benefit to the unpaid intern could be greater than the benefit to the company.

Of course, there is the scenario where the person becomes an entrepreneur.

Maybe you could explain what you mean by "equal"?

Corporations aren't people though and have different rights. They don't enjoy the right to employ people free of charge.

Hardly. Individuals can very easily manage a police force. Look at Blackwater.

The reason you might want the State involved in either of these is because you want it to have a monopoly. I really don't want competing police forces and armies. Having competing organizations that evaluated and licensed doctors might be a good thing.

From an employer's perspective it's easy to see that the more you pay the more interest you'll get from those who can perform work better. The idea that employers would naturally exploit their workers is a bit silly given the ability for those workers to look elsewhere. And they do - which is why real wages have risen substantially over time (capturing some of the value in productivity improvements) to the point that in many cases entry level/effective minimum wages greatly exceed legislated minimum wage. The idea however that government should impose a choice means higher costs on society - in this case borne by the lowest wage earners as they are the ones who are least employable for whatever reason (by definition), means that fewer get hired.

And thus you get examples like this: http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/153901_unemploy26.html

I find that very doubtful. Why is he even considering the project if the cost of paid interns would negate the upside?

I think the idea is that it would be nice to allow people to volunteer/intern when you have no other way to give them that introductory experience. If your options are "give people a chance to get some experience without paying them" and "let them figure out how to get that experience in a down economy on their own because you can't afford to pay anyone", I think trying to find "a way around paying them to do work" is actually good for them.

> a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business.

So, what you're saying appears to be that for-profit businesses can't directly do anything charitable without paying enormous out-of-pocket costs, since they can't use volunteers. I think your plan sucks.

You are right though, it's quite a stretch of the term.

What I wanted to say is that the party offering compensation through experience is, in my opinion, just trying to get free work and making it look like they are "paying" by "giving out" experience.

A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses. The employer should pay (in money) what the work done is worth to them.

They also know a for-profit business should be paying their workers.

(Not to say I agree one way or the other. It is a fine line between experience and exploitation)

Think about it - I ran my own business, I was responsible for everything from client acquisition, billing, account management, not to mention actual production and marketing.

And I didn't starve or get evicted, so it clearly worked. That's great experience.

An unpaid internship doesn't give you any more experience than running your own business. And honestly, it can reflect poorly on your business acumen and/or drive.

If you are relying on the names on your resume, not what you actually did, it's not going to do you much good.

It's fine to not have enough drive to do things on your own, to want to take the "default route" to "default success." There's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. I applaud anyone who finds their path to happiness.

But. People frame these unpaid internships as some great act of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, and they're not. If you want to be rewarded down the road for great acts of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, be an entrepreneur.

Bonus: that creates jobs, and builds everyone up, instead of creating competition for 'free' jobs that pay nothing but 'experience.'