Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

Unpaid internships are one of the biggest scams ever.

You want me to work for you for free so I get "invaluable experience"? How much is my work worth to you, if you're not paying me? For that matter, how much is the experience I get, if I'm doing worthless work? You want ME to be grateful for the privilege of getting the experience of making YOU money for nothing in return? Screw YOU.

Mark Cuban makes it sound like this is about the bright-eyed ambitious kid who just wants to get his foot in the door and, given that one chance, will eventually rise up to run the company. Bullshit. The ambitious kid will find a way. This isn't about him.

This is about all the people struggling on the lowest rungs of a profession, trying to enter it. They can't find a job, so they'll jump at any chance they can to be "working" in their chosen field, even if they don't get paid. They're strung along with the promise of an actual job down the road. And guess what? As soon as they want money, they're out, replaced by someone else who's willing to work for free. This is about having too much supply and not enough demand for a profession, and free labor only makes the problem worse, by masking the real market condition.

This is about a lot of things. It's about ambitious kids, it's about struggling people, it's about flux in employment conditions. You can bring in mentions of the apprenticeship model of yore, but you'll probably realize pretty quickly that there are some big differences.

But let's drop that bullshit and call it what it is, Mark. You're arguing against minimum wage, since zero is usually less than the minimum wage. Why don't you come up and make that argument straight up.

Edit: after re-reading my comment and noticing how many comments there are here and on his blog, I once again realize that Mark Cuban is a troll. Bleh.

You want ME to be grateful for the privilege of getting the experience of making YOU money for nothing in return? Screw YOU.

No one is talking about making you take an unpaid internship that you don't want. We're talking about whether Joe Q. Eagerbeaver should be prevented from taking an unpaid internship that he does want.

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

amen

No one is talking about making you take an unpaid internship that you don't want. We're talking about whether Joe Q. Eagerbeaver should be prevented from taking an unpaid internship that he does want.

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.

> By that logic Ponzi schemes should be legal.

They should only be illegal to the extent that they involve fraudulent deception. Otherwise -- treat the "victims" like mentally competent adults capable of making their own life decisions.

In every employee relationship there is:

a) a wage cost to the employer

b) a non-wage cost (supervision, office space, communication overhead) etc.

c) a benefit the worker provides to the company

Note that in general the benefit c) starts off low for an entry-level worker and grows over time with work.

If c) is equal to or less than b), then the employer cannot afford to pay that worker a wage. By creating a minimum wage or banning unpaid work, you are simply banning an employment contract in the situation where c) is less than b) plus the minimum wage.

Sure in some cases employers may suckering kids via a bait in switch. But in a lot of real cases, the internship or apprenticeship is a path upwards. By making it illegal, you are cutting people off. You have not made the kid any better off or engaged in charity. You have simply made a voluntary contract, that for whatever reason this kid thought was better than all his other options illegal. This kid will now simply have to choose a less preferred option.

I used to work at a non-profit helping to find jobs for the homeless. A lot of the people off the streets simply would not be able to produce $7 an hour worth of value to an employer. Perhaps though, they could produce $2 an hour. But that is illegal, so the pathway into the workplace is barred for these people.

I agree with all your points. However, the laws are there to protect the "desperate" and to enforce a minimum worth of an employee. In many situations, unpaid internships provide a cost to the employer. The trade-off is that any exceptional interns can become full time employees, already having had most of the training, resulting in a lower initial cost to employment (training, etc.). Even for full-time positions, straight from college hires are not ready to directly contribute. There's a window of time (depending on the job itself) that the college graduate, even having completed an internship, will not be able to meaningfully contribute. Most people who have just completed an internship at the company has this time drastically reduced (I'm not going to give made up statistics, but I've seen it reduce the time by 8 months).

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.

Internships can also teach someone who has never worked in a given industry before how a given company manages its operations. This not only provides a minimal "experience" benefit, and possibly a foot in the door for getting hired on at that employer as a regular employee, but also knowledge of how the business is run. In some cases, this might help inform an entrepreneurial effort so that a new competitor may arise under the former intern's direction -- a competitor that doesn't make the same mistakes the company offering internships made.

. . . but none of that matters, because someone might be stupid enough to tenaciously hold on to an internship long after it has ceased being beneficial to the intern, thus resulting in that person being "exploited".

An unpaid internship with a company like Berkshire Hathaway or Pixar could actually be worth a lot of money. It's incredibly valuable to point to work you've done for a respected organization, paid or not.

Except that by being unpaid, they're saying that what you did for them wasn't worth enough to pay them for it.

Not necessarily; maybe it is that the conditions under which the work was performed (i.e. a low level of experience) brought negligible value to the organisation or entailed too high a risk or quality variance to be worth paying for, even if the actual kinetics are remunerable, in principle.

In some fields, the unpaid internship is valuable experience. For example, the legal profession. Legal services organizations, such as your local public defender's office or legal aid society provide more experience in 4 months than a $160k job with a big firm would provide in 3 years. You see actual clients, do meaningful legal research, and even appear in court on a regular basis. In contrast, the cushy firm job sees you in an office performing document review (i.e., looking for grammatical/spelling errors) for close to 2 years with the occasional real assignment every few months.

Also note, that in the legal profession, lawyers do not begin generating their profit for their employer (in a firm setting) until 3-4 years in -- it costs money in lost billing opportunities (clients will not pay for a new lawyer's work whatever the quality, but firms must pay salary).

(The 4 month period is chosen because that is the lag between the Cali bar exam and the release of results in late November, the "post-bar" period during which finding a paid job is close to impossible if you didn't already find one before graduation.).

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