A month or so back an intern at the Great Liberal Hope of Salon wrote an essay discussing how fantastic what an opportunity it was for him to work for free at Salon.

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/21/the_psychic_who_predicted_my_career/singleton/

Here's a salon article about internships words and one of their interns. It's actually a pretty good article, and he mentions that salon doesn't pay their interns. He also mentions that women have about 75% of all internships, which certainly doesn't help the so-called wage gender gap. but he never has the guts to actually talk to one of the people in charge, like Joan Walsh, about how salon the great fighting liberal magazine for the downtrodden and modern progressive can justify ethically there not paying interns.

Appalling that the great liberal shamers there would pay people nothing while ranting about how evil conservatives are screwing over the people. And I say that as a liberal.

I was an intern in college in the early 80s. And in fact my job after a few years was identical to that of an entry level engineer. And they paid me from day one at about five times the going rate of minimum wage.

whoops, here's the link

http://www.salon.com/2011/05/29/intern_nation_interview/

This ties into the whole discussion of minimum wage. There are arguments for and against:

- For enforcing minimum wage laws: if someone works, they ought to be paid a decent, living wage. This obviously ought to apply to interns as well.

- Against minimum wage: if someone's work is, objectively worth less than the minimum wage, companies will not hire them. A job is lost.

The latter is a powerful argument, and it's more than theoretical: there are plenty of studies that show it to be true. I can't find it now, but I recall one chart that graphed (for the US) minimum wage increases against unemployment rates: every increase in minimum wage was immediately followed by a substantial increase in unemployment.

From an entirely different perspective: it's a free market. I may think unpaid internships are idiotic, but if you want to give your hours away, that's your right.

I think a lot of the unpaid internships are at companies that don't even need a new employee, but since it's at no cost to them they're happy to take on their wife's boss's friend's daughter as an intern.

Ya it must be horrible.

Back in my father's time. It was hard to be an intern. There was my father in the land of the free interns, when one day he/she was captured. Thrown into a crowded subway and after a horrible 45 minute ride was forced into the brutal air condition atmosphere of a metropolitan office building. Once in a while the overseers would lash them with criticism such as "this coffee is cold" or "can you make a copy of this".

Things got better. Back in my days, there where the intern press gangs. I remember one night me and my friends where at the local pub, when came in some recruiters. I was lucky as I had a job. Yet my poor friend Bob was currently unemployed, he tried for for the door but they caught him. Last I heard from him he was in the bowels of some office sorting files and letters. There by the grace of God go I.

Really! WTF. these people are not forced into it. Make the choice. Interning can have it's pluses or bonuses. Stop whining after the face.

Totally agree with John. When this woman took the position, she agreed to work for no money - and she probably had to compete for the job with other willing applicants. She judged that the experience, connections, and her foot in the door was sufficient compensation. She could quit at any time - it's not liked quitting would have harmed her financially. Stop babying 'young' adults - emphasis on ADULTS - and let them rise and fall on their own decisions. We used to call that "learning," not litigation-worthy. Just another sign of the malaise of our society.

Do you think a ruling in her favor will provide more opportunities for people to get started in that field, or leas?

She is going to win, because Hearst is not following the law. These people are doing clerical work, not deriving any real educational benefit from it, and the company is getting clerical labor for which it would otherwise have to pay. It's not a tough call.

In the interst of full disclosure, we also have interns, pay them far above the minimum wage, and they get to learn the tools and technologies we use here.

What's in it for us? It is a distraction and a waste of time to start someone who will only be around for a few months, but we often get interns to come back for several years until they graduate. They can do some of the time consuming projects that don't require a high level of organizational knowledge. The real reason is recruiting - several of our best young employees started this way. A former intern is less risky than an unknown new hire.

It doesn't hurt that we treat them fairly during the internship program. Who would want them to form a bad opinion of us and go to work for a competitor?

What this company did is illegal. Sounds like a pretty open and shut case to me. If you don't want to get sued, then follow the law.

If you think it's fair because the interns can walk away, read that second link I posted:

http://www.salon.com/2011/05/29/intern_nation_interview/

Not only is it not fair to the intern who labors for free, but read what MarkD says internships are about: getting access to a job later on.

What unpaid internships do is give huge privileges to those people who can afford to donate their time to that company.

This is not people paying their own way through college (as I did), these are usually the sons and daughters of the already relatively well off that can pay for their kids tuition, since they aren't making any money, and then food, rent, and transportation.

And since interning is another beauty contest on a resume sort of thing, it makes it very difficult for any intern to just walk away, because it's access to that entry level position to the Manhattan media company and so the whole thing becomes yet another race to the bottom.

Mark,
What is illegal about it? If interns don't do clerical work what do they do? I have had to hustle in the past as an intern, and the work was not glamorous but I learned how the organization was run. I also proved that when I told an employer I was eager and willing to learn, they could believe me. John is right. You know the deal going in and no one is forcing you to stay. To take away my right to choose an unpaid internship is a way of denying me my right to spend my time and efforts in anyway I wish. What business is it of the government's if I want to work for free?

As for the idea of the minimum wage being a living wage; well that doesn't fly either. Some work is not meant to provide you with a living. It is meant to be a step between an internship. and a real job. You aren't supposed to raise a family and be a burger flipper at Micky D's. Those laws have made it very difficult for teens looking to get basic employment experience to find work. Every time that figure goes up, teen employment drops lower. This is not the way to develop productive citizens.

"These people are doing clerical work, not deriving any real educational benefit from it, and the company is getting clerical labor for which it would otherwise have to pay."-MarkD

Exactly. We were not allowed to intern at Texas Monthly because, as my professor said, "They'll put you in a back room filing or inputting subscriptions, and you won't learn anything."

If she wins,there will be a lot fewer unpaid internships. I don't see the issue. Colleges will have to re-evaluate their policies forcing students to work for credit while the University collects money for the credit hours (which is how it worked at my school.)

Eh. I did unpaid internships, and they were OK. Even the one that was mostly clerical work was a good learning experience. I got to network and learn from more experienced employees and see how the business worked. And I got a job offer at the end. Not all of them are terrible.

Another one started out as mostly clerical work until I got a sudden, temporary promotion to head of production when our production editor quit in a snit over something. They can be good experiences. Neither of these places likely would have hired me had they been forced to pay me.

We aren't allowed unpaid or under paid intern in the medical tech field. Our buddies at big Pharam killed that by filling half their staffing roles with unpaid interns. The sad thing is that both the intern and the company would benefit from this.

I'd teach the kid Labview and Matlab so he can kick ass in college and his/her career. Then they run the tests so I can be an engineer and not push buttons and comment on blogs. 3 hour test which involves pushing a GO button and jamming my digit in my posterior.

What I don't see mention of yet is that unpaid internships prevent those who cannot afford to work for free from being considered for those positions, effectively helping to keep the poor from getting ahead.

Depends on the internship. We just hired an intern who was working on her online MBA (yeah, god save us from those types).

She did a lot of spreadsheets and basic work for us, finished her degree, and got hired for an entry-level job.

Same company - the daughter of the VP got an internship. She spent all of her time receiving advanced technical and sales training, then off to Europe where the company paid her salary plus apartment plus -- more free training.

A year of free ride and she came back to the states and got a $200k+ sales job with us.

Sweet deal and just a bare whiff of poo stink about it.

I don't see anything morally wrong about offering unpaid internships. You're paying the least someone will accept to do that job, which is how the market works. My unpaid internship was the entree to my career. I thought of it as a college course that I didn't have to pay for.

At any rate, this girl knew what she was getting into. No one forced her to work in publishing, which is already a glutted field, and certainly not for that company.

"Totally agree with John. When this woman took the position, she agreed to work for no money..."

From a libertarian position, I agree. However, the minimum wage law is still the law. If my employer had unpaid interns, they'd get hauled in front of the federal regulators faster than you can snap your fingers. Why do politically correct industries (media, entertainment) get to flout the law? Note that the entertainment industry is also notorious about flouting child-labor laws, but they always skate.

I think paying interns is the right thing to do if their role is comparable to that of an entry-level employee. If the role is lots of non-critical projects, hand holding, or teaching-type stuff, or there's a school involved that dictates important parts of the intern's activities, then unpaid makes sense. We don't have any space in our system for dead weight so I don't know much about unpaid interns.

We pay our interns decently, and we expect them to do real stuff – there's a lot that needs done. Good ones are golden. We have one college sophomore right now I'd like to persuade to quit college for a few years and work for us full-time. She's awesome. Kids like her give a cynic like me faith in the younger generation. The rest are OK, but they're worth the the 10-15 an hour they earn.

I don't know if we need a law mandating these things; but I think it's pretty crappy not to pay people who are doing real work.

I've done a lot of hiring for my projects over the last year or so, and I know how competitive things are, and how people with real resumes are applying for work beneath the positions their work history would suggest are a good fit. I don't see why it's right to call a job an "internship," bring on young people, and not pay them, when I'd have the same process and the same work, except paid, if the hire were a bit older or more experienced.

That's the other thing too.

Interns are eager, work hard, and you can get them to do real work for almost nothing.

To pay them nothing is to value your ethics at nothing. It's truly and completely disgusting to pad your bottom line with free labor rationalized as "because I can."

How can she sue if she agreed to the terms of the internship? Ethics of having interns aside, if she agreed to be one she should have no case. No one put a gun to her head and forced her to work free. I donated a lot of my time at a vet clinic doing some icky and boring jobs like cleaning the kennels, so that I could watch her in surgery and learn, back when I was young and wanted to become a vet. Should I sue?

Maybe there could be "fee interns", people who would pay businesses for the opportunity to work at the business and learn some areas of production. They might then take their knowledge and find jobs at other businesses who were too small to operate a fee intern program, or they could continue at the business where they trained. After mastering some areas of production, they might pay to learn other areas, or simply work at a reduced wage until they gained some experience in those other areas.

Sorry, I forgot for a moment that this would be heartless capitalism, charging a fee to inexperienced people who might pay and still not learn an area well enough to be productive. It would violate many laws designed to protect unskilled people from being robbed by profit-making organizations.

Our current system is much better. People called "students" pay fees to organizations which usually don't produce anything from the student's work. They learn things, which may or may not make them employable, from altruistic individuals called "teachers" who communicate the beautiful, ideal parts of things, rather than the grubby details of producing something. The students then graduate to lives of high wages and immediate productivity in their society.

Mr. Garland apparently lives in a country where vocational schools don't exist.

Christopher,

That is quite a non-sequiter. What do you think was the point of my comment, and how does your comment raise a criticism?

Andrew, you mentioned in your comment that the idea of a "fee intern," and described a transaction in which that intern would pay money to a company, and in return would receive on-the-job training, and possible, though not guaranteed, future employment either with that company or another. You then wrote that such a situation would be anathema because it is "heartless capitalism" (and apparently, you live in some fantasy world in which capitalism and new business models are frowned upon in the U.S.).

My comment was a criticism of yours because a very similar model not only exists, but thrives today in vocational training. Students pay to be put to work and develop skills, which they may later be able to use to get a job later.

Christopher,

Amy's post is about our current labor laws. Those laws prevent businesses from creating "fee interns" and offering an alterntive to a formal, institutional education. My point is, why such concern that interns would work unpaid, when they should be allowed to pay for their work experience, if they wish.

I presented the comparison to businesses, and sarcastically list the supposed advantages of schooling.

You say "You (AMG) then wrote that such a situation (fee interns) would be anathema".

Hey, don't take my word for it. I was referring to the information above: "The lawsuit pointed to guidelines from the United States Labor Department, which state that unpaid internships are only lawful in the context of an educational training program, when the interns do not displace regular employees and the employer derives no immediate advantage from the intern's work."

I wasn't referring to a fantasy world. I think that you do not fully appreciate the real world that you live in.

It seems that you don't pick up well on sarcastic comparisons, and you tend to belittle the people you respond to. Try to understand their ideas rather than dismiss them as morons. Really, it doesn't help your argument or reputation.

I don't think you are a moron. I think that you are a dogmatic economic libertarian (I don't know if your beliefs extend to other aspects of libertarianism, as your comments are most often regarding economic topics), which means I think you are wrong about the proper relationship between the state and economic actors. I am a moderate on these issues, and think that the state needs to regulate to minimize externalities that businesses are inclined to disregard.

I also find your writing and vague and allusive; since I couldn't tell what you are thinking, I responded to what you wrote. Sarcasm, if subtle, is difficult to convey in print, especially in a brief format.

I also am quite confident that a business could charge people for a service very much like what you describe in your "fee intern" idea, as such businesses are thriving today; the irony might be that they are prohibited by law from offering it for free.