Harlan Ellison -- Pay the Writer
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

Last week, Conde Fucking Nast ended its intern program when shock, they found they had to pay their interns.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/news/companies/conde-nast-intern/

How many interns does Nast have getting coffee?

When I was in high school, it was okay for McDonalds to pay me less than minimum wage for the first 160 hours of work as they taught me the job. But after the first 160 hours of work, I got at least the minimum wage.

Conde fuck you Nast wants to pay its interns nothing because after all, the interns learn so much there.

Hell, every job I've ever taken has taught me tons. Tons about new software languages, tons about design, implementation and project management. Tons about entirely new domains.

That a job teaches me something doesn't mean you don't have to pay me for the value I give you.

The internship I had in college working as a software engineer paid me $15 per hour.

Free internships are just a boon of free labor to a company, but they also are highly unfair to lower class and middle class students that cannot afford to live for free, and in Conde Nast's case, in either Manhattan or San Francisco two of the higher cost places to possibly live.

At age 16, in 1981, I got my first union job working for a grocery store in Southern California. After a year I was making $12.00+ and hour, overtime, triple time on working holidays, full medical and dental insurance.

32 years later the people who are doing my old job make less than $12.00 an hour with limited or no benefits.

"Conde fuck you Nast wants to pay its interns nothing because after all, the interns learn so much there."

If someone wants that unpaid internship, what business is it of yours? And you do realize it costs them money to train somebody with no experience while they're, y'know, simultaneously trying to take care of actual business, right?

This is not akin to someone asking you to write an article for them for free.

Oh and anyone who has taken a basic Psych 101 will be familiar with the experiment with the two working groups of people, both doing the same job; one getting paid ten dollars and hour the other getting one dollar and hour. Which one works harder? Surprise, the one getting a dollar. Reason being: inherent in our culture there is the belief if you work hard you will be rewarded...hence the American dream and even the Canadian dream (that's a joke). Fact is, we aren't rewarded accordingly, just really taken advantage of, screwed up the butt and then expected to be grateful!
Catherine Meyers

""Conde fuck you Nast wants to pay its interns nothing because after all, the interns learn so much there."

If someone wants that unpaid internship, what business is it of yours? And you do realize it costs them money to train somebody with no experience while they're, y'know, simultaneously trying to take care of actual business, right?

This is not akin to someone asking you to write an article for them for free."

It's everybody's business when the powerful exploit the powerless, but enjoy your iPhone.

It's highly doubtful that any sort of useful or productive intern program brings Conde Nast no benefits. If they are getting benefits, they should be willing to pay for them.

How many interns do they have and what would their total salary be over the summer compared to the CEO's pay?

Yes, we can prove that students with wealthy families will work for free almost indefinitely to get future access to high paying Manhattan jobs. That seems exploitive of the students, exploitive of their parents, and as I said, abusive of lower and middle income students that need to work the summer to pay for classes.

However, I do encourage you to support as you do, the race in wages to the bottom. Perhaps there is a podcast you can listen to all about it on that iPhone.

Hmmm, maybe people expect free services in part because there's so much on Craiglist and elsewhere - namely, solid goods - that IS free, and not for the sake of charity, either? I wonder.

I'd add that another possible problem is overpopulation. "Nothing except diamonds is above the law of scarcity value."

At age 16, in 1981, I got my first union job working for a grocery store in Southern California. After a year I was making $12.00+ and hour, overtime, triple time on working holidays, full medical and dental insurance.

32 years later the people who are doing my old job make less than $12.00 an hour with limited or no benefits.

Grocery stores average about 1% profit margin. That means for every dollar you spend in the store, the grocery company gets to keep 1¢ for improving store layouts, adding new departments (pharmacy, deli, hot meal replacement, etc.) and other improvements intended to keep them competitive.

And now, with Walmart and Target opening grocery sections, Costco allowing anyone to join (not limited to small business owners any more), and other competition (dollar stores, drug stores, farmers markets, etc.), competition in the grocery industry is beyond fierce.

Walmart changed the dynamic considerably. People used to make a monthly trip to the mass merchandiser (Kmart, Ben Franklin, etc.). Walmart got people to see the mass merchandiser as a weekly trip - changing the shopping dynamic for grocery stores - who were up-to-then the only retail channel with a weekly (or more) customer visit cycle.

According to the Small Business Chronicle: "For a very long time, the grocery business has maintained extremely low profit margins. While parts of a larger supermarket differ in their margins, the main aisles remain at about 1 percent, the lowest in the economy. The result of these low margins has been consolidation, since the economies of scale demand that, given low margins, efficiency and centralization can provide some economic reward. Therefore, the industry, for several decades at least, has been in the process of consolidation. New store formats in the industry have squeezed margins even lower as competition becomes fiercer."

Grocery companies cannot afford the lavish pay an benefits they could provide in the eighties (and earlier). Despite productivity improvements due to vendor-based inventory management, self-checkout, etc., grocery stores as we know them are dying.

Walmart and Target can charge less for a grocery item (even selling it at cost) because the grocery item brings in the customer who then purchases clothing, appliances, kitchen implements, furniture, accessories, etc. while in the store because of the cheaper grocery items. Safeway, Kroger, and Piggly-Wiggly cannot sell grocery items at cost because they don't have the other higher-margin items to supplement the market basket.

It's everybody's business when the powerful exploit the powerless, but enjoy your iPhone.

Yes, because every employer is powerful and every intern is powerless, right? Quit acting an ignorant rube.

It's highly doubtful that any sort of useful or productive intern program brings Conde Nast no benefits.

Duh! What would be the point of the intern program if they were getting no benefit from it?

If they are getting benefits, they should be willing to pay for them.

And what about the interns who are getting benefits more valuable than the pay you expect the company to remit? People don't take those jobs on accident, they know exactly what they can get just from being able to make the connections.

The interns don't "learn so much" there. They do scut work someone else would otherwise have to be paid for.

You're absolutely certain of that? Why would people take those jobs then?

It's my opinion that it's scummy to pay someone nothing for their work...

Employment relationships are based on a value exchange, there's no reason that the value must necessarily involve wages.

By the way, where did you get that all unpaid internships are against the law? Jerry's article certainly says no such thing. It says people filed lawsuits arguing they're unlawful and judges have ruled in some instances that a particular unpaid intern program was in violation of the legal code. That's quite a bit different than saying all unpaid internships are against the law.

Desperation and rich parents.

Is there something wrong with being desperate to get into a field you want to work in? And lest we forget that many people who had no "rich parents" like Paul Williams took unpaid internships and parlayed those opportunities into paying jobs and eventually great careers. So there is risk and reward there as with any other job, and perhaps your determination to get the most value out of an unpaid internship is higher.

I didn't say ALL unpaid internships are against the law but probably many or most are.

"Probably against the law" is not "is against the law," if we're being responsible to the truth of the matter.

My goal in life isn't to grind people into the ground whenever possible...

And you think that's all there is to unpaid internships? Sounds like a bit of confirmation bias in play.

Also, a number of my assistants over the years -- almost all of them -- could not have afforded to take a job that didn't pay. After I learned how to hire people, I began to have wonderful, wonderful people work for me.

And that's fine if that's what works for you and your situation. It doesn't for some employers, and it certainly doesn't work for some potential interns. Using the force of law to back your moral economic position is never acceptable.

Frankly, the bigger problem here is people who think they're deserving of those jobs, and whose experience demands monetary compensation. How convenient for them to try to price their competition out of the market by asking Uncle Sam to wag his finger (and going straight for the sledgehammer if that doesn't work).

I don't really have much of an opinion on this issue. If people want to do internships for whatever reason -- maybe they feel it's a good stepping stone to something better -- who I am to tell them they can't or shouldn't. I probably don't know enough about the respective field to recognize the value or the lack thereof.

You'd be astounded at how many people -- sometimes people I've barely met -- ask me to perform free legal work. We're not talking pro bono work for poverty-stricken people who desperately need but can't afford legal help. I've done plenty of that. I'm talking middle-class or richer people who want me to "take a look at this contract and see what I think of it" -- stuff that would take time, thought, work, and research.

I've got news for people -- legal work is Definitely Not Fun.

The irony, of course, is that, free or not, they could still sue me if they decided my work wasn't good enough. Sometimes I tell them that when I turn them down. Sometimes I turn it around and ask them for something equally unreasonable relating to their field -- that usually makes them think a bit. Once in a while, I'll quote them a fee for the work. That usually stops them dead, too.

People probably wouldn't ask a surgeon to do free surgery. But my sister-in-law the general practitioner does get a lot of people asking her to "take a quick look" at their kid's throat, etc., for free.

I think people hesitate to ask for a free Twizzler because it's a material item. It cost a fraction of a cent to produce. Whereas our free professional services simply require our time, energy, knowledge, imagination, and the sunk cost of our education. And alas -- many people see the Twizzler as more valuable than any of that.

Hmmm. Maybe next time someone asks for free legal services, I'll ask them to perform an equal number of hours of free housecleaning services, including toilets, tubs, windows, etc.

I'm not much of one for class warfare rhetoric but the most pernicious thing about unpaid internships is that it opens doors only for the children of the wealthy. My son had one of the rare paid internships in DC a few years ago and I got to meet several unpaid interns working in various Congressional offices and other agencies. These children of the wealthy were making the connections that the children of the working and lower middle classes could never make. This is very bad for our society's future.

'People probably wouldn't ask a surgeon to do free surgery. But my sister-in-law the general practitioner does get a lot of people asking her to "take a quick look" at their kid's throat, etc., for free. '

DH gets this too. 'Could you just take a look at my back?' He can put a stop to it easily by saying that they'll have to drop their pants :-D
'At a cocktail party!?' Exactly.....

I did have a surgeon who performed major surgery on me, ask to look at the incision at a tennis tournament about a week after. I had already paid him of course, but it beat a second office visit, and I was happy to oblige.