Netflix's “Love Is Blind” Wants Unpaid Photographer for Five Weddings (petapixel.com)

If I took a gig like this, I'd be damn sure that:

1) I am included in the rolling credits,

2) I have several cameo shots within the show,

3) I can use thumbnails of my appearances within my own web site and

4) that I am able to use the show's logo and likeness to promote my own business.

My site would lead off with :

"Award winning photographer. You may have seen my work recently on the hit Netflix show, 'Love Is Blind'".

I have never heard of the concept of a "fair market" beyond what any given person considers fair on a case by case basis.

Edit: Any why this is the case, in this situation. Please explain?

(I'm not from the US - I may be missing something.)

If someone thinks they'll get more than $their_cost in promotion value, they'll do it. If not, they won't.

If no one does, the production company is going to waste a lot of time and burn their reputation trying to avoid what's probably a relatively small expense compared to the budget of their show.

It would be even worse if someone wrote an article about it.. oops.

And if someone wants to say "yes", who are we to tell them what to do with their own time?

It's important that we not allow our moral judgments to interfere with the facts. This is obviously false.

So should people not be allowed to write on a personal blog or in an online publication for the public exposure/other knock-on effects relevant to their day job? Because all those people are, at some level, competing with freelancers and other writers.

(I've actually had conversations with professional writers about this. Their general take is that ship has sailed.)

Now, to be clear, organizations trying to get you to do something that you're typically paid to do is absolutely a pox. But there's a difference between a consultant being asked to give a free presentation at an event "for the exposure" and doing so voluntarily because they've made their own decision that it's a worthwhile investment in lead generation or whatever.

To give a personal example, last year I published a new edition of a book. It wasn't for free but it might as well have been in terms of earnings per hour, but I actually wanted to do that. But if you want me to write something for your corporate blog, you're absolutely paying me and paying me pretty well.

The question is how much would you pay for this opportunity? This buys you an instant reputation.

Also it's not comparable to missing 5 days of work. There's more work involved and it'll take longer than 5 days. It's not like they do 5 shoots every week.

If Netflix buys a laptop from Apple and Apple does something wrong, you don't blame Netflix for it, you blame Apple.

SAG has minimum day rates for a reason. I imagine major studios could find plenty of people to do speaking roles "for exposure" to the point where no low level people have any real leverage to make any kind of living from MASSIVE corps. The massive corps would get free labor by exploiting the hopes and dreams of low level actors. The free market gets weird and fragile without unions here.

Photography doesn't have the same union powers, so we rely on public shaming as much as possible.

We use internships as a pipeline to hire. We pay them for their time, they get real world experience. We both get quality time together to see if long term this is a good fit. Those who start full time ramp up much faster and are generally successful in their career.

Moreover, if companies weren't getting value out of internships, they wouldn't continue hiring interns.

The point is to build relationships with a good school and get a pipeline of applicants that will eventually become great engineers.

I recall someone whining he couldn't find good junior engineers. I suggested he go to his local (pretty good) CS school. He then started to whine that they all were already interning at good companies and were transitioning to full time and there was no way for him to break-in!

Yes, most of the time they have negative productivity, but as an intern I had some demanding projects where our work was part of the final (revenue earning) product.

But that's how it goes. Pay people for their time.

For six months I worked as an intern, getting paid less than my rent. If didn't have parents that could've supported me, I would've been unemployed.

I don't work for free. You presumably don't.

Pay your interns and pay them a livable salary.

When I mentor college students, the only times we hear about unpaid internships are:

1) Unfunded wannabe startups or small family businesses who don't understand what they need, but they assume they can convince some naive kid to do it for free. No one with actual skills or prospects takes these jobs. Job boards remove these posts if they're moderated.

2) Students who struggle to get a normal internship, so their dad/uncle/cousin/neighbor lets them do an unpaid "internship" off the books at their company to get something to put on their resume. They don't really do much work, but now they can put a line on their resume and claim some work experience for the next interview.

I've worked at places where the onboarding was generally terrible and I'd still say 80% of the co-op interns we hired were value-positive.

Although, when I do reflect on it, I suppose there was a lot we did right: - always willing to help newcomers - answering their questions - knowing when not to answer questions and let them learn through failure instead - reassuring them through mistakes (and just being positive overall) - checking in on them once in awhile

But none of these things take any sort of preparation. It's all just cultural.

> Amazingly many seemed to have a very high opinion of their productivity.

Well, you could be correct. I've definitely seen the situation where developers have a reputation that I know first-hand through their work isn't merited. It could also be that maybe your standards are just a little too high for what you expect people right out of (or still in) college.

When I was in college, I did a paid internship at a health insurance company, wherein I audited, documented, and updated requirements for a large SQL script that pulled data from hospitals and used it to calculate reimbursement for Medicare/Medicaid claims (RAPS). Basically, you have to map hospital billing codes to federal ones.

The script was written several years prior by my mentor, and the risk adjustment department had no visibility into how the codes were mapped -- and if it was wrong, we could be fined up to ~$10M (depending on severity), or be missing out on ~$1M in revenue. (It turned out my mentor had done a pretty good job and we only needed minor adjustments, although we also updated the architecture so the risk adjustment folks could define the mapping themselves going forward.)

So in short, I can definitively state that

1) it would have cost the company less for my mentor to do the work directly.

2) The several thousands of dollars that the company spent between my salary and my mentor's was definitely worth the millions in mitigated risk/liability.

3) My mentor enjoyed teaching me much more than he would have enjoyed doing the work himself.

And I'd like to think that I ended up doing a slightly more thorough job than my mentor might have done -- his long tenure at the company and accumulated knowledge of these sorts of scripts being job security of some sort ;)

Anyway, the point here is that internships don't have to be a zero sum game. They can cost more than paying your existing employees to do the same work, and still be valuable.

We had good success with incremental training (getting people pursuing CS, who had at least passing knowledge of what programming is), spending a few initial hours on the bare minimum mechanical tasks that one would need to start working on tasks (e.g. how to enter and style static content, how to google, copy-paste from stackoverflow, the works), then gradually supplementing with actual meaty training via lunch-and-learn format, with the intent to bring everyone (including other full time employees) up to speed with the latest and greatest techniques and best practices.

I managed interns for years in my role as a UI development manager. The main reason to hire interns was as part of our hiring pipeline. It basically served as an extended interview. Any actual work they produced was a bonus.

We were also able to keep interns on through the academic year (part-time), which made the time commitment even more worthwhile. The lack of productivity wasn't because they were interns - it was because they were new to the job. This did require flexibility around their school schedule, so instilling good communication habits early was necessary.

I've only had interns at one job, and I had a similar complaint.

My boss told me that's exactly what's supposed to happen. He explained that they're not free labor. I'm supposed to be training the next generation of $my_profession, and if they're not getting in the way, I'm not letting them do enough to learn.

I guess in some ways he was right. Many of the most valuable lessons I've learned at work have come through mistakes I've made. And probably a bunch when I was an intern all those years ago.

Somewhat like nearly every entry level engineer.

You are right that "free labor" is a inept way to think about internships, but it's also true that its one of those things where returns are somewhat dependent on investment. A good internship program can get a lot of useful things done and also be useful to the interns. There is certainly variability, but typical interns can be productive withing the scope of their term. Great ones will outproduce some of your full timers.

Biggest win is if you do it right you can make some great hires.

When I was in Uni, I did a 6 month paid internship. A year and a half later I joined the company and stayed for two years. When I left, there was still code that I wrote during my internship running in production. I'm sure the other staff could have done it faster and better than I did, but it was clearly good enough to keep 3.5 years after my internship ended.

I haven't heard of this at all in Silicon Valley though. In fact interns are pretty well paid, $7500/month at my previous company.

Its a "great" way for employers to screen out less privileged folks and keep the job for someone from a "proper" family. Trust fund babies have no problem doing an unpaid internship.

As a guideline, if the field has money to go around and companies have to compete for interns, they'll pay. If would-be interns have to compete for a few internships and the field famously struggles with budgets of two beans and a bit of string, they won't.

Not sure this is true. Can you point to where in the bylaws this is stated?

Most provinces don't allow unpaid internships, but some provinces have very loose exceptions to this rule. At least, the unpaid internships have limits around work hours.

Do you think the abuse of unpaid interns doesn't happen because it's against the law? And for the educational institutions, they need the companies more than the companies need them, so why would they cause a fuss?

This looks like a massive conflation of “is” and “is supposed to be.” I’m pretty sure tons of unpaid interns are either doing real work for the company or menial tasks that would otherwise be compensated (like getting coffee for people). The latter is a constantly-recurring plot element in depictions of modern workplaces.

You later claim that these cases are illegal. Even if that’s the case, it’s pretty clear that: A) this is ubiquitous, B) interns generally don’t have any recourse other than just not doing the internship, and C) people in this conversation aren’t actually confused about what internships are.

It's fairly well documented that the Founding Fathers were pretty much all opposed to slavery, but saw it as a huge political shit sandwich that would jeopardize Federalization. The United States is one of the only unions on the planet in which every single member state (without exception) voluntarily ratified and agreed to join. Had the Founding Fathers pushed for abolition, the South would never have joined the Union, and slavery may not have been abolished in the 1860s.

In order to ensure Federalization, the Founders simply ignored the question of slavery to get the slave-states to join the Union, and in fact built systems in place to incentivize the abolition of slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a good example of this: the South outnumbered the North (when counting the slaves), and the South wanted slaves to be counted as one whole person in the census so that they would have outsized representation in the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. This was obviously unfair since those slaves were unfree and basically would have given rich slaveholders multiple votes. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a proposal by the abolitionist North to 1) neuter the power of the South at the Federal level, and 2) worded in such a way ("non-free persons") that if a Southern slave state wanted more House seats at the Federal level, all they had to do was abolish slavery.

A really good way to understand how the Founders felt about slavery is to look at how those that literally advocated for starting a new nation based fundamentally on the institution of slavery (the Confederates) felt about the Founding Fathers. The Cornerstone Speech was an address given by the Vice President of the CSA just before the Civil War began, and includes commentary around how they felt about the “old Constitution” and its framers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Cornerstone

The relevant bit:

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists amongst us – the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.””

I will continue to both grumble about how bad tipping is while also tipping constantly since I think it's the only reasonable thing to do.

I mentioned exploitation in my earlier comment. For me, this is part of a much larger issue stemming from the prevailing paradigm we have that attempts to extract as much value out of things. I don’t frame this in terms of abuse of power; how much leverage one brings to the table matters. Instead, it is the underlying paradigm that treats people as resources from which value is squeezed out of it. Whether we are talking about return on shareholder value, or using adversarial interactions and competition to maximize market efficiency, or maximizing profit, those are all expressions of Value Extraction.

To come back full circle with an alternative perspective: you might have a producer and a production company that enjoys fostering new talent and creative voices. Inviting a photographer to join, not necessarily for the exposure, but for challenging work that cultivates their art. What does a wedding really mean? How can photos be taken to express that? And so forth.