A strange fact popped into my mind, after reading this story and remembering some comments on the "Turing deserves an apology" story.
Many people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom. As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window.
Uh, it's not like the "slave" is someone the "master" just kidnapped. It's an agreed upon situation with an established "safe word" the "slave" can utter at any time to stop whatever is happening.
I don't know what else I would expect from a thread that started on such an idiotic statement, but yes, you can say that sadomasochism and unpaid internships are similar in that you can get out of both of them by saying words.
The point is that they are both activities engaged in by two consenting adults.
It's a common belief that one is not the business of the state, but the other one is. My question: what are the exceptions to the "two consenting adults can do as they wish in privacy" rule?
An internship's precisely the same. It's an agreed upon situation with an established "safe word" the "intern" can utter at any time to stop whatever is happening.
I think that's the problem -- people don't want him to help people if it's not a purely charitable effort, for some reason. If he actually derives material benefit from it, that makes him evil.
I don't get that attitude, but for some reason that seems to be how people view it.
I think it really depends on the industry. If someone had offered me an unpaid internship for coding at any point in my life I would have told them no because I am aware that I could easily earn money or I'd probably be better off contributing to an open source project.
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.
Coding is a much different situation in many cases, specifically because of the availability of open source projects -- which serves the same purpose as an internship opportunity sometimes. Alas, there's no such thing as "open source development" in many industries.
Even for programmers, though, open source development doesn't do everything an internship can do. In fact, some people have a really difficult time getting started contributing to an open source project without some experience working closely with other coders to learn something about collaborative workflow and code review (for instance). The exception to that is cases where someone lucks into having a local mentor to help get them over the bar to entry for open source contributions -- knowledge of how to review others' code, figure out how to improve on it, and produce patches for submission to the project.
Who are you to decide the partnership isn't equal? And just how does the internship law protect the little guy? By making sure she can't get valuable experience? Also, just because you don't understand why someone would offer an unpaid internship instead of a minimum wage job doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Should your ignorance be the basis of public policy? I don't mean to come across as rude but come on, I'm a grown adult and don't need or want your "protection".
I'm sorry, but the two have nothing to do with each other. And, honestly, I'm aghast to find such poor reasoning on HN.
Employment shapes society. Employment pays taxes, puts rooves over people's heads, causes stress and worry (what if I lose my job!?), informs societal choices regarding basic social services (tied to company healthcare). Finally, employment is a public act because it is a market -- if Joe works for free, that creates market pressure for Tina to work for free, too.
With the exception of (almost entirely illegal) sex trade...
1. Sex does not house people
2. Sex does not employ people
3. Joe doing it up the butt does not affect your ability to find a partner
4. Tina engaging in fellatio with her husband does not affect your ability to find a partner
5. Couples not having babies does not affect other couples' ability to have babies
The sex acts that are considered illegal do not create people. Thus they have no greater impact than childless heterosexual couples who only have sex in the missionary position. Whether that childlessness is intentional or accidental is even more irrelevent.
Moreover, spouses/sex partners and offspring are not half as fungible as employees. If Joe and Sue (or Bob and Brad) have a child, don't have a child, or adopt a child, that doesn't affect your ability to have a child or not, as you wish.
Meanwhile, employing people for nothing does have an affect on the job market.
Of course if you banned contraception, the birth rate would rise. But that's not what we're talking about, is it?
We're talking about "private acts between consenting adults." Birth control is another kettle of fish entirely.
You're taking the employment/sex "between two consenting adults" line and then adding an extreme element, like, for example, everybody on earth is required to work 40 hours a week.
Even if you didn't ban contraception, I'm sure birth rates would rise -- because people who wanted to get off and couldn't get fellatio might still not use contraception all the time.
> We're talking about "private acts between consenting adults." Birth control is another kettle of fish entirely.
We're not actually talking about sex, remember. We're talking about unpaid internships.
The OP was arguing that people are hypocrits, if they say "two consenting adults can do whatever they want" (behind closed doors) for sex, and then turns around and wants worker protection laws.
Nobody in this comment thread is actually talking about sex. It's all about the metaphorical comparison, which IMO, breaks down pretty quickly.
In the metaphor -- two sex vs unpaid internships -- there is no corollary for birth control. It is a red herring.
I'm aware of the metaphor. What I find ridiculous is that you're part of the attempt to argue that sex between consenting adults behind closed doors has no larger socio-economic effect, and when someone points out a larger socio-economic effect you try to pretend it's not relevant.
Joe doing it up the butt created the AIDS epidemic. Seems publicly relevant to me. Not that I personally care much about Joe doing it up the butt, but once you think government has a role in sculpting society there is no distinction between personal social issues and personal business issues.
Women choosing to have children out of wedlock has a huge effect on everyone. Much more than some guy offering unpaid internships.
While I'm not particularly fond of kingkongrevenge's example, I don't think you're faithfully representing it. He didn't claim it created the disease -- he claimed it created the epidemic.
It does carry a higher risk of transmitting an STD from one person to another, yes. So I'm wrong to say that it has "nothing" to do with it. But in terms of epidemiology, the higher risk of transmission associated with a given form of sex is insignificant compared to having many partners. Spread, not risk of transmission, is by far the dominant factor here, even if they're not entirely separable. Sort of like the difference between scalability and performance.
Sex is a market. Money is only involved covertly (many women seek wealthy husbands), but it is still a market. Some market pressures:
If some women have sex on the 1'st date, it will be hard for women who want to hold out until marriage to compete.
Similarly, if Tina and Joan and Kellie engage in fellatio, Jennie might have trouble keeping a boyfriend if she does not. There is your "race to the bottom".
Furthermore, sex can both cause pregnancy and spread disease, and therefore does affect healthcare.
You are trying to reach too far with this overly facile comparison. Let me show you how:
1. Sexual competition is not nearly as simple as job competition, for several reasons.
2. Many people have multiple sex partners, but a single job is staffed by a single person.
3. Sex isn't required to eat or keep a roof over your head.
4. Sex isn't taxed.
5. Sex doesn't go on your resume.
6. Sex is between two people (or so), not a person and a corporate entity.
7. People don't involve lawyers or accountants before having sex.
8. Trading sex for money is, in almost all parts of the US, illegal.
9. Individual's choices leading to STDs or pregnancy don't compare, on a magnitude level, with governmental regulation changes that affect employment because the majority of Americans who have health insurance are only covered thru their employers
And, as another commenter wrote, if there is a huge imbalance of power between two sexual partners, that is also often illegal.
Ok, let me phrase my question more carefully, to avoid getting into a listing of detailed differences and similarities between sex and employment.
There is a commonly stated principle, "two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom." This principle clearly has an unstated limiting clause: "two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in privacy, except when ___").
I'm asking what to replace the "___" with.
[edit: also curious why I'm being downmodded for asking.]
> Sexual competition is not nearly as simple as job competition, for several reasons.
I think you have an oversimplified view of the employment market.
> Many people have multiple sex partners, but a single job is staffed by a single person.
Employers often have many, many employees -- sometimes more employees at one time than anyone has sex partners in a decade.
> Sex isn't required to eat or keep a roof over your head.
. . . and working at IBM probably won't give you herpes.
> Sex isn't taxed.
Thank goodness.
> Sex doesn't go on your resume.
Not your professional employment resume, anyway -- unless you have sex professionally (as in the case of porn stars or Las Vegas prostitutes).
> Sex is between two people (or so), not a person and a corporate entity.
. . . and one doesn't normally fill out an application to get hired by one's spouse. So what?
> People don't involve lawyers or accountants before having sex.
. . . except sometimes. Have you heard of "white weddings" and "prenuptial agreements"?
> Trading sex for money is, in almost all parts of the US, illegal.
The porn industry is huge in the US. There's definitely some sex going on, there.
> Individual's choices leading to STDs or pregnancy don't compare, on a magnitude level, with governmental regulation changes that affect employment because the majority of Americans who have health insurance are only covered thru their employers
On the other hand, governmental regulation changes meant to address STDs do at least match that "magnitude".
That's completely different. The licensing of medical practitioners is not based on any notion of protecting society from deviant behaviour; it is based on the need to protect vulnerable individuals from fraud.
I have no problem with consenting individuals engaging in sex acts or internships, with or without pay -- but I absolutely believe that fraud, in all its forms, should be illegal, since a fraudulent transaction is not one between truly consenting individuals.
In Illinois, you need a license to charge money to suggest where throw pillows should be placed; interior design is a licensed profession. A system of licensing is the most efficient way of verifying licenses.
Licensing helps, but it can be abused. Unlicensed anything isn't necessarily a bad thing, and, legal and mental affairs notwithstanding, buyers should be able to choose between multiple options.
Why should we prefer licencing to certification, if desired with protected titles so that the difference between e.g. a Software Engineer (certified) and a programmer is abundantly obvious to anyone to anyone who does the research? Likewise lawyer (passed Bar exam) and an employee of a legal services company which does the kind of routine legal services that are well within the capabilities of the average paralegal but whicg they'd be prosecuted for offering withoug the imprimatur of a J.D. now.
Certification is much better than licensing, because one can always choose to ignore certification, or shop around for the best certifications. This, in turn, is important because licensing and certification both sometimes fail utterly to accurately reflect someone's capabilities -- which means that sometimes you're better off avoiding the licensed or certified individual in favor of someone else who doesn't have the same license or certification but knows his or her shit better and more thoroughly. In the case of a licensed industry, though, you're not allowed to make that kind of decision for yourself.
The sexual options for two consenting adults are fairly limited compared to "everything else imaginable that is unrelated to having sex".
I also don't see any connection between the two schools of thought, other than them both being things you've read recently. At least I've never seen a "CIVIL UNIONS ARE A CIVIL RIGHT, AND NO UNPAID INTERNSHIPS" sign.
Under the 13th Amendment, you don't have the right to sell yourself into slavery in the United States. That is, you can't sign a contract under which I pay your family $n and in return you work for me under conditions of slavery. Prohibitions on unpaid labor are an extension of this restriction on your freedom to enter into contract of your own free will.
How is an unpaid internship anywhere close to being slavery? The unpaid intern can walk away at any time. Further, it's the choice of the unpaid intern - not their family as to whether or not to accept the choice.
Would it surprise you to know that Walmart pays its entry level workers significantly higher than minimum wage? It's relevant because it shows companies like Walmart/Boeing/GM are not price setters / don't have as much control as you presume. Further, the "race to the bottom" in wages is often not desirable or in the interests of a firm.
Sure I don't have a problem with the practice you describe, but I'm pretty sure they would being unable to find workers who care enough or are even productive and losing any good workers to others. The employment market doesn't operate in a vacuum.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to? The hit to their reputation if they tried to pull a stunt like that would be far worse than the damage any law could do - they would never be able to hire new people again. You seem to presume that the law is the only thing keeping corporations in line.
That description may apply in theory, but in practice the 'employer' wields considerable power over the relationship by how they describe their assessment of the worker.
Freedom doesn't really come into the equation. Of course you can do work for free, that is your right. If your neighbor asked you to mow his lawn for free, there is no law to stop you from doing that work for him.
Corporations aren't people though and have different rights. They don't enjoy the right to employ people free of charge.
Many people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom
In that case, both parties are natural persons, in complete freedom, entering into an agreement with each-other that is unlikely to have bad consequences for society. There is not need for government regulation.
As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window.
Because in those cases, one of the parties is either not a natural person (but a company) or it's a natural person that performs specific actions that have a much larger chance of having bad consequences.
Companies can only exist by the grace of government regulation. They can be extremely powerful and hence the government must protect its citizens against it's own creations. Government regulation is already the case.
The first purpose of the government is to take care of issues we cannot individually handle. Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is. Government regulation of this is part of its 'reason for being'.
" Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is."
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.
I think his argument is that it would not be a waste of time for the intern who would gain some experience, skills and resume building if they had nothing better to do. However the profits for his business would not be enough to justify minimum wage. I don't think his net worth is relevant to the argument.
Regardless I agree with the gov, which I stated in a previous reply.
> However the profits for his business would not be enough to justify minimum wage.
I think he gave the game away here:
One silver lining of a “great recession” that we are now
in is that there are a lot of incredibly talented people
without jobs, or who have lost their jobs....I thought we
could assemble a talented group who would enjoy the
internships and could also gain valuable experience to add
to their resumes.
ie, expectations dashed.
Nevermind the cost of labor, though: it's obviously worth his time to try to get this effort off the ground. Why? Brand promotion, of course!
Sure, there might not be any directly attributable revenues, but it is very disingenuous of him to claim that he thus cannot afford to pay his interns.
So . . . the fact you don't want him to be able to benefit from an internship is good enough reason to make sure the would-be interns don't get to benefit from it either. Is that it?
Not at all, it could be very beneficial to all parties. More power to him and the free market system.
But his concern for the betterment of the interns is just sanctimonious prattle. He doesn't like to leave money on the table, and he's peeved that the government will prevent him from getting the best price possible.
> He doesn't like to leave money on the table, and he's peeved that the government will prevent him from getting the best price possible.
Actually, from what I read, it seems like he's peeved that the government will prevent him from creating those jobs in the first place -- because without unpaid interns, the whole project will become nothing but a gigantic money pit.
So "the government thinks we should pay people who work for us, but what we're going to do is prey on the jobless and exploit their desire for a job in the future, we'll use that hope for a job to get them to volunteer to work for us - then we can dump them and get some more suckers later, we'll be even more rich and they can starve for all we care".
Volunteering should not be illegal. Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be. Differentiating these positions is pretty hard - a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business.
> Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be.
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 could call it cddddring if you like. The question is whether the labor of the person benefited the company in any way. If it did, then according to the Fair Labor Standards Act the person must receive compensation.
I volunteer for a huge corporation, along with hundreds of other people, to do things that couldn't be done if they had to pay employees. It's a hobby that has aspects of a side-job.
I don't see why it couldn't work for Cuban.
(Interestingly enough, volunteering is illegal in France, where the people that would be volunteers for this otherwise are actually employed and in a union.)
They're the same issues with minimum wage. The "minimum wage brings minimum jobs" because it hurts those with the least experience the most (http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/08/new-video-minim...). The irony is that people who call themselves advocates for the poor pushing for increasingly higher minimum wages actually hurt the poor with these policies.
The issue of min wage came up here before - the studies I found were mainly inconclusive, it's a hard one to test. One that came up, was a test in the food service industry (low waged) either side of a state border, one side with min wage the other without. It showed that the min wage tended to increased employment and improve the financial position for those employed with minimum wage vs. those in a non-min wage position. Indeed a larger increase in the in wage over the surrounding areas led to higher employment still.
I can respect that it's difficult to isolate for the variables and testing the effects of minimum wage (ie you would have to isolate the "value" created from the various businesses like the food service companies), but the laws of supply and demand are pretty straightforward. Price floors (e.g. minimum wage) result in surpluses, price ceilings (e.g. rent control) result in shortages.
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.
Well, this ought to be obvious. A trade union exists to promote the interests of its members and its leaders (not necessarily in that order). As the union itself creates no added value, it can only do this in a zero sum fashion - at the expense of both employers and the unemployed and anyone else who isn't a member.
The true crime is that more companies are not offering minimum wage internships. I for one, would be happy to recruit smart kids from college, and spend ten or twenty hours a week providing them with direction. I know the software company I work for could utilize their talent for brute-force work like dependency tracking in our code base, testing, build automation, documentation, etc.
I think more small and medium sized companies should provide (paid) internships.
Exactly. It's sad that the #1 rated comment right now is some ridiculous non sequitur about sex, when there are some pretty glaring holes in Cuban's logic.
First off, the value proposition: Cuban is clearly intensely interested in getting this done, because it might be valuable to his company someday. Paraphrased, his argument is that it's not guaranteed to be valuable today, so he shouldn't have to pay anyone to do it. He wants the value, but he doesn't want to pay for it. That's exploitation, no matter how much he tries to sugar-coat it.
Second, the notion of "experience" being valuable: if it's true that the work being offered is worthless to Mark Cuban's company, then the intern isn't working for the Dallas Mavericks. She's at best doing something tangentially related to the Mavericks, and hoping that Mark Cuban or his organization will give her a good recommendation someday for doing it. The value proposition to the intern is, at best, debatable, and worse, the intern is in a position where she must excel in an unpaid position to gain any value at all. The best you can say about it is that it's ethically slimy.
Third, internships have inherent value to the employer -- they're extended interviews for paying jobs. That's why so many tech companies pay summer salaries and perks to college kids; they want to recruit good employees, cheaply. Cuban completely disregards this notion.
Fourth, Cuban grants that the internship has some probability of value to the Mavericks. Thus, the internship has some expected value to the organization. Cuban's argument that the internship has no value is just wrong. Companies routinely hire interns with no concrete expectations about their productivity, because the expectation of value is higher than the cost of a few interns. I'm highly skeptical of any counterargument that this wouldn't also be the case for the Dallas Mavericks.
In short, there are any number of logical holes in Cuban's argument, but the HN conversation is featuring a conversation about sex and individual liberty instead of discussing the topic at hand.
It may not be a popular opinion but I agree with the US gov on this one. Everyone wants something for free.
However, I think the big problem is how the compensation is valued. If the experience gained by the intern is more valuable than minimum wage, then yes, the law seems broken. However for every job that would actually provide meaningful experience and benefit the intern there are probably many other internships that provide very little if any benefit to the intern. Since the gov really has no easy way of measuring the experience / networking compensation, if they attempted to, it would be to the detriment of the mojority of iterns, who would end up working for free for very little if any benefit.
I don't have any numbers to back up my claim of non-beneficial v.s. beneficial free internships. However, I also don't have anything to gain either way and it's just my impartial gut feeling that any system that tried to solve his problem would create more problems for the majority of these free interns, or end up costing tax payer's a lot to police the practice.
You haven't explained why you agree with the US government on this one (though it's not just the US government). Value is subjective - so in the end, why would we rely on the government to establish value in the first place?
Are you saying that instead of letting people make their own choices at an individual level as to whether or not the experience is of value, it's better for government to just ban the choice altogether?
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.
> 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.
Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.
> 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.
I, for one, don't have any problem with people finding "loopholes" in bad laws.
> So the tradition of unpaid internships in certain traditionally white-collar industries tends to be a subtle form of class discrimination.
"A subtle form of class discrimination" is a far cry from "class warfare." I'm saying that, ethically speaking, unpaid internships help to further close off certain careers to people who are traditionally disadvantaged by giving opportunities to get ahead to people who are already traditionally more advantaged.
If you disagree with that logic, that's fine: just explain how I'm wrong instead of just dismissing it.
I disagree with the idea that the possibility that one set of people might be more "advantaged" than another is good justification for ensuring nobody gets a leg up.
. . . and claiming otherwise, specifically when those sets of people are identified by social or economic class, is pretty much "code smell" for "class warfare".
So then what you're arguing then is society is better off for there not to have any work being done at all - essentially what Mark Cuban's concluding statement is: for the "benefit" of the exploited intern, we would rather they sit at home rather than gain any experience at the risk that the experience is useless? What does it matter if the firm is for profit or not for profit/charity/government agency in the first place? So charities couldn't possibly exploit the poor/their workers?
By this logic, should we ban or let government set prices on everything? After all, any free giveaways causes pressure on substitutes to go down in value. So by setting a price on a good or service which is below what some other guy has, you're essentially being "exploited".
Class discrimination? Right, so you're arguing that it's not fair that "middle-class or wealthier kids whose parents can support them" have the privilege of unpaid internships so this practice should be stopped?
As for empirical studies, the problem is that it's very difficult to isolate the variables but when it comes to understanding simple price floors and price ceilings, it's a pretty simple, conclusive relationship. Further, the studies are pretty clear in my books with the overwhelming evidence of cause and effect of minimum wages (sure there are those that are inconclusive, but if you're looking for a "scientific consensus" - you won't find the average economist saying that it's inconclusive unless they happen to work for a union):
http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/50years.htm
"Value is subjective - so in the end, why would we rely on the government to establish value in the first place?"
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 find it disturbing that when "both sides of the debate have perfectly reasonable arguments" the knee-jerk response is "Let's regulate the fuck out of it!"
It's not a knee-jerk response. For future reference, a good indication of a knee-jerk response is a remark that reduces an opponent's arguments to seven-word soundbites involving profanity.
How else would you describe a response that doesn't even take into account the possibility that one could avoid government regulation when there's apparently no solid proof that regulation is better than the lack of regulation? It sounds like a knee-jerk response to me.
Why don't you default to "We shouldn't spend a bunch of extra money on regulation when we don't have any reason to believe regulation will help, or even won't hurt!" instead? If you have some meaningful, reasonable explanation for that choice, I guess I might have been mistaken about the idea that it's a knee-jerk response, but you haven't shared any reasons so far, and there aren't any obvious explanations for why wasting resources on regulation that might just make things worse is better than avoiding that regulation.
Being "knee-jerk" means being reactionary and reckless, whereas I am making a single, limited argument: the law prohibits unpaid labor uniformly in all situations. It does not require a regulatory value judgment to make a decision.
You may not like the values the law represents, but you can't attack its implementation as subjective.
Are you now saying that all you did in the first place is affirm that something exists -- something we all know already exists -- in the midst of discussion of whether it should exist? WTF is the point of that?
"worker safety" - Huh? Where is the safety of the worker here being jeopardized?
It's not perfectly reasonable to the person being denied the choice. Clearly for the employer, the task(s) aren't of sufficient value to pay for the work otherwise, if they couldn't get unpaid workers, they would just pay for it.
Instead, banning the practice makes society tangibly worse off as the work on the margins isn't being performed and the next paid job the unpaid intern will get will likely be lower paid on average because they have less experience.
In some situations sure, I can agree with that. But to say it makes society tangibly worse I strongly disagree with because it assumes that all or at least most unpaid interships will benefit the internee. I don't think that's the case.
Then why would an unpaid internee stay at their position if they didn't see any value to themselves? There generally is at least some value even if it's a line item on a resume (that can have significant cumulative value)
Seriously? Have you never worked somewhere because you hoped it would pay off huge in the end, even though you had other and higher paying options?
Just because a job is attractive, doesn't mean it's going to further your career or somehow increase your value. And if you can't pay the bills while you're pursuing it, who ends up paying? Not the company who got your hours for free.
Yes - but the point being presumably you wouldn't stay at that dead end unpaid position forever. As for the huge payoff in the end, that's sort of what entrepreneurship is as well - there's absolutely no certainty of a payoff but one does hope for it. Why would you take an unpaid internship though if there wasn't some expectation of "more"? If there is then yes, there's a value to that "option".
But presumably this isn't the case in some job like telemarketing or other really marginal menial tasks that you might realize within the first couple weeks if not month of doing it?
> Have you never worked somewhere because you hoped it would pay off huge in the end, even though you had other and higher paying options?
That's called a "gamble". The potential for loss is inherent in that type of decision. Does the potential failure mean the potential win should be prohibited?
I thought I did explain my opinion, but yes you've stated it much more succinctly than I have.
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.
Can you provide an example where you would see a young person starting their career would find themselves worse off by accepting an unpaid internship?
I presume you accept that the young person would only do so if
(a) they weren't able to find a paid position, or
(b) the experience they believed they could get would exceed the pay they could get elsewhere - and presumably therefore would result in future benefits?
Actually I don't think everyone starting out has those same priorities. I think many would go for the carrot, as I most likely would have if I'd been unable to find paying work fresh out of school.
If a telemarketing firm had approached me for a free internship with the promise of riches once I put in my time, I may very well have turned down paying positions at McDonald's etc. I'm not trying to say most of us are dumb coming out of school, but I do believe that the fake pot of gold is pretty appealing and that there are many ethically questionable companies who would make all kinds of promises if it would benefit their bottom line.
I think the system where these companies are forced to act at least somewhat ethically by paying a minimum wage is a good system.
I think there is and should be a line though. If you are unable to value your work properly, young or old, then maybe you simply don't deserve to make more than minimum wage. I don't think society should pay for your bad decisions beyond a certain point. However, I like that you can still at least make some sort of living, and I think the company that is benefiting from your poor decision making skills should be footing that bill, and not tax payers. It would be infuriating to pay a wellfare tax while the persons receiving the benefit of that tax are passing it on to companies where they are working for free.
A company could get an extremely discounted rate for certain services if they were able to hire free interns. Then to take it to extremes, if a publicly traded company could gain a competitive edge by doing this, then it's practically illegal for them not to.
Are you assuming that the company would create a paid position if they couldn't have an unpaid internship position?
I look at it on a pricing continuum. On the extremes, would you pay nothing to get work done that you considered to be important for your business? I mean I employ a number of people and I'm pretty sure I don't pay in the lowest quartile or even half of comparable skilled positions. It's almost the same as buying any product or service, price is just one factor. For most people it's about the overall value. I think this also applies to hiring (at least for me). (I didn't realize that unpaid internships were possible - and like you probably, coming from Canada it's a foreign concept that I hadn't heard of until working in the US - but it seems like a reasonable idea to pay as little as possible during a probationary period before hiring someone for good only given the high costs of training involved with entry level positions?)
I think our difference of opinion really boils down to our views of companies at large. Not every company is ethically responsible and many companies don't put enough thought into the hiring process at all. Once some kind of work becomes free, companies will do less and less diligence hiring for these position, simply because the value of the work becomes trivialized. This ends up hurting the workers and the company in the long run.
There are some great articles at http://www.no-spec.com/ that describe a fairly similar problem.
Let's say I'm starting a business and require a large amount of data entry. I categorize this work as grunt work for the most part. I get free interns to do it since I don't have the capital to pay anyone for it. Let's even say the availability of free work prompted me to start the company in the first place. I sit all these interns in cubicles and have them populate my application. What I'm not doing though is keeping a really good eye on the content their grabbing, copyright infringements etc. because to me, this work is free, if one of them messes up I'll just replace them. I don't have the time to babysit this free work because I'm busy running other parts of my business.
Now, if I was paying for the work I would value it more, and keep a closer eye on it. Why? Well beause I'm paying for it and if I'm paying for it, I want to make sure I'm not getting ripped off. We only value something when it costs us something. Just like we only value the poker pot once we've invested in it. I wouldn't value a free intern nearly as much as a paid intern. This will be reflected in the way I treat the free workers (lack of respect when they are easily replaced, because if I actually respected them, well then I'd pay them), it will reduce the interns sense of pride in their work, and it will definitely degrade the quality of work.
Now there are definitely exceptions, and maybe this article is one of them. However, by and large I think free workers is a really bad idea, and therefor I agreed with laws that prevent this practice.
Hmmm - that's interesting. I think one of the best pieces of advice that I've read about being a manager is to treat each your employees as if they're volunteers. I realize that this is going a bit off the reservation now as far as our discussion goes, but it's something that I've been trying to strive for (often unsuccessfully) - but I think it's useful for building the type of culture that maximizes productivity (and, as an afterthought, is enjoyable to work in).
re: No Spec - yes, it's a position I sympathize with but at the same time, I don't believe any of these markets operate in a vacuum. Given the tensions in the spec market (or any service that seeks to be sold based on price/free), over time it seems almost inevitable that it attracts the bottom end of the market. It's the same reason why I try to make sure I don't underpay employees or service providers as the cost can be far greater in the long run if you do.
re: large amounts of data entry. Having had to do it at one time for a professor, though I was paid, being paid did make me feel as if I had an obligation to do it as right as possible without allowing bad data to fall through the cracks. I'd like to think I was better than that but frankly if I wasn't paid I suspect I would not nearly have been as careful. But that's the thing - sometimes you get what you pay for - and especially for the more menial tasks if you don't value the output that's fine but there was still a cost for the professor to manage the project and there was indeed value to the underlying data that he needed to be accurate. Indeed - often the cost of the overhead is a significant cost of the underlying wages - even more so I suspect for entry level positions.
Such is the case for managing volunteers or unpaid interns for which I don't really see too much of a differentiation. The way I see it is that unpaid work is essentially producing a sample of your work for sale. Sure you don't want to keep on doing it, but at least in a market these things tend to work themselves out. As for spec work (or any industry that provides free samples) - are also of the view that this should be made illegal?
Well a lot of the spec work actually is illegal in terms of copyright infringement. As it grows, so does the infringement. This will create a loads of litigation. Eventually the market will most likely take care of it through some better form of copy protection or through laws. This is going to take a while and probably cost a lot of money and I can handle that as long as it isn't taxpayer money I guess.
As long as it's the businesses that foot the bill then I really can't complain right? However when it comes to free interns the consequences are either paid for by the people, or it's limited to those that can afford to go without a pay check. If I'm paying for someone's rent and food stamps while they get an education / experience / whatever as an intern, then I'd feel better if I knew it was a respectable education / experience etc.
I simply do not believe free internships will give me this piece of mind. On a case by case basis, sure there are probably plenty of great free opportunities, but this is shark infested waters imo. I think the majority will see very little benefit if the floodgates were opened.
It also sounds like the way you run your ship is very ethical and mature. While I'm sure plenty of other business would be just as fair, I highly doubt they would be the majority. In fact I think you would be part of a very small minority. The words Free Interns would attract a lot of attention. Maybe there should be a qualifying process that a company could go through to have this right? Similar to government grants maybe.
What annoys me most about many of the opinions expressed in this discussion is that people think it's okay to punish the honest employers, and the people those honest employers would like to employ, for the actions of the dishonest employers.
Then I will definitely add that not every company is ethically irresponsible. I don't think opening up free internships is the right way to go though. I could be convinced that some sort of qualifying process to keep most of the bad out and let most of the good in could be worthwhile if it was not overly expensive to implement.
Let's say I'm someone looking for an internship in the fashion industry. I go intern at fashion company Y. My entire internship is to watch the E! channel and update twitter every time someone has a horrible (in my opinion)outfit. This work has no immediate supervision. I sit in a cubicle, isolated from everyone else. I have a weekly meeting with an employee who takes the number of twitter updates I've made and goes "You should be making more".
At the end of the internship, the intern has gained nothing. They have provided a service to company Y, but received no training, enlightenment or greater understanding of the industry. In fact, based on what they experienced, it is likely the intern would decide to NOT go into the fashion industry because their entire perception of what the job is is now contradictory to what they thought it was before (but the new view is in fact incorrect). The internship had a negative impact on the intern who may have actually enjoyed the industry. Without having paid the intern (class credit, money, real industry experience), all they did was provide a service for the company for free.
(As a side note, I tried to model this close to the blog post, not provide some artificial "it wouldn't happen" type scenario)
Not having much knowledge of the fashion industry, I can't say if this seems probable or not. But presuming you've done this for a week or two already why would you as an intern continue to stay at what seems to be a horrible position? Further, surely you would also recognize that this isn't indicative of the fashion industry?
I actually have no idea if this is even feasible in the fashion industry, I was just using a similar (fictitious) internship as what was described in the blog as an example. And the key is that an internship should be indicative of the business. Either way, the intern would have lost that week or two (even if they recognize it was a bunk internship), and the position would be open again if the business wanted to continue it. Without the protection from unpaid internships, businesses are free to exploit low-skilled labor in order to perform low to no (monetary) cost for experimentation.
There is a cost to managing any project. Presumably even if for PR, one wants the PR to result in a good impression of your company? So yes, lose a week or two, does that seem so bad at the individual level? It would probably end up costing the company even more in time to filter the work. It's also not frictionless to find new staff - whether paid or unpaid.
I'm not sure I see how your example is similar to Mark Cuban's example. For instance, conducting surveys (one of the tasks Cuban was talking about having interns accomplish) is part of a wide range of professional fields -- including experimental psychology (according to my girlfriend with the psychology degree), political analysis (according to major news networks), and usability testing.
> Either way, the intern would have lost that week or two (even if they recognize it was a bunk internship)
. . . and what else would they have done during that time?
Sometimes, one must try two or three things to find one that's worthwhile. Should I then be able to bring suit against a software developer whose software wasted a week of my time before I decided it wasn't doing me any good, before I moved on to something better?
Since the gov really has no easy way of measuring the experience / networking compensation, if they attempted to, it would be to the detriment of the mojority of iterns, who would end up working for free for very little if any benefit.
The government can't figure it out. Can the interns? If there's a huge population that's willing to work for free, and they're all undervalued, then a company that hires interns for minimum wage will be able to get all the good ones.
Second that. We had unpaid interns at my last job, and their work consisted of telemarketing, harvesting email addresses, web form spamming, data entry. It wouldn't be cost effective if their earned even $5/hr. What did they get out of it... cynicism?
What happened to paying your way through college with paying jobs? Kids need to put their bottom line first, just like employers do.
And they probably paid for those college credits. A typical state school might put that at $900 bucks. Great deal huh?
The unpaid internship thing is often a scam to get people to do just the kind of work you're describing. In companies I've worked for, I've seen it done.
I saw interns manually 'cleaning' data in a way that could be entirely automated. I told my employer at the time that they'd never be able to keep up with new incoming data and it's terrible, pointless work. I also said I could automate it in about 20 hours of work. He said, "we'll put an ad in for more interns."
Young people are naive, it's part of being young. It's unscrupulous to take advantage of that. Cuban could have paid internships paying at minimum wage if he'd like. It would still be far less expensive than getting actual professionals to do that work. His real complaint should be that he can't extract any real value for that work from the marketplace, because that's where his real problem is.
"Kids need to put their bottom line first, just like employers do." - Absolutely - and you don't think they do? Are they better off to have been denied the choice? Why didn't those unpaid interns quit? Could it possibly be that they made the conscious choice that their time spent doing these tasks was better than not at all (or working in fast food or whatever other job for that matter)?
He'd lose a little money, but couldn't he pay them minimum wage and then charge them $7/hour for the training he's giving them(just like the martial arts schools)?
Also, if his company is him and a bunch of interns, who's going to sue him?
His company is very large. He owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and HDnet, along with a bunch of other smaller things. Plenty of money for lawyers to go after.
. . . and, as he pointed out, in some jurisdictions at least it doesn't have to be someone within the company suing. A competitor could sue, or some ridiculous do-gooder who can't stand to see people "exploited" (like some of the people in this discussion, evidently).
As if the job market weren't already too much of a "buyer's market." So many Americans are held hostage by their jobs because of the lack of good unemployment/severance and the deathgrip of health insurance. I don't see any reason to encourage the situation even more by having some jobs - that are actually jobs - be for no pay.
Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience.
> Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience.
. . . but useless for getting your foot in the job field's door, because you have to already be there to "take advantage" of that "opportunity". Your "solution" completely ignores the catch 22 of needing a job to get experience and needing experience to get a job.
After years of freelancing, without prior "work experience" and without even a high school diploma, my first job paid me $64,000.
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.'
> People frame these unpaid internships as some great act of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, and they're not.
I'm not calling them "heroic". I'm just annoyed that other people are casting them as "evil". They can be mutually beneficial, and I don't see a problem with that. The "evil" is people trying to prohibit mutually beneficial transactions.
By the way, I love the entrepreneurial spirit. I just don't love the "you must be an entrepreneur, one of the lucky people who sneak past the catch 22, or 'paid' by way of taxes" plan. I prefer maximizing opportunity, rather than limiting it, even for people who don't have that entrepreneurial spirit.
Then look at it this way. Barter is taxed, and working for free for "experience" is clearly a form of barter.
Unpaid internships still must be taxed. They will probably be taxed at a higher prevailing wage than minimum wage.
So, you have tax payment going on, while no employment paying is going on.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, rich or reasonably well-off kids can take free internships, which creates more free internships, which creates competition for free internships. And those smart, deserving, motivated kids who can't afford to work utterly for free cannot compete for free internships and instead have to work at McDonald's or some other, less useful job.
If the internships are paid, everyone is better off... except, perhaps, the employer who hoped to get free labor. (But who still has to pay taxes, natch.)
> If the internships are paid, everyone is better off
You're assuming that the cost of providing internships is essentially zero. When the likelihood of internships being offered at all (based on cost) is factored into things, your argument falls apart.
This might be the time to mention the true story of Christopher Gardner, as shown in "The Pursuit of Happyness" who worked for six months without pay to find his dream.
One story does not an argument make, but it's just an observation.
He also had to live on the street with his child for those six months, and at the end of the day was still lucky to get the job.
Maybe he wouldn't have been given the opportunity at all if it were paid (though I find that line of reasoning doubtful), but it's pretty hard to argue that he wouldn't have been better off with a paid internship.
> it's pretty hard to argue that he wouldn't have been better off with a paid internship.
. . . if the internship existed at all.
Your argument seems to take the form "The downside you suggest is doubtful to me, but it's pretty hard to argue he wouldn't have been better off if he did everything exactly the same and magically got money."
Well, duh -- if people give you money, you're likely to be better off, if all else is equal. This whole discussion started with an "all else is not equal" set of circumstances, though, where Cuban stated outright that the project cannot afford to exist if the "internships" are paid with hard cash. Period.
Thus, the "doubtful" circumstance is a reality in this case -- and, given that state of affairs, talking about whether they'd be better off if Cuban would just pay them for these jobs that don't exist is nothing but wanking.
Let's discuss this in the on-topic world for a moment: Do you think these potential unpaid internships that have been prohibited by government could have benefited some people who are now worse off because those opportunities don't exist, or not? If you think they could have, perhaps you can explain why you want to deny them those opportunities. If you think they could not have, perhaps you could explain why not. That's what's relevant here -- not whether or not everybody magically having more money would be nice.
Where our politicians would rather see you pay out of your pocket to go back to school rather than get valuable on the job experience.
huh.?. from what I have seen, politics almost runs on interns. Every politician and political organisation has unpaid interns doing real work. The whitehouse has hundreds..
re: "It is a fine line between experience and exploitation" - shouldn't the person getting the experience/being exploited be the arbiter of that rather than some random bureaucrat?
In a perfect world yes.. but in the real world that is the reason there are labor unions.
If you complete a 6 month internship we will give you a job. And keep stringing the person along.. etc..
I think a good compromise would limit an internship to 3 months, afterwards you have to pay. And the employee has to be in a college or degree program or 2 years out of one. And somehow limit it so Burger King can't make you work 3 months for free.
In the real world, labor unions have largely outlived their usefulness which is why firms in industries where they dominate find themselves either dying or bankrupt and why there has been a steady decline in membership.
I'll bite though, how is it (in an imperfect or perfect world) that these unpaid interns are unable to be the arbiters of whether or not an unpaid internship "has value" to them?
Congress and the White House have always been exempt from most workplace and labour regulations - for example, you can't file an OSHA complaint if you work in a Senator's office.
Actually, he's complaining that he can't employ people for a project that probably won't happen at all unless he can employ interns. You're saying "screw him" because he wants to create something that is of greater advantage to people entering the workforce than not having it in existence at all.
I could speculate about that all day. Maybe it has the potential to become beneficial. Maybe it has secondary effects that would be beneficial to his sports franchise, but he can't justify the expense to shareholders. Maybe he would like to provide something for the fans because he's a fan himself. What's it to you why he wants to do it?
If it has value in these forms then why isn't he willing to pay for this value? Basically he wants unpaid interns to subsidize his investment. Not only do the interns themselves pay, but society as a whole pays as unpaid internships devalue labor.
Why does everyone seem so insistent on ignoring the claim that it's too expensive to pay regular employees for this work, and as a result, without interns, the project won't happen at all?
If it even has the potential to turn a profit, then he should foot the cost of the risk, not the interns.
To put it in terms of the startup culture of hacker news:
This is like asking entrepreneurs to work on your startup for free because there is a huge chance that the startup will be unprofitable.
However in the chance that it does become profitable, then you will not be paid in any way, and the only thing you will get out of it is a resume booster and a "chance" to work as a regular salaried employee.
> If it even has the potential to turn a profit, then he should foot the cost of the risk, not the interns.
Do you think he's not paying a bunch of money to make a project like this happen -- even if he doesn't have to pay all of his workers initially? If the difference between "intern" and "minimum wage" is the difference between the project happening and the project not happening, I still don't see how it's so terrible to let him try when the would-be interns think it's worth their time.
Yes. That's what he's complaining about. His business has a project that only works if he can start it with people he doesn't pay. You just said nothing at all: we knew he wanted to do something with the interns, apotheon.
Jesus, people. It's not like he refuses to pay anyone for anything at any time. The core of his complaint is that a project won't happen and people won't get work experience (how much you think he weights each of these relative to the other is your own affair), and not that paying people for projects that can happen that way is a problem somehow. It may seem like a fine distinction, but it's pretty much central to the whole discussion.
If you think I said nothing at all, you aren't listening (or maybe you just refuse to think beyond your intense desire to believe Cuban is eeevil).
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.
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.).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps this is why most unpaid internship programs require you to line stuff up with your school. This was they can classify it as an educational activity?
Everyone deserves fair compensation for their work. I've never understood how anyone could work for a profitable business for free. An intern, especially in the technical field, is probably more up to date than a salaried employee.
> An intern, especially in the technical field, is probably more up to date than a salaried employee.
That's a dubious claim, but let's roll with it, just for argument's sake. If it's true, that doesn't change the fact that someone likely to get an internship doesn't have any job experience, and may thus have a very, very difficult time getting hired. This is why people accept internships; so they can get experience that allows them to get a job.
I think the argument that interns are somehow compensated by "gaining invaluable experience" is somewhat of a strawman. Experience doesn't go away if an intern gets it. Money does and work gets done. I have seen too many people being lured into one "valuable" internship after the other. SOmeone wanted to get some work done and offered "valuable industry insights" as compensation. That is just laughable. If you need someone to do work, pay for it. Simple as that.
Strawman in a sense were the party offering the unpaid internship distorts the value of the compensation through gaining experience. So the argument of the first party not being paid can be refuted by saying that compensation occurs through gaining experience.
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.
> Strawman in a sense were the party offering the unpaid internship distorts the value of the compensation through gaining experience. So the argument of the first party not being paid can be refuted by saying that compensation occurs through gaining experience.
That wouldn't make it a strawman fallacy -- it would just make it refutable.
> in my opinion
I don't think that the fact some people have that opinion is justification for the law.
> A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses.
I haven't heard of many full-time internships. People who take internships generally don't have the time for full-time without pay, and the organizations that offer those internships tend to know that.
I can't think of an article I've read recently that I disagree with more. This is a good law that protects potential employees from being used by cheapskates like the author of this article who want to get slave labor from their employees. Free internships hurt those looking for jobs because they have to compete with free when they need money to pay the bills.
I think I agree with Cuban on this one, with the caveat that anyone who works for free for a billionaire is a bit soft in the head. I can see not paying market wages, but not even minimum wage?
A serious question: What's the difference between an "unpaid internship" and a CEO of a successful company (e.g. Steve Jobs) who gets paid $1/year? Is there not a way to get around this law by simply putting the intern on a $1/summer salary?
The difference is that a CEO like Steve Jobs gets millions or billions worth of stock options which is equivalent to a salary except instead of getting taxed at the +35% bracket, it get's taxed at 15% capital gains tax (lowered from 20% by Bush).
There is a really simple way around this, used only by everybody online this century: set up a fan organization and allow your so-called "interns" to do volunteer work. Make it a collaborative community, and give some fricking minimal thought to quality control by means of a voting system, and your problem is solved.
It's 2009. Why is the owner of the Mavericks not aware of this sort of thing? Answer: he wants full ownership control of the resulting content. But he doesn't want to pay for it - that would make him less of a billionaire. So actual volunteer work is out. He wants the benefits of ownership without the disadvantage of paying people.
The government is right, here. Unpaid work for somebody who fully owns the results and benefits from it directly is a scam. It's spec work for God's sake, and I certainly see plenty of people coming out of the woodwork decrying that every time it comes up. Yet here, everybody's piling on the government for trying to prevent a billionaire from taking advantage of a bunch of out-of-work creative staff.
(If people want "valuable experience", there's no shortage of volunteer work that won't involve a billionaire laughing all the way to the bank.)
Don't Want to Pay to Have Someone do a Shitload of Work for You? Screw You!
Not paying someone to do business related work devalues that 'sort of work', across the board.
If I can get interns to some amount of work for free, then I am not employing and (more importantly) paying someone to do that same work.
This may be good for the company, but it is bad for people who are unemployed and the other employees of the company.
This is because the practice drags down the average price that any company can expect to pay for one unit of that 'sort of work'.
This may be great for shareholders, the CEO's bank balance, but it is not good for anyone else.
(Economically it is better to have an intern making minimum wage, and spending it than to have the money aggregating in some billionaire's bank somewhere).
To act like the intern has any choice in the matter is wrong; as the majority of companies now precondition employment for even the 'starting' positions with some amount of experience. It used to be that employers would hire kids right out of college and actually take the time to mentor them in the business world. Then it was internships during college, and now it is unpaid internships, and soon I'm sure we will be paying for the opportunity to work!
It strikes me as incredibly arrogant that someone would think that the mere experience of working for him is equivalent to any sort of compensation. (What am I really gaining out of making photocopies for you, Mr. Cuban?) When profitable work gets done, someone should get paid, end of story. To me that seems to be morally and ethically correct, even if it drives my bottom line down by a few dollars an hour.
I did an unpaid internship about 4 years ago.. it got my career started, and for that i'm thankful. But it makes me wonder, could I ask for back pay? I know the work i did provided value to the company.
190 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadMany people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom. As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window.
Very confusing.
The unpaid internship law serves to give some protections to the little guy.
Btw, I really don't understand why a billionaire (?) can't afford to pay hourly minimum wages to a bunch of kids.
Is it really? Is SM play "an equal partnership" between master and slave?
It's a common belief that one is not the business of the state, but the other one is. My question: what are the exceptions to the "two consenting adults can do as they wish in privacy" rule?
(active) voluntary euthanasia is one, though I think it's legal in a pair of US states (Oregon since '94 and Washington since 2008).
I think that's the problem -- people don't want him to help people if it's not a purely charitable effort, for some reason. If he actually derives material benefit from it, that makes him evil.
I don't get that attitude, but for some reason that seems to be how people view it.
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.
Even for programmers, though, open source development doesn't do everything an internship can do. In fact, some people have a really difficult time getting started contributing to an open source project without some experience working closely with other coders to learn something about collaborative workflow and code review (for instance). The exception to that is cases where someone lucks into having a local mentor to help get them over the bar to entry for open source contributions -- knowledge of how to review others' code, figure out how to improve on it, and produce patches for submission to the project.
Maybe you could explain what you mean by "equal"?
Employment shapes society. Employment pays taxes, puts rooves over people's heads, causes stress and worry (what if I lose my job!?), informs societal choices regarding basic social services (tied to company healthcare). Finally, employment is a public act because it is a market -- if Joe works for free, that creates market pressure for Tina to work for free, too.
With the exception of (almost entirely illegal) sex trade...
1. Sex does not house people
2. Sex does not employ people
3. Joe doing it up the butt does not affect your ability to find a partner
4. Tina engaging in fellatio with her husband does not affect your ability to find a partner
5. Couples not having babies does not affect other couples' ability to have babies
6. None of this affects healthcare or taxes
It's simple: it's not a market.
That's why employment is a public act.
Moreover, spouses/sex partners and offspring are not half as fungible as employees. If Joe and Sue (or Bob and Brad) have a child, don't have a child, or adopt a child, that doesn't affect your ability to have a child or not, as you wish.
Meanwhile, employing people for nothing does have an affect on the job market.
We're talking about "private acts between consenting adults." Birth control is another kettle of fish entirely.
You're taking the employment/sex "between two consenting adults" line and then adding an extreme element, like, for example, everybody on earth is required to work 40 hours a week.
> We're talking about "private acts between consenting adults." Birth control is another kettle of fish entirely.
WTF?
The OP was arguing that people are hypocrits, if they say "two consenting adults can do whatever they want" (behind closed doors) for sex, and then turns around and wants worker protection laws.
Nobody in this comment thread is actually talking about sex. It's all about the metaphorical comparison, which IMO, breaks down pretty quickly.
In the metaphor -- two sex vs unpaid internships -- there is no corollary for birth control. It is a red herring.
Get it?
Women choosing to have children out of wedlock has a huge effect on everyone. Much more than some guy offering unpaid internships.
Because a disease preys on a population does not mean that population created the disease, whether or not it becomes an epidemic.
I'm pretty sure that AIDS didn't spring fully formed out of the abyss, thanks to anal sex.
And then, if you want to get picky, the deliberate ignoring of the health issues by public authorities escalated the epidemic.
I see what you're saying, but I don't agree that I misrepresented it at all.
The manner in which people have sex, unless we're talking dry humping and such, has nothing to do with creating epidemics.
If some women have sex on the 1'st date, it will be hard for women who want to hold out until marriage to compete.
Similarly, if Tina and Joan and Kellie engage in fellatio, Jennie might have trouble keeping a boyfriend if she does not. There is your "race to the bottom".
Furthermore, sex can both cause pregnancy and spread disease, and therefore does affect healthcare.
1. Sexual competition is not nearly as simple as job competition, for several reasons.
2. Many people have multiple sex partners, but a single job is staffed by a single person.
3. Sex isn't required to eat or keep a roof over your head.
4. Sex isn't taxed.
5. Sex doesn't go on your resume.
6. Sex is between two people (or so), not a person and a corporate entity.
7. People don't involve lawyers or accountants before having sex.
8. Trading sex for money is, in almost all parts of the US, illegal.
9. Individual's choices leading to STDs or pregnancy don't compare, on a magnitude level, with governmental regulation changes that affect employment because the majority of Americans who have health insurance are only covered thru their employers
And, as another commenter wrote, if there is a huge imbalance of power between two sexual partners, that is also often illegal.
There is a commonly stated principle, "two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom." This principle clearly has an unstated limiting clause: "two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in privacy, except when ___").
I'm asking what to replace the "___" with.
[edit: also curious why I'm being downmodded for asking.]
I think you have an oversimplified view of the employment market.
> Many people have multiple sex partners, but a single job is staffed by a single person.
Employers often have many, many employees -- sometimes more employees at one time than anyone has sex partners in a decade.
> Sex isn't required to eat or keep a roof over your head.
. . . and working at IBM probably won't give you herpes.
> Sex isn't taxed.
Thank goodness.
> Sex doesn't go on your resume.
Not your professional employment resume, anyway -- unless you have sex professionally (as in the case of porn stars or Las Vegas prostitutes).
> Sex is between two people (or so), not a person and a corporate entity.
. . . and one doesn't normally fill out an application to get hired by one's spouse. So what?
> People don't involve lawyers or accountants before having sex.
. . . except sometimes. Have you heard of "white weddings" and "prenuptial agreements"?
> Trading sex for money is, in almost all parts of the US, illegal.
The porn industry is huge in the US. There's definitely some sex going on, there.
> Individual's choices leading to STDs or pregnancy don't compare, on a magnitude level, with governmental regulation changes that affect employment because the majority of Americans who have health insurance are only covered thru their employers
On the other hand, governmental regulation changes meant to address STDs do at least match that "magnitude".
That's completely different. The licensing of medical practitioners is not based on any notion of protecting society from deviant behaviour; it is based on the need to protect vulnerable individuals from fraud.
I have no problem with consenting individuals engaging in sex acts or internships, with or without pay -- but I absolutely believe that fraud, in all its forms, should be illegal, since a fraudulent transaction is not one between truly consenting individuals.
Licensing helps, but it can be abused. Unlicensed anything isn't necessarily a bad thing, and, legal and mental affairs notwithstanding, buyers should be able to choose between multiple options.
What difference is there objectively between 'a certified software engineer' and 'a programmer' ?
I also don't see any connection between the two schools of thought, other than them both being things you've read recently. At least I've never seen a "CIVIL UNIONS ARE A CIVIL RIGHT, AND NO UNPAID INTERNSHIPS" sign.
If they fire these people on day 364 and get new trainees next year - that would be ok?
Sure I don't have a problem with the practice you describe, but I'm pretty sure they would being unable to find workers who care enough or are even productive and losing any good workers to others. The employment market doesn't operate in a vacuum.
Corporations aren't people though and have different rights. They don't enjoy the right to employ people free of charge.
In that case, both parties are natural persons, in complete freedom, entering into an agreement with each-other that is unlikely to have bad consequences for society. There is not need for government regulation.
As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window.
Because in those cases, one of the parties is either not a natural person (but a company) or it's a natural person that performs specific actions that have a much larger chance of having bad consequences.
Companies can only exist by the grace of government regulation. They can be extremely powerful and hence the government must protect its citizens against it's own creations. Government regulation is already the case.
The first purpose of the government is to take care of issues we cannot individually handle. Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is. Government regulation of this is part of its 'reason for being'.
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.
Regardless I agree with the gov, which I stated in a previous reply.
I think he gave the game away here:
ie, expectations dashed.Nevermind the cost of labor, though: it's obviously worth his time to try to get this effort off the ground. Why? Brand promotion, of course!
Sure, there might not be any directly attributable revenues, but it is very disingenuous of him to claim that he thus cannot afford to pay his interns.
cake: have | eat, pick one.
But his concern for the betterment of the interns is just sanctimonious prattle. He doesn't like to leave money on the table, and he's peeved that the government will prevent him from getting the best price possible.
Actually, from what I read, it seems like he's peeved that the government will prevent him from creating those jobs in the first place -- because without unpaid interns, the whole project will become nothing but a gigantic money pit.
Volunteering should not be illegal. Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be. Differentiating these positions is pretty hard - a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business.
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.
http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.p...
I don't see why it couldn't work for Cuban.
(Interestingly enough, volunteering is illegal in France, where the people that would be volunteers for this otherwise are actually employed and in a union.)
I'll see if I can dig out that study later.
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 think more small and medium sized companies should provide (paid) internships.
First off, the value proposition: Cuban is clearly intensely interested in getting this done, because it might be valuable to his company someday. Paraphrased, his argument is that it's not guaranteed to be valuable today, so he shouldn't have to pay anyone to do it. He wants the value, but he doesn't want to pay for it. That's exploitation, no matter how much he tries to sugar-coat it.
Second, the notion of "experience" being valuable: if it's true that the work being offered is worthless to Mark Cuban's company, then the intern isn't working for the Dallas Mavericks. She's at best doing something tangentially related to the Mavericks, and hoping that Mark Cuban or his organization will give her a good recommendation someday for doing it. The value proposition to the intern is, at best, debatable, and worse, the intern is in a position where she must excel in an unpaid position to gain any value at all. The best you can say about it is that it's ethically slimy.
Third, internships have inherent value to the employer -- they're extended interviews for paying jobs. That's why so many tech companies pay summer salaries and perks to college kids; they want to recruit good employees, cheaply. Cuban completely disregards this notion.
Fourth, Cuban grants that the internship has some probability of value to the Mavericks. Thus, the internship has some expected value to the organization. Cuban's argument that the internship has no value is just wrong. Companies routinely hire interns with no concrete expectations about their productivity, because the expectation of value is higher than the cost of a few interns. I'm highly skeptical of any counterargument that this wouldn't also be the case for the Dallas Mavericks.
In short, there are any number of logical holes in Cuban's argument, but the HN conversation is featuring a conversation about sex and individual liberty instead of discussing the topic at hand.
However, I think the big problem is how the compensation is valued. If the experience gained by the intern is more valuable than minimum wage, then yes, the law seems broken. However for every job that would actually provide meaningful experience and benefit the intern there are probably many other internships that provide very little if any benefit to the intern. Since the gov really has no easy way of measuring the experience / networking compensation, if they attempted to, it would be to the detriment of the mojority of iterns, who would end up working for free for very little if any benefit.
I don't have any numbers to back up my claim of non-beneficial v.s. beneficial free internships. However, I also don't have anything to gain either way and it's just my impartial gut feeling that any system that tried to solve his problem would create more problems for the majority of these free interns, or end up costing tax payer's a lot to police the practice.
Are you saying that instead of letting people make their own choices at an individual level as to whether or not the experience is of value, it's better for government to just ban the choice altogether?
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.
Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.
> 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.
I, for one, don't have any problem with people finding "loopholes" in bad laws.
> So the tradition of unpaid internships in certain traditionally white-collar industries tends to be a subtle form of class discrimination.
Class warfare? Seriously . . . ?
If you disagree with that logic, that's fine: just explain how I'm wrong instead of just dismissing it.
. . . and claiming otherwise, specifically when those sets of people are identified by social or economic class, is pretty much "code smell" for "class warfare".
By this logic, should we ban or let government set prices on everything? After all, any free giveaways causes pressure on substitutes to go down in value. So by setting a price on a good or service which is below what some other guy has, you're essentially being "exploited".
Class discrimination? Right, so you're arguing that it's not fair that "middle-class or wealthier kids whose parents can support them" have the privilege of unpaid internships so this practice should be stopped?
As for empirical studies, the problem is that it's very difficult to isolate the variables but when it comes to understanding simple price floors and price ceilings, it's a pretty simple, conclusive relationship. Further, the studies are pretty clear in my books with the overwhelming evidence of cause and effect of minimum wages (sure there are those that are inconclusive, but if you're looking for a "scientific consensus" - you won't find the average economist saying that it's inconclusive unless they happen to work for a union): http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/50years.htm
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.
How else would you describe a response that doesn't even take into account the possibility that one could avoid government regulation when there's apparently no solid proof that regulation is better than the lack of regulation? It sounds like a knee-jerk response to me.
Why don't you default to "We shouldn't spend a bunch of extra money on regulation when we don't have any reason to believe regulation will help, or even won't hurt!" instead? If you have some meaningful, reasonable explanation for that choice, I guess I might have been mistaken about the idea that it's a knee-jerk response, but you haven't shared any reasons so far, and there aren't any obvious explanations for why wasting resources on regulation that might just make things worse is better than avoiding that regulation.
You may not like the values the law represents, but you can't attack its implementation as subjective.
It's not perfectly reasonable to the person being denied the choice. Clearly for the employer, the task(s) aren't of sufficient value to pay for the work otherwise, if they couldn't get unpaid workers, they would just pay for it.
Instead, banning the practice makes society tangibly worse off as the work on the margins isn't being performed and the next paid job the unpaid intern will get will likely be lower paid on average because they have less experience.
Just because a job is attractive, doesn't mean it's going to further your career or somehow increase your value. And if you can't pay the bills while you're pursuing it, who ends up paying? Not the company who got your hours for free.
But presumably this isn't the case in some job like telemarketing or other really marginal menial tasks that you might realize within the first couple weeks if not month of doing it?
That's called a "gamble". The potential for loss is inherent in that type of decision. Does the potential failure mean the potential win should be prohibited?
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.
I presume you accept that the young person would only do so if (a) they weren't able to find a paid position, or (b) the experience they believed they could get would exceed the pay they could get elsewhere - and presumably therefore would result in future benefits?
If a telemarketing firm had approached me for a free internship with the promise of riches once I put in my time, I may very well have turned down paying positions at McDonald's etc. I'm not trying to say most of us are dumb coming out of school, but I do believe that the fake pot of gold is pretty appealing and that there are many ethically questionable companies who would make all kinds of promises if it would benefit their bottom line.
I think the system where these companies are forced to act at least somewhat ethically by paying a minimum wage is a good system.
I think there is and should be a line though. If you are unable to value your work properly, young or old, then maybe you simply don't deserve to make more than minimum wage. I don't think society should pay for your bad decisions beyond a certain point. However, I like that you can still at least make some sort of living, and I think the company that is benefiting from your poor decision making skills should be footing that bill, and not tax payers. It would be infuriating to pay a wellfare tax while the persons receiving the benefit of that tax are passing it on to companies where they are working for free.
A company could get an extremely discounted rate for certain services if they were able to hire free interns. Then to take it to extremes, if a publicly traded company could gain a competitive edge by doing this, then it's practically illegal for them not to.
I look at it on a pricing continuum. On the extremes, would you pay nothing to get work done that you considered to be important for your business? I mean I employ a number of people and I'm pretty sure I don't pay in the lowest quartile or even half of comparable skilled positions. It's almost the same as buying any product or service, price is just one factor. For most people it's about the overall value. I think this also applies to hiring (at least for me). (I didn't realize that unpaid internships were possible - and like you probably, coming from Canada it's a foreign concept that I hadn't heard of until working in the US - but it seems like a reasonable idea to pay as little as possible during a probationary period before hiring someone for good only given the high costs of training involved with entry level positions?)
There are some great articles at http://www.no-spec.com/ that describe a fairly similar problem.
Let's say I'm starting a business and require a large amount of data entry. I categorize this work as grunt work for the most part. I get free interns to do it since I don't have the capital to pay anyone for it. Let's even say the availability of free work prompted me to start the company in the first place. I sit all these interns in cubicles and have them populate my application. What I'm not doing though is keeping a really good eye on the content their grabbing, copyright infringements etc. because to me, this work is free, if one of them messes up I'll just replace them. I don't have the time to babysit this free work because I'm busy running other parts of my business.
Now, if I was paying for the work I would value it more, and keep a closer eye on it. Why? Well beause I'm paying for it and if I'm paying for it, I want to make sure I'm not getting ripped off. We only value something when it costs us something. Just like we only value the poker pot once we've invested in it. I wouldn't value a free intern nearly as much as a paid intern. This will be reflected in the way I treat the free workers (lack of respect when they are easily replaced, because if I actually respected them, well then I'd pay them), it will reduce the interns sense of pride in their work, and it will definitely degrade the quality of work.
Now there are definitely exceptions, and maybe this article is one of them. However, by and large I think free workers is a really bad idea, and therefor I agreed with laws that prevent this practice.
re: No Spec - yes, it's a position I sympathize with but at the same time, I don't believe any of these markets operate in a vacuum. Given the tensions in the spec market (or any service that seeks to be sold based on price/free), over time it seems almost inevitable that it attracts the bottom end of the market. It's the same reason why I try to make sure I don't underpay employees or service providers as the cost can be far greater in the long run if you do.
re: large amounts of data entry. Having had to do it at one time for a professor, though I was paid, being paid did make me feel as if I had an obligation to do it as right as possible without allowing bad data to fall through the cracks. I'd like to think I was better than that but frankly if I wasn't paid I suspect I would not nearly have been as careful. But that's the thing - sometimes you get what you pay for - and especially for the more menial tasks if you don't value the output that's fine but there was still a cost for the professor to manage the project and there was indeed value to the underlying data that he needed to be accurate. Indeed - often the cost of the overhead is a significant cost of the underlying wages - even more so I suspect for entry level positions.
Such is the case for managing volunteers or unpaid interns for which I don't really see too much of a differentiation. The way I see it is that unpaid work is essentially producing a sample of your work for sale. Sure you don't want to keep on doing it, but at least in a market these things tend to work themselves out. As for spec work (or any industry that provides free samples) - are also of the view that this should be made illegal?
As long as it's the businesses that foot the bill then I really can't complain right? However when it comes to free interns the consequences are either paid for by the people, or it's limited to those that can afford to go without a pay check. If I'm paying for someone's rent and food stamps while they get an education / experience / whatever as an intern, then I'd feel better if I knew it was a respectable education / experience etc.
I simply do not believe free internships will give me this piece of mind. On a case by case basis, sure there are probably plenty of great free opportunities, but this is shark infested waters imo. I think the majority will see very little benefit if the floodgates were opened.
It also sounds like the way you run your ship is very ethical and mature. While I'm sure plenty of other business would be just as fair, I highly doubt they would be the majority. In fact I think you would be part of a very small minority. The words Free Interns would attract a lot of attention. Maybe there should be a qualifying process that a company could go through to have this right? Similar to government grants maybe.
What annoys me most about many of the opinions expressed in this discussion is that people think it's okay to punish the honest employers, and the people those honest employers would like to employ, for the actions of the dishonest employers.
At the end of the internship, the intern has gained nothing. They have provided a service to company Y, but received no training, enlightenment or greater understanding of the industry. In fact, based on what they experienced, it is likely the intern would decide to NOT go into the fashion industry because their entire perception of what the job is is now contradictory to what they thought it was before (but the new view is in fact incorrect). The internship had a negative impact on the intern who may have actually enjoyed the industry. Without having paid the intern (class credit, money, real industry experience), all they did was provide a service for the company for free.
(As a side note, I tried to model this close to the blog post, not provide some artificial "it wouldn't happen" type scenario)
> Either way, the intern would have lost that week or two (even if they recognize it was a bunk internship)
. . . and what else would they have done during that time?
Sometimes, one must try two or three things to find one that's worthwhile. Should I then be able to bring suit against a software developer whose software wasted a week of my time before I decided it wasn't doing me any good, before I moved on to something better?
The government can't figure it out. Can the interns? If there's a huge population that's willing to work for free, and they're all undervalued, then a company that hires interns for minimum wage will be able to get all the good ones.
What happened to paying your way through college with paying jobs? Kids need to put their bottom line first, just like employers do.
The unpaid internship thing is often a scam to get people to do just the kind of work you're describing. In companies I've worked for, I've seen it done.
I saw interns manually 'cleaning' data in a way that could be entirely automated. I told my employer at the time that they'd never be able to keep up with new incoming data and it's terrible, pointless work. I also said I could automate it in about 20 hours of work. He said, "we'll put an ad in for more interns."
Young people are naive, it's part of being young. It's unscrupulous to take advantage of that. Cuban could have paid internships paying at minimum wage if he'd like. It would still be far less expensive than getting actual professionals to do that work. His real complaint should be that he can't extract any real value for that work from the marketplace, because that's where his real problem is.
If so . . . where's the problem? Is it that people just assumed they'd get more than they were promised?
Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience.
. . . but useless for getting your foot in the job field's door, because you have to already be there to "take advantage" of that "opportunity". Your "solution" completely ignores the catch 22 of needing a job to get experience and needing experience to get a job.
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.'
I'm not calling them "heroic". I'm just annoyed that other people are casting them as "evil". They can be mutually beneficial, and I don't see a problem with that. The "evil" is people trying to prohibit mutually beneficial transactions.
By the way, I love the entrepreneurial spirit. I just don't love the "you must be an entrepreneur, one of the lucky people who sneak past the catch 22, or 'paid' by way of taxes" plan. I prefer maximizing opportunity, rather than limiting it, even for people who don't have that entrepreneurial spirit.
Unpaid internships still must be taxed. They will probably be taxed at a higher prevailing wage than minimum wage.
So, you have tax payment going on, while no employment paying is going on.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, rich or reasonably well-off kids can take free internships, which creates more free internships, which creates competition for free internships. And those smart, deserving, motivated kids who can't afford to work utterly for free cannot compete for free internships and instead have to work at McDonald's or some other, less useful job.
If the internships are paid, everyone is better off... except, perhaps, the employer who hoped to get free labor. (But who still has to pay taxes, natch.)
You're assuming that the cost of providing internships is essentially zero. When the likelihood of internships being offered at all (based on cost) is factored into things, your argument falls apart.
Either the company gets a hire-able employee or they get a whole bunch of work done that no one else was going to do.
One story does not an argument make, but it's just an observation.
Maybe he wouldn't have been given the opportunity at all if it were paid (though I find that line of reasoning doubtful), but it's pretty hard to argue that he wouldn't have been better off with a paid internship.
. . . if the internship existed at all.
Your argument seems to take the form "The downside you suggest is doubtful to me, but it's pretty hard to argue he wouldn't have been better off if he did everything exactly the same and magically got money."
Well, duh -- if people give you money, you're likely to be better off, if all else is equal. This whole discussion started with an "all else is not equal" set of circumstances, though, where Cuban stated outright that the project cannot afford to exist if the "internships" are paid with hard cash. Period.
Thus, the "doubtful" circumstance is a reality in this case -- and, given that state of affairs, talking about whether they'd be better off if Cuban would just pay them for these jobs that don't exist is nothing but wanking.
Let's discuss this in the on-topic world for a moment: Do you think these potential unpaid internships that have been prohibited by government could have benefited some people who are now worse off because those opportunities don't exist, or not? If you think they could have, perhaps you can explain why you want to deny them those opportunities. If you think they could not have, perhaps you could explain why not. That's what's relevant here -- not whether or not everybody magically having more money would be nice.
huh.?. from what I have seen, politics almost runs on interns. Every politician and political organisation has unpaid interns doing real work. The whitehouse has hundreds..
http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/Internships/
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)
If you complete a 6 month internship we will give you a job. And keep stringing the person along.. etc..
I think a good compromise would limit an internship to 3 months, afterwards you have to pay. And the employee has to be in a college or degree program or 2 years out of one. And somehow limit it so Burger King can't make you work 3 months for free.
I'll bite though, how is it (in an imperfect or perfect world) that these unpaid interns are unable to be the arbiters of whether or not an unpaid internship "has value" to them?
I find that very doubtful. Why is he even considering the project if the cost of paid interns would negate the upside?
To put it in terms of the startup culture of hacker news:
This is like asking entrepreneurs to work on your startup for free because there is a huge chance that the startup will be unprofitable.
However in the chance that it does become profitable, then you will not be paid in any way, and the only thing you will get out of it is a resume booster and a "chance" to work as a regular salaried employee.
See how silly this reasoning is now?
Do you think he's not paying a bunch of money to make a project like this happen -- even if he doesn't have to pay all of his workers initially? If the difference between "intern" and "minimum wage" is the difference between the project happening and the project not happening, I still don't see how it's so terrible to let him try when the would-be interns think it's worth their time.
Jesus, people. It's not like he refuses to pay anyone for anything at any time. The core of his complaint is that a project won't happen and people won't get work experience (how much you think he weights each of these relative to the other is your own affair), and not that paying people for projects that can happen that way is a problem somehow. It may seem like a fine distinction, but it's pretty much central to the whole discussion.
If you think I said nothing at all, you aren't listening (or maybe you just refuse to think beyond your intense desire to believe Cuban is eeevil).
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.
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.).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
. . . 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".
That's a dubious claim, but let's roll with it, just for argument's sake. If it's true, that doesn't change the fact that someone likely to get an internship doesn't have any job experience, and may thus have a very, very difficult time getting hired. This is why people accept internships; so they can get experience that allows them to get a job.
2. An internship actually can be valuable work experience, and that job may not exist at all if it can't be unpaid.
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.
That wouldn't make it a strawman fallacy -- it would just make it refutable.
> in my opinion
I don't think that the fact some people have that opinion is justification for the law.
> A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses.
I haven't heard of many full-time internships. People who take internships generally don't have the time for full-time without pay, and the organizations that offer those internships tend to know that.
It's 2009. Why is the owner of the Mavericks not aware of this sort of thing? Answer: he wants full ownership control of the resulting content. But he doesn't want to pay for it - that would make him less of a billionaire. So actual volunteer work is out. He wants the benefits of ownership without the disadvantage of paying people.
The government is right, here. Unpaid work for somebody who fully owns the results and benefits from it directly is a scam. It's spec work for God's sake, and I certainly see plenty of people coming out of the woodwork decrying that every time it comes up. Yet here, everybody's piling on the government for trying to prevent a billionaire from taking advantage of a bunch of out-of-work creative staff.
(If people want "valuable experience", there's no shortage of volunteer work that won't involve a billionaire laughing all the way to the bank.)
Not paying someone to do business related work devalues that 'sort of work', across the board. If I can get interns to some amount of work for free, then I am not employing and (more importantly) paying someone to do that same work. This may be good for the company, but it is bad for people who are unemployed and the other employees of the company. This is because the practice drags down the average price that any company can expect to pay for one unit of that 'sort of work'.
This may be great for shareholders, the CEO's bank balance, but it is not good for anyone else.
(Economically it is better to have an intern making minimum wage, and spending it than to have the money aggregating in some billionaire's bank somewhere).
To act like the intern has any choice in the matter is wrong; as the majority of companies now precondition employment for even the 'starting' positions with some amount of experience. It used to be that employers would hire kids right out of college and actually take the time to mentor them in the business world. Then it was internships during college, and now it is unpaid internships, and soon I'm sure we will be paying for the opportunity to work!
It strikes me as incredibly arrogant that someone would think that the mere experience of working for him is equivalent to any sort of compensation. (What am I really gaining out of making photocopies for you, Mr. Cuban?) When profitable work gets done, someone should get paid, end of story. To me that seems to be morally and ethically correct, even if it drives my bottom line down by a few dollars an hour.