Demanding that interns work for free is inevitable in an industry where a lot
of people are trying to break in, most without any real hope. That's free
market economics I suppose.
Once upon a time, medieval apprentices paid the master for the right to train
with him, but they did get decent tuition in most cases.
More enlightened places set a minimum wage for any such task but that does
limit opportunities, of course.
The US minimum wage seems to be set at just below what you'd have to pay a 16yo
for casual work at KFC down here.
Clearly it is not a wage as such but a de facto 'work for the dole' scheme
which has been exploited by many corporations until it becomes the norm.
I'm reminded of the exploitation of colonial plantation workers around the
world who were paid a below subsistence wage to work the land that had been
expropriated from them and then generously allocated a plot of land to grow
themselves the food that they could not afford to buy. Not quite as subtle as
sharecropping but still a good way to create economic slaves.
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 18/10/2011, at 4:34 PM, Chris Crawford wrote:
> It does stink, but even if the US required interns to be paid, it would
> still stink because they'd be paid minimum wage, which is so low here that
> anyone earning it is condemned to terrible poverty. The minimum wage in the
> USA is a mere $7.25 an hour. That works out to about $200 a week pay after
> taxes are taken out. I live in a city with one of the lowest costs of living
> in the USA, and even here you cannot survive at all on less than $11 an
> hour. That's if you're all alone. If you have children, you need more. Many
> internships are offered in places like New York City and Los Angeles, where
> the cost of housing is 4-5 TIMES what it is in Fort Wayne. Yet, the minimum
> wage in these places, where apartments START at $1000 a month for the
> cheapest places in town, the minimum wage is still $7.25...less than rent
> costs! You still need to eat and pay for your electricity too!
--
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