Are they moral?
Actually, what I think is immoral is some third party (e.g., the government) telling someone what they are allowed to earn in a freely negotiated contract (that is, the minimum wage is immoral, and empirically destructive of the lives of minorities, as Sowell has documented). It seems a little strange that you can pay someone nothing, but you can’t pay them four bucks an hour, even if they’re a teenager who needs some spending money and is willing to take that wage.
Yes.
Duh.
Stuff like that just pisses me off. If a company isn’t in a position to pay someone, but they want the experience, I think denying them the right to enter into that contract on terms they both find reasonable is immoral.
~Jon
Unfortunately, you can’t make that argument to people who simply don’t, won’t, can’t believe that mutually beneficial agreements exist. Then there’s people who see “improving society” as something that should be incentivized and that’s about the only economics they understand. For example, the argument for paying youth to go to college in many countries, including my own, is that it improves society for everyone – both in terms of economics and culture (so both engineering degrees and arts degrees are government funded). So you end up with a system that is similarly funded: industry goes begging to the government for benefits to pay interns. That’s how collectivist thought works.
Economics 101. Intern jobs are paying the market clearing price for the skills interns offer, namely zero dollars. I’ve never heard of engineering students doing unpaid internships, usually they get paid for summer work. That’s because the market clearing price for the work engineering students perform is greater than zero.
The fact of the matter is the people who take these unpaid internships have chosen useless majors and they need to learn something before their labor can provide positive return to the company. If you’d like to be paid more than zero then you need to learn more than nothing. If you argue that paying someone nothing is immoral then you would also have to agree that different pay for different skills is also immoral, i.e. you’re a socialist.
I know at least two lawyers who I’ve heard talk about unpaid internships while in Law School.
But, being lawyers, that too might meet your requirement of a zero worth job.
Work by a “lawyer” who has yet to pass the bar is worth less than zero.
They’re fine.
“Room and Board” is also fine.
But the same fields most invested in unpaid internships sure seem to be the same guys most invested in the minimum wage.
That is: Hollywood, you’re scofflaws.
The only real problem is that you end up with an industry dominated by those whose parents can afford to pay their bills while they work for free, not necessarily the people who would be the best at the job. Several of my friends worked unpaid for long periods for movie production companies and had to drop out after a while because they just couldn’t afford to continue doing so.
Exactly Edward.
Unpaid internships are immoral for exactly your description. Your average schmoe can’t take on the debt, or cost of a free internship, and they basically create an aristocratic caste based on family connections, wealth or patronage.
Unpaid internships are a market signal that there is a glut of people pursuing careers in those fields. People need to take that into account when they choose a field. Poor people, especially, need to pick a profession in which plenty of jobs are available, precisely because they can’t afford to not have a paying job. Nobody owes you a job in your field of choice.
We used to have a concept of ‘social mobility’; just because you were born poor you didn’t have to stay that way.
A few decades ago in Britain you could start out in a low-paid job in a movie production company and be a millionaire producer a couple of decades later. When I lived there the typical production company seemed to consist of the offspring of upper-middle-class parents who received production funds from the taxpayer via government bodies run by people they went to private school with, who then relied on kids of upper-middle-class parents on unpaid internships who might get permanent jobs if they stuck it out for a few years or got to know those same government funding officials.
Obviously it’s a particularly extreme example because much of the money does or did come from the taxpayer so the companies didn’t have to compete in the open market. But it can happen in any business which lacks competition.
Either way, I was always amused when I saw actors and others from the movie business telling us that we should raise the minimum wage.
Just because you can’t do that in a particular industry doesn’t mean you can’t still do that in some other industry.
Edward, I strongly agree that upward mobility is important. As a society we should remove any impediments to people bettering their station in life. But the onus for actually achieving it is on the individual. Picking a good career is part of that. If you want to raise yourself out of poverty by hard work, I would say that setting your sights on being a Hollywood mogul is a poor choice.
Are they slaves or is this a free choice? A worker is worth their wages. It’s not immoral but it certainly is sleazy.
The immorality is on the part of parents that don’t provide guidance. If the internship has practical value then it’s fine.
Sleazy? You couldn’t pay me enough to take on an intern.
Even if she was really, really cute? Perhaps one as helped Sheldon Cooper with his breakthrough and asked to share credit?
“Out!!!” [finger pointing to the door.]