The Value Of Internships

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• This something I've done several times in my life. First job I ever had, when I was still at school, was helping at the office of a relative for not much more than the cost of getting there, a free lunch & a few shillings pocket money. Walked into my first job, on leaving school, already know much of how to do it.
  Since, any time I want to acquire a new talent, I talk someone into teaching me in exchange for free assistance in what they're doing. Result's I've got a dozen or more things I could go do as a living, any time I wanted. And the cross fertilization of knowledge between them gives me an advantage at all of them.

• If society believes there should be a minimum wage for work then being able to get round it by calling something an 'internship' isn't right. There are strong arguments against the minimum wage, but for most of the roles where being an intern matters then the work being done is generally valued higher than the minimum wage anyway. The solution may not be to allow internships, but to make hiring and firing easier - recruit someone on a minimum wage with a 1 week rolling contract. If they aren't any good just don't renew the contract. Most of the value of internships isn't that the candidates are free, but that they are easy to get rid of when you realise they aren't any good. If they are good then put them on a permanent contract and raise their salary to whatever the market rate is given their experience.

• It was only a few years ago I discovered that internships were unpaid. And my immediate thought was: but these are adults, aren't they, what the *** are they supposed to live on?

  If they're unpaid, they should just call them what they ***y well are: work experience, exactly what I did when I was at school.

• Underpaid work is the heart of small-town baseball clubs. The average player even at the AAA level works for barely enough to live on, and there are leagues across the U.S. where university kids play for free. The "pay" here is to make it to the Bigs and strike it rich. The hot dog vendors and the guy in the dog suit likewise work for college credit. That's how you can get in the gate for only $5. Obama, of course, was going to ride to the rescue of these exploited workers, and do to baseball what he did to health insurance. You learn how to interact, when to complain, when to keep quiet in an internship; you famously learn little about the real world in the classroom.

• Amateur sports (or even semi-amateur) are a completely different topic, if you want to do something for fun or volunteer for something then fair enough. We'll also leave the USAs strange mix of semi-professional sport and university entry for another discussion.

  Nobody disagrees that having work experience is a good thing and teaches many experiences that you won't learn in the classroom. But work experience and being on a trial for a job are two different things. If an intern is doing real work, for an extended period of time, bringing real value to the company then they should be paid to compensate them for the work. Minimum wage and minimal job security is fine, but it should at least limit the current abuses of the system where the employer is just using it to freely fill a job vacancy. Even limited periods of work experience (2 weeks) where the employer is actually providing mentoring and an experience, and it is clear what is on offer and available at the end may be fine as long as it isn't misrepresented.

• Seems weird to worry about average Joe getting more than average Jane when little Trisram is slaving away for SFA down in the mail room and nobody gives a toss. OK for sixteen-year-olds, adults (which we define as 18!) need paying.

• Thank you for offering your aesthetics on "fair" pay, but do you really intend that third parties impose them on work arrangements where the parties voluntarily agreed to different terms? Rhoda's criterion is crossing the arbitrary legal definition of adulthood, while that of mole125 seems to be that the employer not benefit more than the employee, in some distant observer's opinion (though both believe they are benefitting more from the work arrangement than they would in its absence).

• Rhoda's ideal wouid be that anyone can make an agreement with anyone else about work using money or other value. Totally libertarian. But that horse bolted centuries ago. If we are to have stupid employment laws they should be applied, not worked around. Can't believe I'm writing that given my relationship with IR35.

• Well, that is a typical argument of a "libertarian" whom government has harmed arguing that other people be comparably harmed, toward some concept of even-handedness. So it is that bricks-and-mortar stores have argued for years (now before the U.S. Supreme Court) that we should break the longstanding rule that a state cannot tax a business in another state (with no physical presence in the taxing state), so their e-commerce competitors can experience predation equally. I say two wrongs don't make a right.

• Adults at work, doing productive work, should get minimum wage at least. Of course restrictive laws always result in anomalies. There does need to be provision for voluntary free work. Internships vary between good work experience and slavery, with a dash of nepotism and a splash of privileged access. I would deal with this on a personal level by telling my kids not to work for nothing and putting the shutters down at BOMAD if they insisted. I don't think we need any new rules. As for US interstate commerce, if I were trying to fix it I wouldn't start from here. Same goes for employment laws.

  • "Adults at work, doing productive work, should get minimum wage at least."

    Why? What if they're not productive to the minimum wage level? What if they're worth £4/hr when they join? What if they need lots of training, costing lots of money, meaning they aren't delivering much?