The Attack on Internships Is Wrongheaded

From FEE.org:

Google “unfair internships” and you get a blizzard of complaint. Interns are underpaid. Internships favor the rich. They are exploitative. They are a strategic way of getting around federal labor law. Some want mandates on pay. Others want them forbidden.

Here we have a narrow means of escape for young workers, a slight glimmer of hope in a job market that is growing increasingly dark for them. Following college, they can work for free or at a very low rate, for a time, and then perhaps have a greater chance of building a career, or at least avoiding the label “loser.”

And then what happens? The opinion elite conspire to wreck that opportunity too. Our laws and institutions set them up to fail, and then smother one of the few chances they have discovered to avoid that fate.

Why Internships?

Kids spend as much as 16 years sitting in desks, listening to experts, and taking tests to demonstrate that they can recite information. Then after undergoing all this, and paying ghastly amounts for the privilege, they are stunned to discover that they lack skills for the workplace.

Why is the marketplace not dumping barrels of cash on their heads as a reward for their good behavior? As it turns out, that’s not what a job is about. A job is a contract that pays money in return for the value that the employee creates. If you can’t create value in excess of your financial aspirations, there is a problem. You won’t get hired at a desirable wage or you won’t get hired at all.

More importantly, young people lack a network to even get in the door. At every stage of life, they march through school with their peers, step by step, and the adults around them celebrate each hoop they jump. Then the real world hits hard, and no one much cares about the only thing they have been told to do their entire lives.

Bombarding institutions with education-laden resumes is not doing the trick.

Reviving the Apprenticeship

The apprenticeship has been part of entryway training in most countries since the Middle Ages. You study under a master. You gain skills. You work without wages, possibly in exchange for food and housing. This goes on for a number of years until you can start to earn real money. Apprenticeships were a mainstream part of work life for hundreds of years.

But starting in the Progressive Era (with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917), internships came to be regulated by governments at all levels. This is inevitable in a planning state that aspires to regulate work hours, wages, and terms of contract. In those days, school became compulsory, and it came to be considered a legal privilege to be employed at all. It was part of the effort by governments to sort people into categories based on eugenic notions of fit and unfit. To gain an apprenticeship at all required government approval.

Deregulate the Interns

People today complain that interns are paid too little and don’t experience a direct benefit in the form of employment after the internship ends.

But guess what? This isn’t the fault of the business. This is the fault of government. Incredibly, federal law stipulates conditions that are designed to devalue the internship in general; these are the six main ones:

1. It must be more like school than work. Ridiculous and counterproductive.
2. The intern, not the employer, should benefit. Why not both?
3. The intern cannot displace a regular employee. This is a mandate for uselessness.
4. The employer cannot benefit from the activities of the intern, which, again, is a devaluing mandate.
5. The intern is not working toward a job with the company, and this is well understood.
6. Both the employer and the intern know that no wages are paid to the intern.

If you look at those conditions, you can see that the practices that so deeply irk the critics of internships are specifically mandated by federal labor law.  [read more]

The Left don’t like internships because they think businesses (especially corporations) are the oppressor and employees are the oppressee. That’s basically from Karl Marx. And if someone wants to work for no or little pay just to gain experience then the business is exploiting him/her even though that’s the intern’s choice. If Congress can have interns then why can’t businesses?