Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

Uh, wage slavery? How much of a person's salary is spent just on the basics such as food and clothing and gas and education?

The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage.

This is how the system is structured; there is a permanent underclass that will accept any wages. Even more educated people will lower their wage expectations when the economy appears bad. This means that companies can get cheaper labour at any time to pick up slack or as replacements if their current workers get too uppity and demand a living wage.

it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed.

Unemployed is only bad if it means starvation or homelessness. In a socialist, communist, or anarchist society unemployment would be okay. Unemployed workers wouldn't starve, they would still be allowed to live, and they could take part-time jobs/unpaid internships and learn new skills without worrying about making ends meet.

There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges.

So your solution is to train people to become effective human resources for businesses to consume? That doesn't help. We already do that.

You're saying that workers need to learn how to be better workers so that they can prosper. You're saying that they should make themselves as appealing to businesses as possible and somehow, you're assuming that this will give them higher wages. The only reason people get higher wages is because they demand them either through a union or through an informal agreement with other workers that they won't work for less. This is true in the IT industry and is one of the reasons why IT workers don't see a need for a union. We all have agreed never to work for a shitty wage. We know that we can just take our skills elsewhere or start our own company or whatever because we stand up for ourselves.

At least in 2006 it was rather easy to get a tax identification number (I forget what it's called) with a signed affidavit and a witness saying you live at some address, and you can use that to get work. Now, without better documentation the government taxes you at the highest rate possible, and since you won't file you'll never get a penny back.

Also, they worked in card houses, so maybe the documentation requirements weren't as strict as a professional programming environment. Oh, and I'm sure it's all sorts of illegal. But just doing it is easier than it seems. :)

What's even more galling, from my perspective, is the government is taking money out of the pensions of private citizens to pay for this "jobs initiative".

Anyway, your analogy will seem more believable we start to see the children of interns forced to work for the companies that their parent work for, interns being paid with tickets only redeemable at the company store, having to ask permission to marry, only being allowed to marry other employees, not being allowed to move off the company campus, etc... lots of a way to go on the road to serfdom.

The second situation is, when students try to get a job, which a lot of people want to have, like at Google, Price Waterhouse Coopers and so on. In this situation the brand alone will help them out later to get better jobs or even give them a chance for a full time job in this company that others can't get. It's a little like doing a start-up. You put in a lot for the small chance to get a unnatural big payoff.

In both situations I can't disapprove of unpaid internships. I hope with sharing these experiences, other readers might get a more objective point of view. It is not all bad about unpaid internships!