A Liberal Agreement

Today I have a shocking revelation.  I've actually found a liberal idea with which I can agree.

It's about Unpaid Student Internships.

Unpaid internships amount to a legal form of slavery.  Interns are brought into companies and organizations across America and given low-level jobs.  Many internships give their students close to zero relevant experience in their field of study, but instead merely use them to get mundane and dirty jobs done.

College tuition and fees have escalated into the stratosphere with no measurable improvement in their ability to prepare their students.  Escalating costs instead seem to be mostly going into paying escalating salaries for left-wing elitist professors.  They also seem to go into the latest trend of building Taj Mahal student fitness facilities.  But the colleges have created a new "Activity Fee" to help pay for those, I think on top of the tuition increases.

So it's insulting that students and their parents are further abused by the colleges and their corporate partners that offer unpaid internships.  Working in an unpaid internship for the summer removes the student's ability to earn money in a summer job to help defray their education costs for the upcoming school year.

I think all internships should pay minimum wage at the very least, and comply with wage and hour regulations as well.  I was shocked many years ago when I started a summer job and discovered that the company was able to pay me an hourly rate under the Federal Minimum Wage plus did not have to pay me time-and-a-half for my overtime hours.  There was no logical reason for the exception beyond whatever misguided idea was behind it.

It's a sad story I hear often from college students.  A student can't earn money over the summer because he's been offered an unpaid internship.  The internship offers no promise of employment after graduation, and the only benefit to the student for accepting it is for the slight possibility he may be able to observe some of the activities he's studying to be able to do.  He won't be tasked with anything remotely related to his field of study, though.

But one situation I knew about awhile back was even more egregious.  The intern was working 50 to 60 hours per week through the summer.  He asked for a couple of days off to attend his sister's wedding.  The request was denied, and he was told his internship would be given to another student if he took the days off.  I think it's a horrible idea that a company can fire a slave because there's a long line of other willing slaves available to take his place.

I firmly believe that internships should be paid.  Just as I think medical students who have reached the intern stage of their education must be paid.  If you're performing a service for an employer, just being a student does not grant that employer license to treat you like a slave.  Perhaps the courts are about to force colleges and employers to stop this terrible practice.