When I worked with interns they were all paid... but every one was more time and expense to work with than any value they provided. In weeks they accomplished what I could do in an afternoon, and we spent WAY more than an afternoon of work with them. Amazingly many seemed to have a very high opinion of their productivity.
Now that's fine because when I did work with them the intent was to give these folks an opportunity / experience.
But I don't know about this idea that interns are somehow a gateway to getting value out of people for free. Interns in my experience (outside of maybe a unicorn out there) are not something you can expect to get much of anything out of.
I can't imagine coming out of the intern experiences I've had thinking that I'm going to get anything like worthwhile free labor from them.
We use internships as a pipeline to hire. We pay them for their time, they get real world experience. We both get quality time together to see if long term this is a good fit. Those who start full time ramp up much faster and are generally successful in their career.
I was hired at the end of my internship and switched over to regular work and grew as an independent employee to handle more serious workloads. My internship was an investment that the company paid into me (and other folks) and by the time I left the company I feel like I more than paid that back.
It's essentially just a probationary period at the start of employment but with much less expectation to retain the employee and less commitment from the potential employee to stay on.
As a computer science student, us students idealize those internships because the benefits and longer hours means more money to pay off student loans.
When I was in college, I did a paid internship at a health insurance company, wherein I audited, documented, and updated requirements for a large SQL script that pulled data from hospitals and used it to calculate reimbursement for Medicare/Medicaid claims (RAPS). Basically, you have to map hospital billing codes to federal ones.
The script was written several years prior by my mentor, and the risk adjustment department had no visibility into how the codes were mapped -- and if it was wrong, we could be fined up to ~$10M (depending on severity), or be missing out on ~$1M in revenue. (It turned out my mentor had done a pretty good job and we only needed minor adjustments, although we also updated the architecture so the risk adjustment folks could define the mapping themselves going forward.)
So in short, I can definitively state that
1) it would have cost the company less for my mentor to do the work directly.
2) The several thousands of dollars that the company spent between my salary and my mentor's was definitely worth the millions in mitigated risk/liability.
3) My mentor enjoyed teaching me much more than he would have enjoyed doing the work himself.
And I'd like to think that I ended up doing a slightly more thorough job than my mentor might have done -- his long tenure at the company and accumulated knowledge of these sorts of scripts being job security of some sort ;)
Anyway, the point here is that internships don't have to be a zero sum game. They can cost more than paying your existing employees to do the same work, and still be valuable.
The point is to build relationships with a good school and get a pipeline of applicants that will eventually become great engineers.
I recall someone whining he couldn't find good junior engineers. I suggested he go to his local (pretty good) CS school. He then started to whine that they all were already interning at good companies and were transitioning to full time and there was no way for him to break-in!
I've worked at places where the onboarding was generally terrible and I'd still say 80% of the co-op interns we hired were value-positive.
Although, when I do reflect on it, I suppose there was a lot we did right: - always willing to help newcomers - answering their questions - knowing when not to answer questions and let them learn through failure instead - reassuring them through mistakes (and just being positive overall) - checking in on them once in awhile
But none of these things take any sort of preparation. It's all just cultural.
> Amazingly many seemed to have a very high opinion of their productivity.
Well, you could be correct. I've definitely seen the situation where developers have a reputation that I know first-hand through their work isn't merited. It could also be that maybe your standards are just a little too high for what you expect people right out of (or still in) college.
But that's for a Senior or Principle dev - for intermediary devs I wouldn't expect positive gain for the company for a good two months and junior devs tend to be more expensive with that training phase lasting for something like six weeks.
Interns are a loss for companies - but please don't stop hiring them, you'll get some great employees out of the process and you're also investing in developing better communication and mentorship skills for your long term employees. As someone working at a company that was teensy tiny when I started this latter point is quite important - I actively invest in my skills to keep up with the curve and make sure I'm still providing as much value as is reasonable for my position. If I had been locked away to dev code in isolation when I was hired I'd be super rusty at a lot of skills that provide my employer real value.
One thing I'm still not sold on is that interns are a net loss. They would often get to do work that was novel to them and tedious to your full-time developers. Work that was nice-to-have but no-one-wants-to-do. It's hard to put a price tag on it. Especially with externalities that come with that kind of work; bad ones like killing employee morale for whoever has to do it and good ones like increasing the team's productivity. Interns, in my experience, are not prone to the former yet still contribute to the latter. Examples of such work are things like updating tests and documentation or tackling some not-so-urgent tech debt.
Assuming that they still create tech debt of their own because they probably were (and we all are, aren't we?) my experience has been positive.
When I mentor college students, the only times we hear about unpaid internships are:
1) Unfunded wannabe startups or small family businesses who don't understand what they need, but they assume they can convince some naive kid to do it for free. No one with actual skills or prospects takes these jobs. Job boards remove these posts if they're moderated.
2) Students who struggle to get a normal internship, so their dad/uncle/cousin/neighbor lets them do an unpaid "internship" off the books at their company to get something to put on their resume. They don't really do much work, but now they can put a line on their resume and claim some work experience for the next interview.
In non-tech fields this sort of thing is much more common and, at least when I went through school in the States, the fact that you might have to work an unpaid internship was a reality we all accepted (the cultural perception may have moved on). It's not illegal but it's possible very few HR person would allow such a posting - internships aren't profitable for companies, so most of the unpaid internships were teensy companies that hadn't realized that their interns would actually cost the company money regardless of the salary.
1. Here's the DOL's Fact Sheet including the seven evaluation metrics: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
2. Which is it's own problem - working an internship at Google is basically having Game of Thrones on your IMDB page and the FAANG companies do exploit this perceived prestige.
I'd rather have Alien, but each to their own.
Unless this claim is scoped to the tech industry, it's absolutely wrong. Frankly I don't know the actual legal status but it's standard practice in a lot of industries, esp. things like publishing.
That said, the interpretation changed some in 2015 and again n 2018. Here is the Department of Labor's "test" on whether or not you can provide unpaid internships: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
That's federal, but some states have stricter laws.
> Unpaid internships are legal if the intern is the "primary beneficiary" of the arrangement. This is determined by the seven-point Primary Beneficiary Test.
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15161-are-unpaid-internshi...
Moreover, if companies weren't getting value out of internships, they wouldn't continue hiring interns.
But they cost so much of my time that I no longer want to hire any.
If they were at college completing courses, they'd be giving up their labor towards that. If you consider an internship an educational opportunity, then the argument that they should be paid holds no water (since they don't get paid for college work, instead they pay for the experience).
Obviously, not all internships are _really_ educational opportunities, but I would expect most of them to be to at least some extent. To argue that all of them are just "the intern doing work for the employer, and the only difference is the amount of work compared to a full employee" is naive at best, and possibly disingenuous.
- the junior individual (intern, student) is doing work
- the junior individual expects to learn during the experience
- the senior entity (college, company) is expected to put effort into making sure the junior has learning opportunities
- the senior entity can expect the junior person to contribute less productivity to the company than a full employee
Now, how similar/dis-similar they are depends heavily on how much the internship focuses on the learning experience and how much the intern adds to the company.
But to say that the intern is definitely contributing more than they are gain is factually incorrect. And
> They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly.
The thing is, "accordingly" is open to interpretation and, in some cases where the intern is getting a lot more than they give, it's reasonable to argue that it is "not at all".
This depends. I am a student and at my last internship I was given work that nobody really had time for but ended up (towards the end) becoming a key part of a revenue-generating, customer-facing feature. While a senior could have done the same stuff in less time, I feel like the fact that this stuff was initially something nobody at the company had time for initially provided some sort of value to the company.
And the pressure to deliver only increases when talking FAANG internships, which pay (hourly) at the same rate as a junior engineer. It seems absurd to me to pay an intern that much to deliver negative value to a team, don't you think?
I do agree, 100%. I think many interns add value and should be paid accordingly. I think many other interns cost more than the add (and gain a lot), and I can see where needing to pay them would mean they wouldn't be there at all. And I think there's a lot area between those two cases.
> This depends.
Honestly, that's all I was trying to say originally; that it depends on the situation.
> the senior entity can expect the junior person to contribute less productivity to the company than a full employee
College students don't "contribute productivity" at all, because they don't have an employer/employee relationship with the school. The work they do is entirely orthogonal to the school's revenue. This comparison fundamentally does not make sense.
For six months I worked as an intern, getting paid less than my rent. If didn't have parents that could've supported me, I would've been unemployed.
I don't work for free. You presumably don't.
Pay your interns and pay them a livable salary.
I've only had interns at one job, and I had a similar complaint.
My boss told me that's exactly what's supposed to happen. He explained that they're not free labor. I'm supposed to be training the next generation of $my_profession, and if they're not getting in the way, I'm not letting them do enough to learn.
I guess in some ways he was right. Many of the most valuable lessons I've learned at work have come through mistakes I've made. And probably a bunch when I was an intern all those years ago.
I had intended to say this myself.
Computer programmers rarely train themselves. Very few of anything train themselves. Autodidacts who can become masters of <insert field here> are extremely rare, and even those that have that capability can still pick up a lot of information from someone with decades of experience.
Our species seems to learn best through being taught by those with more experience than us.
Somewhat like nearly every entry level engineer.
You are right that "free labor" is a inept way to think about internships, but it's also true that its one of those things where returns are somewhat dependent on investment. A good internship program can get a lot of useful things done and also be useful to the interns. There is certainly variability, but typical interns can be productive withing the scope of their term. Great ones will outproduce some of your full timers.
Biggest win is if you do it right you can make some great hires.
When I was in Uni, I did a 6 month paid internship. A year and a half later I joined the company and stayed for two years. When I left, there was still code that I wrote during my internship running in production. I'm sure the other staff could have done it faster and better than I did, but it was clearly good enough to keep 3.5 years after my internship ended.
I managed interns for years in my role as a UI development manager. The main reason to hire interns was as part of our hiring pipeline. It basically served as an extended interview. Any actual work they produced was a bonus.
We were also able to keep interns on through the academic year (part-time), which made the time commitment even more worthwhile. The lack of productivity wasn't because they were interns - it was because they were new to the job. This did require flexibility around their school schedule, so instilling good communication habits early was necessary.
We had good success with incremental training (getting people pursuing CS, who had at least passing knowledge of what programming is), spending a few initial hours on the bare minimum mechanical tasks that one would need to start working on tasks (e.g. how to enter and style static content, how to google, copy-paste from stackoverflow, the works), then gradually supplementing with actual meaty training via lunch-and-learn format, with the intent to bring everyone (including other full time employees) up to speed with the latest and greatest techniques and best practices.
Yes, most of the time they have negative productivity, but as an intern I had some demanding projects where our work was part of the final (revenue earning) product.
But that's how it goes. Pay people for their time.
Literally _everyone_ who says this doesn't understand what an unpaid internship is, including you.
An unpaid intern is essentially an entry-level newhire who never leaves the onboarding and training phase. (Unless they are subsequently hired.) They are there to learn something about the job, the company, and the people there. Most importantly CANNOT perform work that meaningfully contributes to the company's goals.
Because this is HN, here's an example of how it would look in a software company. Let's say Timmy is in college and wants to see what a real dev shop looks like, so he applies for (and is accepted) for an unpaid internship at FoobarDev. Here are some of the things Timmy could be asked to do:
* Learn the programming language(s) in use at the company * Set up a personal development environment according to the company's tech stack. * Implement a toy feature that will never ship with the product. * Fix a minor tooling or build bug that might be an annoyance but never seriously impacted developers or the product. * Chat with developers, managers, and others in the company about their background and experience.
Here are some things that Timmy could NOT be asked to do:
* Implement a new product feature. * Tackle a bug from the backlog. * Clean the office * File paperwork * Make a coffee-run for the full-time hires
Companies who abuse unpaid internships are _violating_ their agreements with education institutions and are probably breaking labor law. The idea with an unpaid internship is that the intern gets a peek inside the Real World at no risk. Don't underestimate the value of this... Getting ones bearings in a field puts you well ahead of your peers and the networking is absolutely invaluable. (Linked-In is not even close to a substitute for actually meeting people.)
This looks like a massive conflation of “is” and “is supposed to be.” I’m pretty sure tons of unpaid interns are either doing real work for the company or menial tasks that would otherwise be compensated (like getting coffee for people). The latter is a constantly-recurring plot element in depictions of modern workplaces.
You later claim that these cases are illegal. Even if that’s the case, it’s pretty clear that: A) this is ubiquitous, B) interns generally don’t have any recourse other than just not doing the internship, and C) people in this conversation aren’t actually confused about what internships are.
Do you think the abuse of unpaid interns doesn't happen because it's against the law? And for the educational institutions, they need the companies more than the companies need them, so why would they cause a fuss?
This really isn't true. First the word "internship" is not codified in any law. Second employment law is typically provincial unless it's a federally regulated industry so the rules are different everywhere. Finally, most jurisidctions allow them if they're the "hands-on" part of an educational program, which IME qualifies 90%+ of the interships I've seen.
Most provinces don't allow unpaid internships, but some provinces have very loose exceptions to this rule. At least, the unpaid internships have limits around work hours.
I think tipping as a cultural norm is another of the roots. Making it acceptable to move (a large portion of) staff payment from the employer to the customer should never have happened. The toxicity with which people defend tipping culture (in my experience in online forums) is astounding.
I will continue to both grumble about how bad tipping is while also tipping constantly since I think it's the only reasonable thing to do.
They're also good manager training.
> 1. The intern’s duties will be similar to training provided by an educational institution.
> 2. The position exists for the intern’s benefit.
> 3. The intern’s work does not displace the work of regular employees, and his or her work must be supervised. [0]
The US has a minimum wage. That begs the question: is hiring unpaid photographers for a Netflix show even legal in the US?
[0] https://www.californialaborlawattorney.com/practice-areas/wa...
However, in the modern age, companies require a certain amount of skill for even the most entry level job and the colleges kind of take over some of the responsibilities of training the unskilled labor. At this point, unpaid internships no longer are about companies sinking cost into people without reaping benefits.
1 - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
Unpaid internships are illegal in the United States, and the regulation isn't new.
The loophole is if the intern is the primary beneficiary of the internship rather than the company. Some internships are structured more like classes where the students shadow people around their jobs but aren't given assignments. Even these are often paid.
I haven't actually seen a real job at a real company (not a wannabe startup or some guy looking for a free Wordpress site or something) advertised as an unpaid internship in years.
The only exception I've seen lately is when family or acquaintances give kids a fake pseudo-internship so they can have something to put on their resume.
Come on, when am I supposed to make the money required to live?
The actors guild union actually demand you work as a almost-no-pay extra/support for several productions before you are even admitted to the union.
not to mention the informal but prevalent culture of "assistants" where people stabilished in the industry takes in people they treat as literal vassals doing errands.
Not sure this is true. Can you point to where in the bylaws this is stated?
This is even worse on the side-unions, such as costume, etc.
If there's exploitation going on here I don't think it's really fair to attribute it to SAG in particular (though I'm not certain if you ever were, your original comment just mentioned the exploitation of hollywood - not specifically that SAG was driving this). Maybe it's more the case that a landscape that's likely to be rife with exploitation (and actors and abstract artists are extremely vulnerable to exploitation as a class of employee due to the strange quality of the value they produce) is actually made a little bit better by SAG ensuring that most actors are getting a fair shake?
The exposure opportunity is priceless here.
It's fairly well documented that the Founding Fathers were pretty much all opposed to slavery, but saw it as a huge political shit sandwich that would jeopardize Federalization. The United States is one of the only unions on the planet in which every single member state (without exception) voluntarily ratified and agreed to join. Had the Founding Fathers pushed for abolition, the South would never have joined the Union, and slavery may not have been abolished in the 1860s.
In order to ensure Federalization, the Founders simply ignored the question of slavery to get the slave-states to join the Union, and in fact built systems in place to incentivize the abolition of slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a good example of this: the South outnumbered the North (when counting the slaves), and the South wanted slaves to be counted as one whole person in the census so that they would have outsized representation in the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. This was obviously unfair since those slaves were unfree and basically would have given rich slaveholders multiple votes. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a proposal by the abolitionist North to 1) neuter the power of the South at the Federal level, and 2) worded in such a way ("non-free persons") that if a Southern slave state wanted more House seats at the Federal level, all they had to do was abolish slavery.
A really good way to understand how the Founders felt about slavery is to look at how those that literally advocated for starting a new nation based fundamentally on the institution of slavery (the Confederates) felt about the Founding Fathers. The Cornerstone Speech was an address given by the Vice President of the CSA just before the Civil War began, and includes commentary around how they felt about the “old Constitution” and its framers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Cornerstone
The relevant bit:
“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists amongst us – the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.””
They couldn't have been that opposed to it or they themselves wouldn't have kept owning slaves.
Sure, Washington freed 'his' slaves when he died (modulo complications such as he intended them to be freed on Martha's death, but she freed 'his'--not 'hers'--early), but until then he did stuff like rotating 'his' slaves out of Philadelphia every few months so he wouldn't have to free them. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Posey which includes this quote: "The general's cook ran away, being now in Philadelphia, and left a little daughter of six at Mount Vernon. Beaudoin ventured that the little girl must be deeply upset that she would never see her father again; she answered, "Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now.")
And not to get into Jefferson and Hemings, whom he started raping when she was 14 (whether you think a slave can consent, a child can not), and kept enslaved (along with their children) until his death.
> The United States is one of the only unions on the planet in which every single member state (without exception) voluntarily ratified and agreed to join
That 'without exception' is doing a lot of work in the case of Hawaii.
In fact, it should be quite clear from that comment that not only was slavery NOT a foundational pillar of the United States, it was the opposite of a foundational pillar since its abolition was a long-run goal, the Founders placed Federal incentives to drive its abolition, and ultimately hoped that later generations would be able to do so across the entire Union once and for all.
Similarly, slavery as an institution had no bearing on the socioeconomic systems of the Northern States, but it was quite essential to the Southern States. All the US was (at the time) was a Union of all of those States. The concept didn't really exist at the US level, and insofar as it did exist, it was in the form of an incentive to abolish slavery. The foundational pillars of the United States were simply a Federal union of States with a bicameral legislature, a set of enumerated powers, and a set of limitations on the Federal government. That's it. Just because it did nothing to abolish slavery at its founding does not mean that slavery was itself a foundational pillar of the institution. By that logic, <insert atrocity committed by UN member country> is a foundational pillar of the United Nations. A totally unserious argument.
My question wasn't rhetorical. I actually do not know the history. If monarchy was indeed both socioeconomically important and a deal-breaker for founding the EU to a comparable extent as slavery in the United States, then I would think it's fair to call it a founding pillar.
> Similarly, slavery as an institution had no bearing on the socioeconomic systems of the Northern States, but it was quite essential to the Southern States.
That isn't the impression I've gotten from my admittedly non-expert reading of history, but I'm willing to be shown how I'm wrong. My impression is that the textile industry (which was intimately tied to Southern cotton production) was hugely important to the North for at least 50 years after the northern states had started restricting slavery. And from what I can tell, Pennsylvania was the first of the colonies to "abolish slavery," and that wasn't until 1780 and more importantly it didn't free existing slaves. It abolished importing slaves, and made children subsequently born to slaves indentured servants.
> By that logic, <insert atrocity committed by UN member country> is a foundational pillar of the United Nations. A totally unserious argument.
No, again, it's not about the mere existence of a phenomenon. I'm not claiming that wearing a tricorne hat was a founding pillar of the United States because it was common at the time of founding. I think I've been clear about that.
The disagreement is that it's not accurate to call it a founding pillar even in such cases. "The founding pillar" of most unions has nothing to do with the specifics of members of that union, unless explicitly stated. And in fact, as I pointed out above, the Framers added systems to incentivize its abolition, so not only is it inaccurate to argue that slavery was a foundational pillar, it's arguably the opposite.
We actually have a rich set of literature outlining what the so called "founding pillars" were, and they were the Federalist Papers. The outlined "founding pillars" were (in no particular order): federalism, bicameralism, minority rights, republicanism, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
> My impression is that the textile industry (which was intimately tied to Southern cotton production) was hugely important to the North for at least 50 years after the northern states had started restricting slavery. And from what I can tell, Pennsylvania was the first of the colonies to "abolish slavery," and that wasn't until 1780 and more importantly it didn't free existing slaves. It abolished importing slaves, and made children subsequently born to slaves indentured servants.
There was certainly trade between Southern and Northern States, but the North was overwhelmingly industrialized, whereas the South was an agrarian slave-driven economy. When the Civil War ended, the North continued to prosper, while the South's economy was decimated; in fact when slavery was abolished, the GDP of the US increased(https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html).
And although you're correct that Pennsylvania didn't abolish slavery until 1780, the US Constitution wasn't drafted until 1787; until then the States were governed by the Articles of Confederation. By 1787, every single Northern State except New Jersey (1806) had abolished slavery. And FYI, abolition meant freeing existing slaves, not just banning the importation. By 1806, all former slaves in the Northern states were free.
And another FYI, slavery was abolished in the Northern States before it was abolished in France, the UK, and the Netherlands. No reasonable person would call slavery a "founding pillar" of either of those countries.
Um, that's not remotely close to what's being contended here. What we're talking about is tradeoffs; i.e. what do you do when you want to coerce other States to abolish a regime that's politically unpopular in your State, but politically popular in the State in question? You can either do nothing, and let that system continue to exist (in perpetuity), or you can set up a new system that enables us to eventually abolish that institution from the top-down.
You have to consider the alternative: Founders that didn't create a Union, an independent South, and no real incentive or force to act as a check on slavery, and potentially allowing it to exist in the South beyond the 1860's. This is a hypothetical that's pretty easy to imagine considering that those Southern states tried creating a Confederation with slavery literally being enshrined in its Constitution (a "founding pillar", to use your framing) in 1861.
A world in which the South just agrees to join the Union in 1787 and also simply agree to abolish slavery is a fantasy. A world in which the North creates a slavery-free Union without the South is one in which slavery exists in a Confederate constitution well past the 1860's. Given those options, I'll take our reality any day of the year: the one where we created a Union that allowed us to eventually outnumber the South, elect Abraham Lincoln, and abolish slavery once and for all. That was the Founders' gambit, and the Confederates admitted just as much in their Cornerstone Speech I cited above.
Thought experiment: a state that actively uses the death penalty applies to join the EU...
Perhaps a parallel to internships.
And yes, there is some parallel to internships which are generally paid at a rather low rate (often lower than the lowest equivalent employee; a CS intern is going to get paid less than a 1st year out of college new hire developer). But they're still being paid, and it's still the minimum wage (even though it's a lower minimum wage than for those over 20).
edit: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted for not having been exposed to this. If you're willing to take an unpaid internship it's your own fault.
Its a "great" way for employers to screen out less privileged folks and keep the job for someone from a "proper" family. Trust fund babies have no problem doing an unpaid internship.
As a guideline, if the field has money to go around and companies have to compete for interns, they'll pay. If would-be interns have to compete for a few internships and the field famously struggles with budgets of two beans and a bit of string, they won't.
Netflix is rolling in cash.
Let's say Netflix['s production company] were to auction the opportunity to work with them on this project (for clarity: the winning photographer pays).
Q1: Are we suggesting there would no bidders?
Q2: If "the market fixes stuff" why can't the market fix this?
I haven't heard of this at all in Silicon Valley though. In fact interns are pretty well paid, $7500/month at my previous company.
Congress now pays their interns too, though I don't know if this extends to campaign interns: https://cha.house.gov/member-services/house-paid-internship-...
And, honestly, internships aren't free for companies unless there is literally nothing of value being given to the intern, adding a low salary to these positions to make them affordable to people without independent savings or rich parents would just be more equitable while not significantly impacting employers. Internships are, in the best light, just a really good recruiting tool.