Then again, I am not in favor of say Amazon workers being exploited with very poorly paid jobs and conditions for their source of income over the long term. (Thomas Sowell gives some good arguments against minimum wage - I am on the fence and it boils down to "it depends").
Massively against them if they aren't paid like any normal job. If the intern is doing actual productive work(and let's not kid ourselves - they are most of the time), then they should be paid like any other employee.
The only exception I can see is companies that have training programmes with vocational schools, where you go and work somewhere for say 2 years training to be a carpenter or a plumber or electrician or whatever - then it's no different than being at school and learning. But I'd wager than 99% of internships are not like that, they are just a very cheap way to get unpaid(or poorly paid) labour under the pretense of "giving young people work experience". It's nonsense.
I am in agreement that apprenticeships seem to be a good thing that we should reintroduce. Working in IT, real world experience seems to count at least as much as anything I learned on university. The only times I have needed to implement a sort algorithm is for interviews.
That's fine then. I specifically mean internships which either don't pay anything or which pay some token amount like $100 a week for fuel expenses. If they pay a minimum wage then well, they are basic level entry jobs, that's fine.
If you are an intern in a railroad you can move cars around the yard all day: you can move them to a loading dock, or to make up a larger set for a train, but at the end of the day you must move them back. However if any of those cars are moved to the dock are loaded/unloaded, or the larger train they just made leaves the yard, then they did useful work and must be paid for that.
I mean yes, but like you yourself acknowledged - that's a completely meaningless law. No intern is going to report this, because young people are just happy to have a job, no one wants to destroy their career right at the start. I myself was in that exact same position when I started - as an intern, my contract specifically said I can't be doing any productive work. Of course I did anyway. And I'm sure it still happens in every industry, because.....why wouldn't it. That's why I think unpaid internships just shouldn't be a thing at all, anywhere, unless linked to vocational schools that oversee them as a training programme.
All unpaid internships should have regular independent auditors because, as you say, interns are unlikely to report abuse of the law.
But what they found in restaurants that had the no-tip policy is that all of their really great staff found better paying jobs easily, and the shitty employees, or new employees, would be the ones that stayed. And the new employees would leave as soon as they were trained up, so all that was left at the no-tip restaurants were the shittiest of the shitty employees. This is what I read from a study on this exact situation of no-tip restaurants and the effect it had.
more realistically, unless they are capable of finding another job that will pay as much they’ll just end up earning less without tips.