Can you provide an example where you would see a young person starting their career would find themselves worse off by accepting an unpaid internship?

I presume you accept that the young person would only do so if (a) they weren't able to find a paid position, or (b) the experience they believed they could get would exceed the pay they could get elsewhere - and presumably therefore would result in future benefits?

Actually I don't think everyone starting out has those same priorities. I think many would go for the carrot, as I most likely would have if I'd been unable to find paying work fresh out of school.

If a telemarketing firm had approached me for a free internship with the promise of riches once I put in my time, I may very well have turned down paying positions at McDonald's etc. I'm not trying to say most of us are dumb coming out of school, but I do believe that the fake pot of gold is pretty appealing and that there are many ethically questionable companies who would make all kinds of promises if it would benefit their bottom line.

I think the system where these companies are forced to act at least somewhat ethically by paying a minimum wage is a good system.

I think there is and should be a line though. If you are unable to value your work properly, young or old, then maybe you simply don't deserve to make more than minimum wage. I don't think society should pay for your bad decisions beyond a certain point. However, I like that you can still at least make some sort of living, and I think the company that is benefiting from your poor decision making skills should be footing that bill, and not tax payers. It would be infuriating to pay a wellfare tax while the persons receiving the benefit of that tax are passing it on to companies where they are working for free.

A company could get an extremely discounted rate for certain services if they were able to hire free interns. Then to take it to extremes, if a publicly traded company could gain a competitive edge by doing this, then it's practically illegal for them not to.

Are you assuming that the company would create a paid position if they couldn't have an unpaid internship position?

I look at it on a pricing continuum. On the extremes, would you pay nothing to get work done that you considered to be important for your business? I mean I employ a number of people and I'm pretty sure I don't pay in the lowest quartile or even half of comparable skilled positions. It's almost the same as buying any product or service, price is just one factor. For most people it's about the overall value. I think this also applies to hiring (at least for me). (I didn't realize that unpaid internships were possible - and like you probably, coming from Canada it's a foreign concept that I hadn't heard of until working in the US - but it seems like a reasonable idea to pay as little as possible during a probationary period before hiring someone for good only given the high costs of training involved with entry level positions?)

I think our difference of opinion really boils down to our views of companies at large. Not every company is ethically responsible and many companies don't put enough thought into the hiring process at all. Once some kind of work becomes free, companies will do less and less diligence hiring for these position, simply because the value of the work becomes trivialized. This ends up hurting the workers and the company in the long run.

There are some great articles at http://www.no-spec.com/ that describe a fairly similar problem.

Let's say I'm starting a business and require a large amount of data entry. I categorize this work as grunt work for the most part. I get free interns to do it since I don't have the capital to pay anyone for it. Let's even say the availability of free work prompted me to start the company in the first place. I sit all these interns in cubicles and have them populate my application. What I'm not doing though is keeping a really good eye on the content their grabbing, copyright infringements etc. because to me, this work is free, if one of them messes up I'll just replace them. I don't have the time to babysit this free work because I'm busy running other parts of my business.

Now, if I was paying for the work I would value it more, and keep a closer eye on it. Why? Well beause I'm paying for it and if I'm paying for it, I want to make sure I'm not getting ripped off. We only value something when it costs us something. Just like we only value the poker pot once we've invested in it. I wouldn't value a free intern nearly as much as a paid intern. This will be reflected in the way I treat the free workers (lack of respect when they are easily replaced, because if I actually respected them, well then I'd pay them), it will reduce the interns sense of pride in their work, and it will definitely degrade the quality of work.

Now there are definitely exceptions, and maybe this article is one of them. However, by and large I think free workers is a really bad idea, and therefor I agreed with laws that prevent this practice.

Hmmm - that's interesting. I think one of the best pieces of advice that I've read about being a manager is to treat each your employees as if they're volunteers. I realize that this is going a bit off the reservation now as far as our discussion goes, but it's something that I've been trying to strive for (often unsuccessfully) - but I think it's useful for building the type of culture that maximizes productivity (and, as an afterthought, is enjoyable to work in).

re: No Spec - yes, it's a position I sympathize with but at the same time, I don't believe any of these markets operate in a vacuum. Given the tensions in the spec market (or any service that seeks to be sold based on price/free), over time it seems almost inevitable that it attracts the bottom end of the market. It's the same reason why I try to make sure I don't underpay employees or service providers as the cost can be far greater in the long run if you do.

re: large amounts of data entry. Having had to do it at one time for a professor, though I was paid, being paid did make me feel as if I had an obligation to do it as right as possible without allowing bad data to fall through the cracks. I'd like to think I was better than that but frankly if I wasn't paid I suspect I would not nearly have been as careful. But that's the thing - sometimes you get what you pay for - and especially for the more menial tasks if you don't value the output that's fine but there was still a cost for the professor to manage the project and there was indeed value to the underlying data that he needed to be accurate. Indeed - often the cost of the overhead is a significant cost of the underlying wages - even more so I suspect for entry level positions.

Such is the case for managing volunteers or unpaid interns for which I don't really see too much of a differentiation. The way I see it is that unpaid work is essentially producing a sample of your work for sale. Sure you don't want to keep on doing it, but at least in a market these things tend to work themselves out. As for spec work (or any industry that provides free samples) - are also of the view that this should be made illegal?

Well a lot of the spec work actually is illegal in terms of copyright infringement. As it grows, so does the infringement. This will create a loads of litigation. Eventually the market will most likely take care of it through some better form of copy protection or through laws. This is going to take a while and probably cost a lot of money and I can handle that as long as it isn't taxpayer money I guess.

As long as it's the businesses that foot the bill then I really can't complain right? However when it comes to free interns the consequences are either paid for by the people, or it's limited to those that can afford to go without a pay check. If I'm paying for someone's rent and food stamps while they get an education / experience / whatever as an intern, then I'd feel better if I knew it was a respectable education / experience etc.

I simply do not believe free internships will give me this piece of mind. On a case by case basis, sure there are probably plenty of great free opportunities, but this is shark infested waters imo. I think the majority will see very little benefit if the floodgates were opened.

It also sounds like the way you run your ship is very ethical and mature. While I'm sure plenty of other business would be just as fair, I highly doubt they would be the majority. In fact I think you would be part of a very small minority. The words Free Interns would attract a lot of attention. Maybe there should be a qualifying process that a company could go through to have this right? Similar to government grants maybe.

> Not every company is ethically responsible

What annoys me most about many of the opinions expressed in this discussion is that people think it's okay to punish the honest employers, and the people those honest employers would like to employ, for the actions of the dishonest employers.

Then I will definitely add that not every company is ethically irresponsible. I don't think opening up free internships is the right way to go though. I could be convinced that some sort of qualifying process to keep most of the bad out and let most of the good in could be worthwhile if it was not overly expensive to implement.

Let's say I'm someone looking for an internship in the fashion industry. I go intern at fashion company Y. My entire internship is to watch the E! channel and update twitter every time someone has a horrible (in my opinion)outfit. This work has no immediate supervision. I sit in a cubicle, isolated from everyone else. I have a weekly meeting with an employee who takes the number of twitter updates I've made and goes "You should be making more".

At the end of the internship, the intern has gained nothing. They have provided a service to company Y, but received no training, enlightenment or greater understanding of the industry. In fact, based on what they experienced, it is likely the intern would decide to NOT go into the fashion industry because their entire perception of what the job is is now contradictory to what they thought it was before (but the new view is in fact incorrect). The internship had a negative impact on the intern who may have actually enjoyed the industry. Without having paid the intern (class credit, money, real industry experience), all they did was provide a service for the company for free.

(As a side note, I tried to model this close to the blog post, not provide some artificial "it wouldn't happen" type scenario)

Not having much knowledge of the fashion industry, I can't say if this seems probable or not. But presuming you've done this for a week or two already why would you as an intern continue to stay at what seems to be a horrible position? Further, surely you would also recognize that this isn't indicative of the fashion industry?

I actually have no idea if this is even feasible in the fashion industry, I was just using a similar (fictitious) internship as what was described in the blog as an example. And the key is that an internship should be indicative of the business. Either way, the intern would have lost that week or two (even if they recognize it was a bunk internship), and the position would be open again if the business wanted to continue it. Without the protection from unpaid internships, businesses are free to exploit low-skilled labor in order to perform low to no (monetary) cost for experimentation.

There is a cost to managing any project. Presumably even if for PR, one wants the PR to result in a good impression of your company? So yes, lose a week or two, does that seem so bad at the individual level? It would probably end up costing the company even more in time to filter the work. It's also not frictionless to find new staff - whether paid or unpaid.

I'm not sure I see how your example is similar to Mark Cuban's example. For instance, conducting surveys (one of the tasks Cuban was talking about having interns accomplish) is part of a wide range of professional fields -- including experimental psychology (according to my girlfriend with the psychology degree), political analysis (according to major news networks), and usability testing.

> Either way, the intern would have lost that week or two (even if they recognize it was a bunk internship)

. . . and what else would they have done during that time?

Sometimes, one must try two or three things to find one that's worthwhile. Should I then be able to bring suit against a software developer whose software wasted a week of my time before I decided it wasn't doing me any good, before I moved on to something better?