Liberal Media Outspoken For Living Wage, Just Not For Their Interns The problem with unpaid internships is that interns are people, and in capitalist economies people generally must work for money in order to obtain food and shelter. While I managed to pull it off, a lot of those who want to become journalists aren’t lucky enough to be born white and middle class. My family had enough money to support my stupid “dream,” while others, many no doubt more talented and deserving than I, were barred from even trying because they were too poor to work for nothing. Paying people little to nothing because you can—a practice aided by the awfulness of the job market and the desperation of people trying to make it in “glamor” industries like journalism—is both exploitative and discriminatory, but many good liberals do not appear to recognize it as such, even as they decry that behavior elsewhere. Robert Reich served as labor secretary under Bill Clinton and is outspoken in his support for a living wage. But when I asked him about the trend of entry-level jobs being relabeled “internships” and being stripped of the pay, benefits, and legal rights they once offered recent college grads (by some estimates, half of the estimated 1.5 million interns in America are unpaid), he professed ignorance. “This is not a topic Ive given much thought,” said Reich. vice/read/the-exploited-laborers-of-the-liberal-media Heres what qualifies them as interns rather than employees: dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm The campaign for full employment rights for interns is very active: https://facebook/InternLaborRights InternMatch, a start-up that helps students find internships, is calling on companies to sign a “Bill of Rights’ that promises fair treatment and paid or meaningful work. Some big names are signing on. gigaom/2013/09/22/firms-sign-on-to-intern-bill-of-rights-amid-ongoing-unpaid-labor-fights However, not everyone got the memo, it seems: deadline/2013/11/fox-searchlight-wins-appeal-rights-in-black-swan-intern-class-action/ Photo: Joel Gillman/Flickr Shahed Khan Pathan Saidur Rahman
Posted on: Thu, 05 Dec 2013 03:37:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015