"I'm afraid you can't outlaw people working against their own best interest..." Yes, you can, sadly. Minimum wage laws do exactly this. If you enact a minimum

"I'm afraid you can't outlaw people working against their own best interest..." Yes, you can, sadly. Minimum wage laws do exactly this. If you enact a minimum wage of X, some of the people who make less than X have their wages increase to X, and some get laid off. Or, less dramatically, they find it harder to get a job because their labor isn't actually worth X. Ostensibly, this is balanced out by the benefit to the people who do find work, but it's indisputable that the downside does exist. If it didn't, it begs the question of why we shouldn't raise minimum wage another dollar, then another, ad infinitum until we're all millionaires. The reason interns are de facto excluded from the laws is that they're generally not the class of people the laws are meant to protect. They're young people with a reasonable expectation of future earnings significantly above the minimum wage, not unskilled adults that might be poor forever. In the US, some states even carve out exceptions to minimum wage laws for teenagers working summer jobs for this same reason.