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Want an Unpaid Internship So You Can Get Valuable Experience ? – Screw You

45 points by jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

yummyfajitas 17y ago
A strange fact popped into my mind, after reading this story and remembering some comments on the "Turing deserves an apology" story. Many people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom. As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window. Very confusing.
- psranga 17y ago
  Hmm, one is an equal partnership, the other isn't. The unpaid internship law serves to give some protections to the little guy. Btw, I really don't understand why a billionaire (?) can't afford to pay hourly minimum wages to a bunch of kids.
  - masklinn 17y ago
    > Hmm, one is an equal partnership, the other isn't. Is it really? Is SM play "an equal partnership" between master and slave?
    - tvon 17y ago
      Uh, it's not like the "slave" is someone the "master" just kidnapped. It's an agreed upon situation with an established "safe word" the "slave" can utter at any time to stop whatever is happening.
      - byrneseyeview 17y ago
        An internship is just like that. The safe word is "I quit."
        tvon 17y ago
        I don't know what else I would expect from a thread that started on such an idiotic statement, but yes, you can say that sadomasochism and unpaid internships are similar in that you can get out of both of them by saying words.
        yummyfajitas 17y ago
        The point is that they are both activities engaged in by two consenting adults. It's a common belief that one is not the business of the state, but the other one is. My question: what are the exceptions to the "two consenting adults can do as they wish in privacy" rule?
        masklinn 17y ago
        > My question: what are the exceptions to the "two consenting adults can do as they wish in privacy" rule? (active) voluntary euthanasia is one, though I think it's legal in a pair of US states (Oregon since '94 and Washington since 2008).
        apotheon 17y ago
        I think he was talking about a "rule" of dominant ethics or morality, and not the law, with that question.
      - masklinn 17y ago
        An internship's precisely the same. It's an agreed upon situation with an established "safe word" the "intern" can utter at any time to stop whatever is happening.
  - imp 17y ago
    He probably didn't become a billionaire without trying to find ways to cut costs as much as possible. He's not running a charity.
    - apotheon 17y ago
      > He's not running a charity. I think that's the problem -- people don't want him to help people if it's not a purely charitable effort, for some reason. If he actually derives material benefit from it, that makes him evil. I don't get that attitude, but for some reason that seems to be how people view it.
    - electromagnetic 17y ago
      No he's running a business with employees, some of which he isn't paying because they're 'interns'.
  - dbul 17y ago
    I think it really depends on the industry. If someone had offered me an unpaid internship for coding at any point in my life I would have told them no because I am aware that I could easily earn money or I'd probably be better off contributing to an open source project. But consider the hypothetical in another industry. Someone gets a shot at an unpaid internship, they do really well, the company they are associated with gives them a recommendation, and immediately after the internship they get an offer for a position in that industry. Or: Someone does not get an internship, it is a competitive industry, the person ends up working an $8 / hr job for the next some odd years until they get an opening in the industry. It would seem the benefit to the unpaid intern could be greater than the benefit to the company. Of course, there is the scenario where the person becomes an entrepreneur.
    - apotheon 17y ago
      Coding is a much different situation in many cases, specifically because of the availability of open source projects -- which serves the same purpose as an internship opportunity sometimes. Alas, there's no such thing as "open source development" in many industries. Even for programmers, though, open source development doesn't do everything an internship can do. In fact, some people have a really difficult time getting started contributing to an open source project without some experience working closely with other coders to learn something about collaborative workflow and code review (for instance). The exception to that is cases where someone lucks into having a local mentor to help get them over the bar to entry for open source contributions -- knowledge of how to review others' code, figure out how to improve on it, and produce patches for submission to the project.
  - uopnuiyb 17y ago
    Simple solution - call the job a training course and charge the interns $10k to do it!
    - apotheon 17y ago
      You still wouldn't be allowed to have them do actually useful work for you.
  - te_platt 17y ago
    Who are you to decide the partnership isn't equal? And just how does the internship law protect the little guy? By making sure she can't get valuable experience? Also, just because you don't understand why someone would offer an unpaid internship instead of a minimum wage job doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Should your ignorance be the basis of public policy? I don't mean to come across as rude but come on, I'm a grown adult and don't need or want your "protection".
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    Why is tracking game reports or driving trains unequal, but sex equal? Similarly, why is using sex toys equal, but using colonoscopes unequal? Maybe you could explain what you mean by "equal"?
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  Employment is not a private act, it has huge social ramifications.
  - kingkongrevenge 17y ago
    Procreation and norms of marriage and family have enormous social ramifications. There is no distinction.
    - ahoyhere 17y ago
      I'm sorry, but the two have nothing to do with each other. And, honestly, I'm aghast to find such poor reasoning on HN. Employment shapes society. Employment pays taxes, puts rooves over people's heads, causes stress and worry (what if I lose my job!?), informs societal choices regarding basic social services (tied to company healthcare). Finally, employment is a public act because it is a market -- if Joe works for free, that creates market pressure for Tina to work for free, too. With the exception of (almost entirely illegal) sex trade... 1. Sex does not house people 2. Sex does not employ people 3. Joe doing it up the butt does not affect your ability to find a partner 4. Tina engaging in fellatio with her husband does not affect your ability to find a partner 5. Couples not having babies does not affect other couples' ability to have babies 6. None of this affects healthcare or taxes It's simple: it's not a market. That's why employment is a public act.
      - apotheon 17y ago
        I don't know if you've noticed, but sex creates people.
        ahoyhere 17y ago
        The sex acts that are considered illegal do not create people. Thus they have no greater impact than childless heterosexual couples who only have sex in the missionary position. Whether that childlessness is intentional or accidental is even more irrelevent. Moreover, spouses/sex partners and offspring are not half as fungible as employees. If Joe and Sue (or Bob and Brad) have a child, don't have a child, or adopt a child, that doesn't affect your ability to have a child or not, as you wish. Meanwhile, employing people for nothing does have an affect on the job market.
- cperciva 17y ago
  unlicensed medicine That's completely different. The licensing of medical practitioners is not based on any notion of protecting society from deviant behaviour; it is based on the need to protect vulnerable individuals from fraud. I have no problem with consenting individuals engaging in sex acts or internships, with or without pay -- but I absolutely believe that fraud, in all its forms, should be illegal, since a fraudulent transaction is not one between truly consenting individuals.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    One need not be licensed to be honest.
    - dasil003 17y ago
      One need not keep their train ticket to have purchased one...
      - apotheon 17y ago
        Do you think that refutes anything I said?
    - cperciva 17y ago
      True, and one doesn't need a driver's license to know how to drive -- but a system of licensing is the most efficient way of verifying qualifications.
      - req2 17y ago
        In Illinois, you need a license to charge money to suggest where throw pillows should be placed; interior design is a licensed profession. A system of licensing is the most efficient way of verifying licenses. Licensing helps, but it can be abused. Unlicensed anything isn't necessarily a bad thing, and, legal and mental affairs notwithstanding, buyers should be able to choose between multiple options.
      - apotheon 17y ago
- tvon 17y ago
  The sexual options for two consenting adults are fairly limited compared to "everything else imaginable that is unrelated to having sex". I also don't see any connection between the two schools of thought, other than them both being things you've read recently. At least I've never seen a "CIVIL UNIONS ARE A CIVIL RIGHT, AND NO UNPAID INTERNSHIPS" sign.
- gabrielroth 17y ago
  Under the 13th Amendment, you don't have the right to sell yourself into slavery in the United States. That is, you can't sign a contract under which I pay your family $n and in return you work for me under conditions of slavery. Prohibitions on unpaid labor are an extension of this restriction on your freedom to enter into contract of your own free will.
  - cwan 17y ago
    How is an unpaid internship anywhere close to being slavery? The unpaid intern can walk away at any time. Further, it's the choice of the unpaid intern - not their family as to whether or not to accept the choice.
    - uopnuiyb 17y ago
      So in a recession if GM/Boeing/Walmart demand that all new hires work for no pay for their first year 'as intern trainees' that would be OK? If they fire these people on day 364 and get new trainees next year - that would be ok?
      - cwan 17y ago
        Would it surprise you to know that Walmart pays its entry level workers significantly higher than minimum wage? It's relevant because it shows companies like Walmart/Boeing/GM are not price setters / don't have as much control as you presume. Further, the "race to the bottom" in wages is often not desirable or in the interests of a firm. Sure I don't have a problem with the practice you describe, but I'm pretty sure they would being unable to find workers who care enough or are even productive and losing any good workers to others. The employment market doesn't operate in a vacuum.
      - defen 17y ago
        Why shouldn't they be allowed to? The hit to their reputation if they tried to pull a stunt like that would be far worse than the damage any law could do - they would never be able to hire new people again. You seem to presume that the law is the only thing keeping corporations in line.
- Confusion 17y ago
  Many people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom In that case, both parties are natural persons, in complete freedom, entering into an agreement with each-other that is unlikely to have bad consequences for society. There is not need for government regulation. As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window. Because in those cases, one of the parties is either not a natural person (but a company) or it's a natural person that performs specific actions that have a much larger chance of having bad consequences. Companies can only exist by the grace of government regulation. They can be extremely powerful and hence the government must protect its citizens against it's own creations. Government regulation is already the case. The first purpose of the government is to take care of issues we cannot individually handle. Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is. Government regulation of this is part of its 'reason for being'.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    " Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is." Hardly. Individuals can very easily manage a police force. Look at Blackwater. The reason you might want the State involved in either of these is because you want it to have a monopoly. I really don't want competing police forces and armies. Having competing organizations that evaluated and licensed doctors might be a good thing.
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- rapind 17y ago
  I think his argument is that it would not be a waste of time for the intern who would gain some experience, skills and resume building if they had nothing better to do. However the profits for his business would not be enough to justify minimum wage. I don't think his net worth is relevant to the argument. Regardless I agree with the gov, which I stated in a previous reply.
  - pradocchia 17y ago
    > However the profits for his business would not be enough to justify minimum wage. I think he gave the game away here: One silver lining of a “great recession” that we are now in is that there are a lot of incredibly talented people without jobs, or who have lost their jobs....I thought we could assemble a talented group who would enjoy the internships and could also gain valuable experience to add to their resumes. ie, expectations dashed. Nevermind the cost of labor, though: it's obviously worth his time to try to get this effort off the ground. Why? Brand promotion, of course! Sure, there might not be any directly attributable revenues, but it is very disingenuous of him to claim that he thus cannot afford to pay his interns. cake: have | eat, pick one.
    - apotheon 17y ago
      So . . . the fact you don't want him to be able to benefit from an internship is good enough reason to make sure the would-be interns don't get to benefit from it either. Is that it?
      - pradocchia 17y ago
        Not at all, it could be very beneficial to all parties. More power to him and the free market system. But his concern for the betterment of the interns is just sanctimonious prattle. He doesn't like to leave money on the table, and he's peeved that the government will prevent him from getting the best price possible.
drhodes 17y ago
So call it volunteering? Surely volunteers are not illegal yet.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  So "the government thinks we should pay people who work for us, but what we're going to do is prey on the jobless and exploit their desire for a job in the future, we'll use that hope for a job to get them to volunteer to work for us - then we can dump them and get some more suckers later, we'll be even more rich and they can starve for all we care". Volunteering should not be illegal. Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be. Differentiating these positions is pretty hard - a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    > Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be. I think the idea is that it would be nice to allow people to volunteer/intern when you have no other way to give them that introductory experience. If your options are "give people a chance to get some experience without paying them" and "let them figure out how to get that experience in a down economy on their own because you can't afford to pay anyone", I think trying to find "a way around paying them to do work" is actually good for them. > a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business. So, what you're saying appears to be that for-profit businesses can't directly do anything charitable without paying enormous out-of-pocket costs, since they can't use volunteers. I think your plan sucks.
- dbul 17y ago
  You could call it cddddring if you like. The question is whether the labor of the person benefited the company in any way. If it did, then according to the Fair Labor Standards Act the person must receive compensation. http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.pdf http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.p...
- tnovelli 17y ago
cwan 17y ago
They're the same issues with minimum wage. The "minimum wage brings minimum jobs" because it hurts those with the least experience the most (http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/08/new-video-minimum-wage-brings-minimum-jobs.html http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/08/new-video-minim...). The irony is that people who call themselves advocates for the poor pushing for increasingly higher minimum wages actually hurt the poor with these policies.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  The issue of min wage came up here before - the studies I found were mainly inconclusive, it's a hard one to test. One that came up, was a test in the food service industry (low waged) either side of a state border, one side with min wage the other without. It showed that the min wage tended to increased employment and improve the financial position for those employed with minimum wage vs. those in a non-min wage position. Indeed a larger increase in the in wage over the surrounding areas led to higher employment still. I'll see if I can dig out that study later.
  - cwan 17y ago
    I can respect that it's difficult to isolate for the variables and testing the effects of minimum wage (ie you would have to isolate the "value" created from the various businesses like the food service companies), but the laws of supply and demand are pretty straightforward. Price floors (e.g. minimum wage) result in surpluses, price ceilings (e.g. rent control) result in shortages. From an employer's perspective it's easy to see that the more you pay the more interest you'll get from those who can perform work better. The idea that employers would naturally exploit their workers is a bit silly given the ability for those workers to look elsewhere. And they do - which is why real wages have risen substantially over time (capturing some of the value in productivity improvements) to the point that in many cases entry level/effective minimum wages greatly exceed legislated minimum wage. The idea however that government should impose a choice means higher costs on society - in this case borne by the lowest wage earners as they are the ones who are least employable for whatever reason (by definition), means that fewer get hired. And thus you get examples like this: http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/153901_unemploy26.html http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/153901_unemploy26.html
euroclydon 17y ago
The true crime is that more companies are not offering minimum wage internships. I for one, would be happy to recruit smart kids from college, and spend ten or twenty hours a week providing them with direction. I know the software company I work for could utilize their talent for brute-force work like dependency tracking in our code base, testing, build automation, documentation, etc. I think more small and medium sized companies should provide (paid) internships.
- timr 17y ago
  Exactly. It's sad that the #1 rated comment right now is some ridiculous non sequitur about sex, when there are some pretty glaring holes in Cuban's logic. First off, the value proposition: Cuban is clearly intensely interested in getting this done, because it might be valuable to his company someday. Paraphrased, his argument is that it's not guaranteed to be valuable today, so he shouldn't have to pay anyone to do it. He wants the value, but he doesn't want to pay for it. That's exploitation, no matter how much he tries to sugar-coat it. Second, the notion of "experience" being valuable: if it's true that the work being offered is worthless to Mark Cuban's company, then the intern isn't working for the Dallas Mavericks. She's at best doing something tangentially related to the Mavericks, and hoping that Mark Cuban or his organization will give her a good recommendation someday for doing it. The value proposition to the intern is, at best, debatable, and worse, the intern is in a position where she must excel in an unpaid position to gain any value at all. The best you can say about it is that it's ethically slimy. Third, internships have inherent value to the employer -- they're extended interviews for paying jobs. That's why so many tech companies pay summer salaries and perks to college kids; they want to recruit good employees, cheaply. Cuban completely disregards this notion. Fourth, Cuban grants that the internship has some probability of value to the Mavericks. Thus, the internship has some expected value to the organization. Cuban's argument that the internship has no value is just wrong. Companies routinely hire interns with no concrete expectations about their productivity, because the expectation of value is higher than the cost of a few interns. I'm highly skeptical of any counterargument that this wouldn't also be the case for the Dallas Mavericks. In short, there are any number of logical holes in Cuban's argument, but the HN conversation is featuring a conversation about sex and individual liberty instead of discussing the topic at hand.
rapind 17y ago
It may not be a popular opinion but I agree with the US gov on this one. Everyone wants something for free. However, I think the big problem is how the compensation is valued. If the experience gained by the intern is more valuable than minimum wage, then yes, the law seems broken. However for every job that would actually provide meaningful experience and benefit the intern there are probably many other internships that provide very little if any benefit to the intern. Since the gov really has no easy way of measuring the experience / networking compensation, if they attempted to, it would be to the detriment of the mojority of iterns, who would end up working for free for very little if any benefit. I don't have any numbers to back up my claim of non-beneficial v.s. beneficial free internships. However, I also don't have anything to gain either way and it's just my impartial gut feeling that any system that tried to solve his problem would create more problems for the majority of these free interns, or end up costing tax payer's a lot to police the practice.
- cwan 17y ago
  You haven't explained why you agree with the US government on this one (though it's not just the US government). Value is subjective - so in the end, why would we rely on the government to establish value in the first place? Are you saying that instead of letting people make their own choices at an individual level as to whether or not the experience is of value, it's better for government to just ban the choice altogether?
  - akeefer 17y ago
    I'll take a crack at justifying it. First of all, if you have a minimum wage law (which we do), it has to be enforced. Allowing people to work as "unpaid interns" is a half-assed way that corporations take to work around that law. You can argue about the efficacy of minimum wage laws, but it seems like real empirical studies (instead of just theoretical arguments) have been pretty inconclusive. And overall, the point is that you can't just let people create a massive loophole in that law by just deciding not to pay people at all. Secondly, from a simple ethical standpoint, unpaid internships privilege people who are already well enough off to be able to give their labor away for free (i.e. generally middle-class or wealthier kids whose parents can support them). You don't get a lot of poor kids applying for unpaid internships at age 20 or 22 because, guess what, they need those 40+ hours a week to actually earn an income. So the tradition of unpaid internships in certain traditionally white-collar industries tends to be a subtle form of class discrimination. And recasting it as a "volunteer" thing is also a total cop-out: you volunteer for a non-profit charity, not a for-profit corporation.
pjvandehaar 17y ago
He'd lose a little money, but couldn't he pay them minimum wage and then charge them $7/hour for the training he's giving them(just like the martial arts schools)? Also, if his company is him and a bunch of interns, who's going to sue him?
- krschultz 17y ago
  His company is very large. He owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and HDnet, along with a bunch of other smaller things. Plenty of money for lawyers to go after.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    . . . and, as he pointed out, in some jurisdictions at least it doesn't have to be someone within the company suing. A competitor could sue, or some ridiculous do-gooder who can't stand to see people "exploited" (like some of the people in this discussion, evidently).
ahoyhere 17y ago
As if the job market weren't already too much of a "buyer's market." So many Americans are held hostage by their jobs because of the lack of good unemployment/severance and the deathgrip of health insurance. I don't see any reason to encourage the situation even more by having some jobs - that are actually jobs - be for no pay. Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience.
- apotheon 17y ago
  > Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience. . . . but useless for getting your foot in the job field's door, because you have to already be there to "take advantage" of that "opportunity". Your "solution" completely ignores the catch 22 of needing a job to get experience and needing experience to get a job.
  - ahoyhere 17y ago
    After years of freelancing, without prior "work experience" and without even a high school diploma, my first job paid me $64,000. Think about it - I ran my own business, I was responsible for everything from client acquisition, billing, account management, not to mention actual production and marketing. And I didn't starve or get evicted, so it clearly worked. That's great experience. An unpaid internship doesn't give you any more experience than running your own business. And honestly, it can reflect poorly on your business acumen and/or drive. If you are relying on the names on your resume, not what you actually did, it's not going to do you much good. It's fine to not have enough drive to do things on your own, to want to take the "default route" to "default success." There's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. I applaud anyone who finds their path to happiness. But. People frame these unpaid internships as some great act of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, and they're not. If you want to be rewarded down the road for great acts of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, be an entrepreneur. Bonus: that creates jobs, and builds everyone up, instead of creating competition for 'free' jobs that pay nothing but 'experience.'
    - 17y ago
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timmaah 17y ago
Where our politicians would rather see you pay out of your pocket to go back to school rather than get valuable on the job experience. huh.?. from what I have seen, politics almost runs on interns. Every politician and political organisation has unpaid interns doing real work. The whitehouse has hundreds.. http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/Internships/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/Internships/
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  Is The Whitehouse a for profit privately owned business (eg via stock).
  - timmaah 17y ago
    I understand that.. but the fact that the white house and politicians he rails against have interns show that they think it is a positive experience. They also know a for-profit business should be paying their workers. (Not to say I agree one way or the other. It is a fine line between experience and exploitation)
    - cwan 17y ago
      re: "It is a fine line between experience and exploitation" - shouldn't the person getting the experience/being exploited be the arbiter of that rather than some random bureaucrat?
      - timmaah 17y ago
        In a perfect world yes.. but in the real world that is the reason there are labor unions. If you complete a 6 month internship we will give you a job. And keep stringing the person along.. etc.. I think a good compromise would limit an internship to 3 months, afterwards you have to pay. And the employee has to be in a college or degree program or 2 years out of one. And somehow limit it so Burger King can't make you work 3 months for free.
        17y ago
sfphotoarts 17y ago
A billionaire complaining he has to pay people.... to paraphrase the title of the post, screw him.
- apotheon 17y ago
  Actually, he's complaining that he can't employ people for a project that probably won't happen at all unless he can employ interns. You're saying "screw him" because he wants to create something that is of greater advantage to people entering the workforce than not having it in existence at all.
  - pradocchia 17y ago
    > he can't employ people for a project that probably won't happen at all unless he can employ interns I find that very doubtful. Why is he even considering the project if the cost of paid interns would negate the upside?
    - apotheon 17y ago
      I could speculate about that all day. Maybe it has the potential to become beneficial. Maybe it has secondary effects that would be beneficial to his sports franchise, but he can't justify the expense to shareholders. Maybe he would like to provide something for the fans because he's a fan himself. What's it to you why he wants to do it?
      - mcantelon 17y ago
        If it has value in these forms then why isn't he willing to pay for this value? Basically he wants unpaid interns to subsidize his investment. Not only do the interns themselves pay, but society as a whole pays as unpaid internships devalue labor.
        apotheon 17y ago
        Why does everyone seem so insistent on ignoring the claim that it's too expensive to pay regular employees for this work, and as a result, without interns, the project won't happen at all?
alex_c 17y ago
Unpaid internships are one of the biggest scams ever. You want me to work for you for free so I get "invaluable experience"? How much is my work worth to you, if you're not paying me? For that matter, how much is the experience I get, if I'm doing worthless work? You want ME to be grateful for the privilege of getting the experience of making YOU money for nothing in return? Screw YOU. Mark Cuban makes it sound like this is about the bright-eyed ambitious kid who just wants to get his foot in the door and, given that one chance, will eventually rise up to run the company. Bullshit. The ambitious kid will find a way. This isn't about him. This is about all the people struggling on the lowest rungs of a profession, trying to enter it. They can't find a job, so they'll jump at any chance they can to be "working" in their chosen field, even if they don't get paid. They're strung along with the promise of an actual job down the road. And guess what? As soon as they want money, they're out, replaced by someone else who's willing to work for free. This is about having too much supply and not enough demand for a profession, and free labor only makes the problem worse, by masking the real market condition. This is about a lot of things. It's about ambitious kids, it's about struggling people, it's about flux in employment conditions. You can bring in mentions of the apprenticeship model of yore, but you'll probably realize pretty quickly that there are some big differences. But let's drop that bullshit and call it what it is, Mark. You're arguing against minimum wage, since zero is usually less than the minimum wage. Why don't you come up and make that argument straight up. Edit: after re-reading my comment and noticing how many comments there are here and on his blog, I once again realize that Mark Cuban is a troll. Bleh.
- deleted 17y ago
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- fatdog789 17y ago
  In some fields, the unpaid internship is valuable experience. For example, the legal profession. Legal services organizations, such as your local public defender's office or legal aid society provide more experience in 4 months than a $160k job with a big firm would provide in 3 years. You see actual clients, do meaningful legal research, and even appear in court on a regular basis. In contrast, the cushy firm job sees you in an office performing document review (i.e., looking for grammatical/spelling errors) for close to 2 years with the occasional real assignment every few months. Also note, that in the legal profession, lawyers do not begin generating their profit for their employer (in a firm setting) until 3-4 years in -- it costs money in lost billing opportunities (clients will not pay for a new lawyer's work whatever the quality, but firms must pay salary). (The 4 month period is chosen because that is the lag between the Cali bar exam and the release of results in late November, the "post-bar" period during which finding a paid job is close to impossible if you didn't already find one before graduation.).
brandnewlow 17y ago
Perhaps this is why most unpaid internship programs require you to line stuff up with your school. This was they can classify it as an educational activity?
- apotheon 17y ago
  Did you read the article? Apparently even internships used to satisfy school requirements are often illegal.
dannyr 17y ago
If Mark Cuban's social media effort does not generate revenue, why do it then? The Mavericks after all is a for-profit business.
rjett0 17y ago
Everyone deserves fair compensation for their work. I've never understood how anyone could work for a profitable business for free. An intern, especially in the technical field, is probably more up to date than a salaried employee.
- apotheon 17y ago
  > An intern, especially in the technical field, is probably more up to date than a salaried employee. That's a dubious claim, but let's roll with it, just for argument's sake. If it's true, that doesn't change the fact that someone likely to get an internship doesn't have any job experience, and may thus have a very, very difficult time getting hired. This is why people accept internships; so they can get experience that allows them to get a job.
voidpointer 17y ago
I think the argument that interns are somehow compensated by "gaining invaluable experience" is somewhat of a strawman. Experience doesn't go away if an intern gets it. Money does and work gets done. I have seen too many people being lured into one "valuable" internship after the other. SOmeone wanted to get some work done and offered "valuable industry insights" as compensation. That is just laughable. If you need someone to do work, pay for it. Simple as that.
- apotheon 17y ago
  1. I'm not sure you're clear on the meaning of the term "strawman". 2. An internship actually can be valuable work experience, and that job may not exist at all if it can't be unpaid.
  - voidpointer 17y ago
    Strawman in a sense were the party offering the unpaid internship distorts the value of the compensation through gaining experience. So the argument of the first party not being paid can be refuted by saying that compensation occurs through gaining experience. You are right though, it's quite a stretch of the term. What I wanted to say is that the party offering compensation through experience is, in my opinion, just trying to get free work and making it look like they are "paying" by "giving out" experience. A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses. The employer should pay (in money) what the work done is worth to them.
    - apotheon 17y ago
      > Strawman in a sense were the party offering the unpaid internship distorts the value of the compensation through gaining experience. So the argument of the first party not being paid can be refuted by saying that compensation occurs through gaining experience. That wouldn't make it a strawman fallacy -- it would just make it refutable. > in my opinion I don't think that the fact some people have that opinion is justification for the law. > A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses. I haven't heard of many full-time internships. People who take internships generally don't have the time for full-time without pay, and the organizations that offer those internships tend to know that.
onlyafly 17y ago
I can't think of an article I've read recently that I disagree with more. This is a good law that protects potential employees from being used by cheapskates like the author of this article who want to get slave labor from their employees. Free internships hurt those looking for jobs because they have to compete with free when they need money to pay the bills.
davidw 17y ago
I think I agree with Cuban on this one, with the caveat that anyone who works for free for a billionaire is a bit soft in the head. I can see not paying market wages, but not even minimum wage?
iseff 17y ago
A serious question: What's the difference between an "unpaid internship" and a CEO of a successful company (e.g. Steve Jobs) who gets paid $1/year? Is there not a way to get around this law by simply putting the intern on a $1/summer salary?
- codexon 17y ago
  The difference is that a CEO like Steve Jobs gets millions or billions worth of stock options which is equivalent to a salary except instead of getting taxed at the +35% bracket, it get's taxed at 15% capital gains tax (lowered from 20% by Bush).
shiranaihito 17y ago
Summary: "I can't have people work for me for free. Boo-Hoo!"
doki_pen 17y ago
With unemployment so high, why should there be free labor? It is not in the best interest of "We the People".
Vivtek 17y ago
There is a really simple way around this, used only by everybody online this century: set up a fan organization and allow your so-called "interns" to do volunteer work. Make it a collaborative community, and give some fricking minimal thought to quality control by means of a voting system, and your problem is solved. It's 2009. Why is the owner of the Mavericks not aware of this sort of thing? Answer: he wants full ownership control of the resulting content. But he doesn't want to pay for it - that would make him less of a billionaire. So actual volunteer work is out. He wants the benefits of ownership without the disadvantage of paying people. The government is right, here. Unpaid work for somebody who fully owns the results and benefits from it directly is a scam. It's spec work for God's sake, and I certainly see plenty of people coming out of the woodwork decrying that every time it comes up. Yet here, everybody's piling on the government for trying to prevent a billionaire from taking advantage of a bunch of out-of-work creative staff. (If people want "valuable experience", there's no shortage of volunteer work that won't involve a billionaire laughing all the way to the bank.)
anonjon 17y ago
Don't Want to Pay to Have Someone do a Shitload of Work for You? Screw You! Not paying someone to do business related work devalues that 'sort of work', across the board. If I can get interns to some amount of work for free, then I am not employing and (more importantly) paying someone to do that same work. This may be good for the company, but it is bad for people who are unemployed and the other employees of the company. This is because the practice drags down the average price that any company can expect to pay for one unit of that 'sort of work'. This may be great for shareholders, the CEO's bank balance, but it is not good for anyone else. (Economically it is better to have an intern making minimum wage, and spending it than to have the money aggregating in some billionaire's bank somewhere). To act like the intern has any choice in the matter is wrong; as the majority of companies now precondition employment for even the 'starting' positions with some amount of experience. It used to be that employers would hire kids right out of college and actually take the time to mentor them in the business world. Then it was internships during college, and now it is unpaid internships, and soon I'm sure we will be paying for the opportunity to work! It strikes me as incredibly arrogant that someone would think that the mere experience of working for him is equivalent to any sort of compensation. (What am I really gaining out of making photocopies for you, Mr. Cuban?) When profitable work gets done, someone should get paid, end of story. To me that seems to be morally and ethically correct, even if it drives my bottom line down by a few dollars an hour.
tptacek 17y ago
Just pay the fucking interns, billionare. If we can do it, so can you.
clistctrl 17y ago
I did an unpaid internship about 4 years ago.. it got my career started, and for that i'm thankful. But it makes me wonder, could I ask for back pay? I know the work i did provided value to the company.
abalashov 17y ago
For example, there was a case of an internship for working on a train. The company had the interns driving trains from one end of their yard to the other under close supervision. The moving of the trains was completely unnecessary and was just being done to train the potential employees. It seems to me that this is a rather vague, academic argument. Maybe the trains benefit from occasional movement in order to keep their mechanical systems lubricated, so that certain fluids and pressure chambers don't go flat, etc. Obviously, I have no idea if that's true. I don't know a thing about trains or other mechanical systems. The point is that if one wants to, one can probably make the claim - however tenuous - that just about any sort of 'kinetics' of supposedly "no value" to the company do, in fact, have some benefit. Grooming potential future employees by having them do "useless" work can lower future recruitment costs and reduce risk. Isn't that "valuable?"
Mcuban 17y ago
Lets add some reality to these discussion. to add a person, regardless of how much they are paid has a significant cost. So its never free to an employer. Paid or unpaid. An unpaid intern is going to be someone we know is looking to Use Us to create value for themselves. That if the experience doesnt create value for them. They are gone. That in exchange for not being paid, they in essences have far more flexibility. They can stay or leave at their whim. We have nothing more to keep them showing up to work than the experience we create for them. That is a far different challenge than someone just looking for a job. This is particularly true when you are trying to create a new dimension to a business. When we started MicroSolutions as one of the first local area networking systems integrators in 1983, we had unpaid people who saw the long term benefit of LANS. Many we hired and who benefited as the company established itself and then was sold to HR Block. In 1995 we had unpaid people who saw the opportunity to get involved with broadcasting on the internet. Some got jobs and made millions. Others leveraged the positions to bigger and better things. in 2001 we started HDNet under the proposition that eventually HDTVs would be ubiquitous and cost far less than 10k in future years. We brought on unpaid interns who went on to become full time employees and others that leveraged the experience into jobs. Like those in my companies before them, it was valuable to them to have experience and unique knowledge as an employee of a company that is an early innovator and a leader in their field. in this case, I was looking for new ways to create a profitable media endeavor for the Mavs. One look around you is all it takes to see that making any media endeavor profitable is very difficult. I was willing to absorb the overhead and use my existing employees and infrastructure to train the interns and then see if we could get anything going at all. Its an opportunity for the Mavs and for those who want to gain experience in trying to develop new sports media models. So why not just pay them ? Whats 8 dollars an hour ? First of all its a paperwork nightmare. I had to ask HR if we could even do unpaid internships, which is a ridiculous concept in and of itself. Starting or extending a business is no longer just about an idea and execution. Its about paperwork. Its about having employees to manage all that paperwork. Its about work rules.Its about insurance. Its about introducing hassle to existing employees who already have enough to do. so to bring on say 10 paid interns isnt just about paying the interns, its about making the choice to either further burden existing employees, or to possibly hire another back office professionals who doesnt want to take a job with the possibility they could be fired a few weeks later because my new media idea didnt pan out. Businesses live in a paperwork and overhead prison these days. So instead of bringing on the unpaid interns, I had a meeting with our existing people and found 1 person who i could push a little harder to try to experiment with some things. I dont think its the optimal way to test some ideas, but it will have to do.

A strange fact popped into my mind, after reading this story and remembering some comments on the "Turing deserves an apology" story. Many people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom. As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window. Very confusing.

psranga 17y ago
Hmm, one is an equal partnership, the other isn't. The unpaid internship law serves to give some protections to the little guy. Btw, I really don't understand why a billionaire (?) can't afford to pay hourly minimum wages to a bunch of kids.
- masklinn 17y ago
  > Hmm, one is an equal partnership, the other isn't. Is it really? Is SM play "an equal partnership" between master and slave?
  - tvon 17y ago
    Uh, it's not like the "slave" is someone the "master" just kidnapped. It's an agreed upon situation with an established "safe word" the "slave" can utter at any time to stop whatever is happening.
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      An internship is just like that. The safe word is "I quit."
      - tvon 17y ago
        I don't know what else I would expect from a thread that started on such an idiotic statement, but yes, you can say that sadomasochism and unpaid internships are similar in that you can get out of both of them by saying words.
        yummyfajitas 17y ago
        The point is that they are both activities engaged in by two consenting adults. It's a common belief that one is not the business of the state, but the other one is. My question: what are the exceptions to the "two consenting adults can do as they wish in privacy" rule?
        masklinn 17y ago
        > My question: what are the exceptions to the "two consenting adults can do as they wish in privacy" rule? (active) voluntary euthanasia is one, though I think it's legal in a pair of US states (Oregon since '94 and Washington since 2008).
        apotheon 17y ago
        I think he was talking about a "rule" of dominant ethics or morality, and not the law, with that question.
    - masklinn 17y ago
      An internship's precisely the same. It's an agreed upon situation with an established "safe word" the "intern" can utter at any time to stop whatever is happening.
- imp 17y ago
  He probably didn't become a billionaire without trying to find ways to cut costs as much as possible. He's not running a charity.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    > He's not running a charity. I think that's the problem -- people don't want him to help people if it's not a purely charitable effort, for some reason. If he actually derives material benefit from it, that makes him evil. I don't get that attitude, but for some reason that seems to be how people view it.
  - electromagnetic 17y ago
    No he's running a business with employees, some of which he isn't paying because they're 'interns'.
- dbul 17y ago
  I think it really depends on the industry. If someone had offered me an unpaid internship for coding at any point in my life I would have told them no because I am aware that I could easily earn money or I'd probably be better off contributing to an open source project. But consider the hypothetical in another industry. Someone gets a shot at an unpaid internship, they do really well, the company they are associated with gives them a recommendation, and immediately after the internship they get an offer for a position in that industry. Or: Someone does not get an internship, it is a competitive industry, the person ends up working an $8 / hr job for the next some odd years until they get an opening in the industry. It would seem the benefit to the unpaid intern could be greater than the benefit to the company. Of course, there is the scenario where the person becomes an entrepreneur.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    Coding is a much different situation in many cases, specifically because of the availability of open source projects -- which serves the same purpose as an internship opportunity sometimes. Alas, there's no such thing as "open source development" in many industries. Even for programmers, though, open source development doesn't do everything an internship can do. In fact, some people have a really difficult time getting started contributing to an open source project without some experience working closely with other coders to learn something about collaborative workflow and code review (for instance). The exception to that is cases where someone lucks into having a local mentor to help get them over the bar to entry for open source contributions -- knowledge of how to review others' code, figure out how to improve on it, and produce patches for submission to the project.
- uopnuiyb 17y ago
  Simple solution - call the job a training course and charge the interns $10k to do it!
  - apotheon 17y ago
    You still wouldn't be allowed to have them do actually useful work for you.
- te_platt 17y ago
  Who are you to decide the partnership isn't equal? And just how does the internship law protect the little guy? By making sure she can't get valuable experience? Also, just because you don't understand why someone would offer an unpaid internship instead of a minimum wage job doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Should your ignorance be the basis of public policy? I don't mean to come across as rude but come on, I'm a grown adult and don't need or want your "protection".
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  Why is tracking game reports or driving trains unequal, but sex equal? Similarly, why is using sex toys equal, but using colonoscopes unequal? Maybe you could explain what you mean by "equal"?
ahoyhere 17y ago
Employment is not a private act, it has huge social ramifications.
- kingkongrevenge 17y ago
  Procreation and norms of marriage and family have enormous social ramifications. There is no distinction.
  - ahoyhere 17y ago
    I'm sorry, but the two have nothing to do with each other. And, honestly, I'm aghast to find such poor reasoning on HN. Employment shapes society. Employment pays taxes, puts rooves over people's heads, causes stress and worry (what if I lose my job!?), informs societal choices regarding basic social services (tied to company healthcare). Finally, employment is a public act because it is a market -- if Joe works for free, that creates market pressure for Tina to work for free, too. With the exception of (almost entirely illegal) sex trade... 1. Sex does not house people 2. Sex does not employ people 3. Joe doing it up the butt does not affect your ability to find a partner 4. Tina engaging in fellatio with her husband does not affect your ability to find a partner 5. Couples not having babies does not affect other couples' ability to have babies 6. None of this affects healthcare or taxes It's simple: it's not a market. That's why employment is a public act.
    - apotheon 17y ago
      I don't know if you've noticed, but sex creates people.
      - ahoyhere 17y ago
        The sex acts that are considered illegal do not create people. Thus they have no greater impact than childless heterosexual couples who only have sex in the missionary position. Whether that childlessness is intentional or accidental is even more irrelevent. Moreover, spouses/sex partners and offspring are not half as fungible as employees. If Joe and Sue (or Bob and Brad) have a child, don't have a child, or adopt a child, that doesn't affect your ability to have a child or not, as you wish. Meanwhile, employing people for nothing does have an affect on the job market.
cperciva 17y ago
unlicensed medicine That's completely different. The licensing of medical practitioners is not based on any notion of protecting society from deviant behaviour; it is based on the need to protect vulnerable individuals from fraud. I have no problem with consenting individuals engaging in sex acts or internships, with or without pay -- but I absolutely believe that fraud, in all its forms, should be illegal, since a fraudulent transaction is not one between truly consenting individuals.
- apotheon 17y ago
  One need not be licensed to be honest.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    One need not keep their train ticket to have purchased one...
    - apotheon 17y ago
      Do you think that refutes anything I said?
  - cperciva 17y ago
    True, and one doesn't need a driver's license to know how to drive -- but a system of licensing is the most efficient way of verifying qualifications.
    - req2 17y ago
      In Illinois, you need a license to charge money to suggest where throw pillows should be placed; interior design is a licensed profession. A system of licensing is the most efficient way of verifying licenses. Licensing helps, but it can be abused. Unlicensed anything isn't necessarily a bad thing, and, legal and mental affairs notwithstanding, buyers should be able to choose between multiple options.
    - apotheon 17y ago
tvon 17y ago
The sexual options for two consenting adults are fairly limited compared to "everything else imaginable that is unrelated to having sex". I also don't see any connection between the two schools of thought, other than them both being things you've read recently. At least I've never seen a "CIVIL UNIONS ARE A CIVIL RIGHT, AND NO UNPAID INTERNSHIPS" sign.
gabrielroth 17y ago
Under the 13th Amendment, you don't have the right to sell yourself into slavery in the United States. That is, you can't sign a contract under which I pay your family $n and in return you work for me under conditions of slavery. Prohibitions on unpaid labor are an extension of this restriction on your freedom to enter into contract of your own free will.
- cwan 17y ago
  How is an unpaid internship anywhere close to being slavery? The unpaid intern can walk away at any time. Further, it's the choice of the unpaid intern - not their family as to whether or not to accept the choice.
  - uopnuiyb 17y ago
    So in a recession if GM/Boeing/Walmart demand that all new hires work for no pay for their first year 'as intern trainees' that would be OK? If they fire these people on day 364 and get new trainees next year - that would be ok?
    - cwan 17y ago
      Would it surprise you to know that Walmart pays its entry level workers significantly higher than minimum wage? It's relevant because it shows companies like Walmart/Boeing/GM are not price setters / don't have as much control as you presume. Further, the "race to the bottom" in wages is often not desirable or in the interests of a firm. Sure I don't have a problem with the practice you describe, but I'm pretty sure they would being unable to find workers who care enough or are even productive and losing any good workers to others. The employment market doesn't operate in a vacuum.
    - defen 17y ago
      Why shouldn't they be allowed to? The hit to their reputation if they tried to pull a stunt like that would be far worse than the damage any law could do - they would never be able to hire new people again. You seem to presume that the law is the only thing keeping corporations in line.
Confusion 17y ago
Many people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom In that case, both parties are natural persons, in complete freedom, entering into an agreement with each-other that is unlikely to have bad consequences for society. There is not need for government regulation. As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window. Because in those cases, one of the parties is either not a natural person (but a company) or it's a natural person that performs specific actions that have a much larger chance of having bad consequences. Companies can only exist by the grace of government regulation. They can be extremely powerful and hence the government must protect its citizens against it's own creations. Government regulation is already the case. The first purpose of the government is to take care of issues we cannot individually handle. Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is. Government regulation of this is part of its 'reason for being'.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  " Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is." Hardly. Individuals can very easily manage a police force. Look at Blackwater. The reason you might want the State involved in either of these is because you want it to have a monopoly. I really don't want competing police forces and armies. Having competing organizations that evaluated and licensed doctors might be a good thing.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

rapind 17y ago
I think his argument is that it would not be a waste of time for the intern who would gain some experience, skills and resume building if they had nothing better to do. However the profits for his business would not be enough to justify minimum wage. I don't think his net worth is relevant to the argument. Regardless I agree with the gov, which I stated in a previous reply.
- pradocchia 17y ago
  > However the profits for his business would not be enough to justify minimum wage. I think he gave the game away here: One silver lining of a “great recession” that we are now in is that there are a lot of incredibly talented people without jobs, or who have lost their jobs....I thought we could assemble a talented group who would enjoy the internships and could also gain valuable experience to add to their resumes. ie, expectations dashed. Nevermind the cost of labor, though: it's obviously worth his time to try to get this effort off the ground. Why? Brand promotion, of course! Sure, there might not be any directly attributable revenues, but it is very disingenuous of him to claim that he thus cannot afford to pay his interns. cake: have | eat, pick one.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    So . . . the fact you don't want him to be able to benefit from an internship is good enough reason to make sure the would-be interns don't get to benefit from it either. Is that it?
    - pradocchia 17y ago
      Not at all, it could be very beneficial to all parties. More power to him and the free market system. But his concern for the betterment of the interns is just sanctimonious prattle. He doesn't like to leave money on the table, and he's peeved that the government will prevent him from getting the best price possible.

drhodes 17y ago

So call it volunteering? Surely volunteers are not illegal yet.

pbhjpbhj 17y ago
So "the government thinks we should pay people who work for us, but what we're going to do is prey on the jobless and exploit their desire for a job in the future, we'll use that hope for a job to get them to volunteer to work for us - then we can dump them and get some more suckers later, we'll be even more rich and they can starve for all we care". Volunteering should not be illegal. Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be. Differentiating these positions is pretty hard - a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business.
- apotheon 17y ago
  > Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be. I think the idea is that it would be nice to allow people to volunteer/intern when you have no other way to give them that introductory experience. If your options are "give people a chance to get some experience without paying them" and "let them figure out how to get that experience in a down economy on their own because you can't afford to pay anyone", I think trying to find "a way around paying them to do work" is actually good for them. > a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business. So, what you're saying appears to be that for-profit businesses can't directly do anything charitable without paying enormous out-of-pocket costs, since they can't use volunteers. I think your plan sucks.
dbul 17y ago
You could call it cddddring if you like. The question is whether the labor of the person benefited the company in any way. If it did, then according to the Fair Labor Standards Act the person must receive compensation. http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.pdf http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.p...
tnovelli 17y ago

cwan 17y ago

They're the same issues with minimum wage. The "minimum wage brings minimum jobs" because it hurts those with the least experience the most (http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/08/new-video-minimum-wage-brings-minimum-jobs.html http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/08/new-video-minim...). The irony is that people who call themselves advocates for the poor pushing for increasingly higher minimum wages actually hurt the poor with these policies.

pbhjpbhj 17y ago
The issue of min wage came up here before - the studies I found were mainly inconclusive, it's a hard one to test. One that came up, was a test in the food service industry (low waged) either side of a state border, one side with min wage the other without. It showed that the min wage tended to increased employment and improve the financial position for those employed with minimum wage vs. those in a non-min wage position. Indeed a larger increase in the in wage over the surrounding areas led to higher employment still. I'll see if I can dig out that study later.
- cwan 17y ago
  I can respect that it's difficult to isolate for the variables and testing the effects of minimum wage (ie you would have to isolate the "value" created from the various businesses like the food service companies), but the laws of supply and demand are pretty straightforward. Price floors (e.g. minimum wage) result in surpluses, price ceilings (e.g. rent control) result in shortages. From an employer's perspective it's easy to see that the more you pay the more interest you'll get from those who can perform work better. The idea that employers would naturally exploit their workers is a bit silly given the ability for those workers to look elsewhere. And they do - which is why real wages have risen substantially over time (capturing some of the value in productivity improvements) to the point that in many cases entry level/effective minimum wages greatly exceed legislated minimum wage. The idea however that government should impose a choice means higher costs on society - in this case borne by the lowest wage earners as they are the ones who are least employable for whatever reason (by definition), means that fewer get hired. And thus you get examples like this: http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/153901_unemploy26.html http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/153901_unemploy26.html

euroclydon 17y ago

The true crime is that more companies are not offering minimum wage internships. I for one, would be happy to recruit smart kids from college, and spend ten or twenty hours a week providing them with direction. I know the software company I work for could utilize their talent for brute-force work like dependency tracking in our code base, testing, build automation, documentation, etc. I think more small and medium sized companies should provide (paid) internships.

timr 17y ago
Exactly. It's sad that the #1 rated comment right now is some ridiculous non sequitur about sex, when there are some pretty glaring holes in Cuban's logic. First off, the value proposition: Cuban is clearly intensely interested in getting this done, because it might be valuable to his company someday. Paraphrased, his argument is that it's not guaranteed to be valuable today, so he shouldn't have to pay anyone to do it. He wants the value, but he doesn't want to pay for it. That's exploitation, no matter how much he tries to sugar-coat it. Second, the notion of "experience" being valuable: if it's true that the work being offered is worthless to Mark Cuban's company, then the intern isn't working for the Dallas Mavericks. She's at best doing something tangentially related to the Mavericks, and hoping that Mark Cuban or his organization will give her a good recommendation someday for doing it. The value proposition to the intern is, at best, debatable, and worse, the intern is in a position where she must excel in an unpaid position to gain any value at all. The best you can say about it is that it's ethically slimy. Third, internships have inherent value to the employer -- they're extended interviews for paying jobs. That's why so many tech companies pay summer salaries and perks to college kids; they want to recruit good employees, cheaply. Cuban completely disregards this notion. Fourth, Cuban grants that the internship has some probability of value to the Mavericks. Thus, the internship has some expected value to the organization. Cuban's argument that the internship has no value is just wrong. Companies routinely hire interns with no concrete expectations about their productivity, because the expectation of value is higher than the cost of a few interns. I'm highly skeptical of any counterargument that this wouldn't also be the case for the Dallas Mavericks. In short, there are any number of logical holes in Cuban's argument, but the HN conversation is featuring a conversation about sex and individual liberty instead of discussing the topic at hand.

rapind 17y ago

It may not be a popular opinion but I agree with the US gov on this one. Everyone wants something for free. However, I think the big problem is how the compensation is valued. If the experience gained by the intern is more valuable than minimum wage, then yes, the law seems broken. However for every job that would actually provide meaningful experience and benefit the intern there are probably many other internships that provide very little if any benefit to the intern. Since the gov really has no easy way of measuring the experience / networking compensation, if they attempted to, it would be to the detriment of the mojority of iterns, who would end up working for free for very little if any benefit. I don't have any numbers to back up my claim of non-beneficial v.s. beneficial free internships. However, I also don't have anything to gain either way and it's just my impartial gut feeling that any system that tried to solve his problem would create more problems for the majority of these free interns, or end up costing tax payer's a lot to police the practice.

cwan 17y ago
You haven't explained why you agree with the US government on this one (though it's not just the US government). Value is subjective - so in the end, why would we rely on the government to establish value in the first place? Are you saying that instead of letting people make their own choices at an individual level as to whether or not the experience is of value, it's better for government to just ban the choice altogether?
- akeefer 17y ago
  I'll take a crack at justifying it. First of all, if you have a minimum wage law (which we do), it has to be enforced. Allowing people to work as "unpaid interns" is a half-assed way that corporations take to work around that law. You can argue about the efficacy of minimum wage laws, but it seems like real empirical studies (instead of just theoretical arguments) have been pretty inconclusive. And overall, the point is that you can't just let people create a massive loophole in that law by just deciding not to pay people at all. Secondly, from a simple ethical standpoint, unpaid internships privilege people who are already well enough off to be able to give their labor away for free (i.e. generally middle-class or wealthier kids whose parents can support them). You don't get a lot of poor kids applying for unpaid internships at age 20 or 22 because, guess what, they need those 40+ hours a week to actually earn an income. So the tradition of unpaid internships in certain traditionally white-collar industries tends to be a subtle form of class discrimination. And recasting it as a "volunteer" thing is also a total cop-out: you volunteer for a non-profit charity, not a for-profit corporation.

pjvandehaar 17y ago

He'd lose a little money, but couldn't he pay them minimum wage and then charge them $7/hour for the training he's giving them(just like the martial arts schools)? Also, if his company is him and a bunch of interns, who's going to sue him?

krschultz 17y ago
His company is very large. He owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and HDnet, along with a bunch of other smaller things. Plenty of money for lawyers to go after.
- apotheon 17y ago
  . . . and, as he pointed out, in some jurisdictions at least it doesn't have to be someone within the company suing. A competitor could sue, or some ridiculous do-gooder who can't stand to see people "exploited" (like some of the people in this discussion, evidently).

ahoyhere 17y ago

As if the job market weren't already too much of a "buyer's market." So many Americans are held hostage by their jobs because of the lack of good unemployment/severance and the deathgrip of health insurance. I don't see any reason to encourage the situation even more by having some jobs - that are actually jobs - be for no pay. Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience.

apotheon 17y ago
> Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience. . . . but useless for getting your foot in the job field's door, because you have to already be there to "take advantage" of that "opportunity". Your "solution" completely ignores the catch 22 of needing a job to get experience and needing experience to get a job.
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  After years of freelancing, without prior "work experience" and without even a high school diploma, my first job paid me $64,000. Think about it - I ran my own business, I was responsible for everything from client acquisition, billing, account management, not to mention actual production and marketing. And I didn't starve or get evicted, so it clearly worked. That's great experience. An unpaid internship doesn't give you any more experience than running your own business. And honestly, it can reflect poorly on your business acumen and/or drive. If you are relying on the names on your resume, not what you actually did, it's not going to do you much good. It's fine to not have enough drive to do things on your own, to want to take the "default route" to "default success." There's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. I applaud anyone who finds their path to happiness. But. People frame these unpaid internships as some great act of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, and they're not. If you want to be rewarded down the road for great acts of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, be an entrepreneur. Bonus: that creates jobs, and builds everyone up, instead of creating competition for 'free' jobs that pay nothing but 'experience.'
  - 17y ago

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timmaah 17y ago

Where our politicians would rather see you pay out of your pocket to go back to school rather than get valuable on the job experience. huh.?. from what I have seen, politics almost runs on interns. Every politician and political organisation has unpaid interns doing real work. The whitehouse has hundreds.. http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/Internships/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/Internships/

pbhjpbhj 17y ago
Is The Whitehouse a for profit privately owned business (eg via stock).
- timmaah 17y ago
  I understand that.. but the fact that the white house and politicians he rails against have interns show that they think it is a positive experience. They also know a for-profit business should be paying their workers. (Not to say I agree one way or the other. It is a fine line between experience and exploitation)
  - cwan 17y ago
    re: "It is a fine line between experience and exploitation" - shouldn't the person getting the experience/being exploited be the arbiter of that rather than some random bureaucrat?
    - timmaah 17y ago
      In a perfect world yes.. but in the real world that is the reason there are labor unions. If you complete a 6 month internship we will give you a job. And keep stringing the person along.. etc.. I think a good compromise would limit an internship to 3 months, afterwards you have to pay. And the employee has to be in a college or degree program or 2 years out of one. And somehow limit it so Burger King can't make you work 3 months for free.
      - 17y ago

sfphotoarts 17y ago

A billionaire complaining he has to pay people.... to paraphrase the title of the post, screw him.

apotheon 17y ago
Actually, he's complaining that he can't employ people for a project that probably won't happen at all unless he can employ interns. You're saying "screw him" because he wants to create something that is of greater advantage to people entering the workforce than not having it in existence at all.
- pradocchia 17y ago
  > he can't employ people for a project that probably won't happen at all unless he can employ interns I find that very doubtful. Why is he even considering the project if the cost of paid interns would negate the upside?
  - apotheon 17y ago
    I could speculate about that all day. Maybe it has the potential to become beneficial. Maybe it has secondary effects that would be beneficial to his sports franchise, but he can't justify the expense to shareholders. Maybe he would like to provide something for the fans because he's a fan himself. What's it to you why he wants to do it?
    - mcantelon 17y ago
      If it has value in these forms then why isn't he willing to pay for this value? Basically he wants unpaid interns to subsidize his investment. Not only do the interns themselves pay, but society as a whole pays as unpaid internships devalue labor.
      - apotheon 17y ago
        Why does everyone seem so insistent on ignoring the claim that it's too expensive to pay regular employees for this work, and as a result, without interns, the project won't happen at all?

alex_c 17y ago

Unpaid internships are one of the biggest scams ever. You want me to work for you for free so I get "invaluable experience"? How much is my work worth to you, if you're not paying me? For that matter, how much is the experience I get, if I'm doing worthless work? You want ME to be grateful for the privilege of getting the experience of making YOU money for nothing in return? Screw YOU. Mark Cuban makes it sound like this is about the bright-eyed ambitious kid who just wants to get his foot in the door and, given that one chance, will eventually rise up to run the company. Bullshit. The ambitious kid will find a way. This isn't about him. This is about all the people struggling on the lowest rungs of a profession, trying to enter it. They can't find a job, so they'll jump at any chance they can to be "working" in their chosen field, even if they don't get paid. They're strung along with the promise of an actual job down the road. And guess what? As soon as they want money, they're out, replaced by someone else who's willing to work for free. This is about having too much supply and not enough demand for a profession, and free labor only makes the problem worse, by masking the real market condition. This is about a lot of things. It's about ambitious kids, it's about struggling people, it's about flux in employment conditions. You can bring in mentions of the apprenticeship model of yore, but you'll probably realize pretty quickly that there are some big differences. But let's drop that bullshit and call it what it is, Mark. You're arguing against minimum wage, since zero is usually less than the minimum wage. Why don't you come up and make that argument straight up. Edit: after re-reading my comment and noticing how many comments there are here and on his blog, I once again realize that Mark Cuban is a troll. Bleh.

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fatdog789 17y ago
In some fields, the unpaid internship is valuable experience. For example, the legal profession. Legal services organizations, such as your local public defender's office or legal aid society provide more experience in 4 months than a $160k job with a big firm would provide in 3 years. You see actual clients, do meaningful legal research, and even appear in court on a regular basis. In contrast, the cushy firm job sees you in an office performing document review (i.e., looking for grammatical/spelling errors) for close to 2 years with the occasional real assignment every few months. Also note, that in the legal profession, lawyers do not begin generating their profit for their employer (in a firm setting) until 3-4 years in -- it costs money in lost billing opportunities (clients will not pay for a new lawyer's work whatever the quality, but firms must pay salary). (The 4 month period is chosen because that is the lag between the Cali bar exam and the release of results in late November, the "post-bar" period during which finding a paid job is close to impossible if you didn't already find one before graduation.).

brandnewlow 17y ago

Perhaps this is why most unpaid internship programs require you to line stuff up with your school. This was they can classify it as an educational activity?

apotheon 17y ago
Did you read the article? Apparently even internships used to satisfy school requirements are often illegal.

dannyr 17y ago

If Mark Cuban's social media effort does not generate revenue, why do it then? The Mavericks after all is a for-profit business.

rjett0 17y ago

Everyone deserves fair compensation for their work. I've never understood how anyone could work for a profitable business for free. An intern, especially in the technical field, is probably more up to date than a salaried employee.

apotheon 17y ago
> An intern, especially in the technical field, is probably more up to date than a salaried employee. That's a dubious claim, but let's roll with it, just for argument's sake. If it's true, that doesn't change the fact that someone likely to get an internship doesn't have any job experience, and may thus have a very, very difficult time getting hired. This is why people accept internships; so they can get experience that allows them to get a job.

voidpointer 17y ago

I think the argument that interns are somehow compensated by "gaining invaluable experience" is somewhat of a strawman. Experience doesn't go away if an intern gets it. Money does and work gets done. I have seen too many people being lured into one "valuable" internship after the other. SOmeone wanted to get some work done and offered "valuable industry insights" as compensation. That is just laughable. If you need someone to do work, pay for it. Simple as that.

apotheon 17y ago
1. I'm not sure you're clear on the meaning of the term "strawman". 2. An internship actually can be valuable work experience, and that job may not exist at all if it can't be unpaid.
- voidpointer 17y ago
  Strawman in a sense were the party offering the unpaid internship distorts the value of the compensation through gaining experience. So the argument of the first party not being paid can be refuted by saying that compensation occurs through gaining experience. You are right though, it's quite a stretch of the term. What I wanted to say is that the party offering compensation through experience is, in my opinion, just trying to get free work and making it look like they are "paying" by "giving out" experience. A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses. The employer should pay (in money) what the work done is worth to them.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    > Strawman in a sense were the party offering the unpaid internship distorts the value of the compensation through gaining experience. So the argument of the first party not being paid can be refuted by saying that compensation occurs through gaining experience. That wouldn't make it a strawman fallacy -- it would just make it refutable. > in my opinion I don't think that the fact some people have that opinion is justification for the law. > A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses. I haven't heard of many full-time internships. People who take internships generally don't have the time for full-time without pay, and the organizations that offer those internships tend to know that.

onlyafly 17y ago

I can't think of an article I've read recently that I disagree with more. This is a good law that protects potential employees from being used by cheapskates like the author of this article who want to get slave labor from their employees. Free internships hurt those looking for jobs because they have to compete with free when they need money to pay the bills.

davidw 17y ago

I think I agree with Cuban on this one, with the caveat that anyone who works for free for a billionaire is a bit soft in the head. I can see not paying market wages, but not even minimum wage?

iseff 17y ago

A serious question: What's the difference between an "unpaid internship" and a CEO of a successful company (e.g. Steve Jobs) who gets paid $1/year? Is there not a way to get around this law by simply putting the intern on a $1/summer salary?

codexon 17y ago
The difference is that a CEO like Steve Jobs gets millions or billions worth of stock options which is equivalent to a salary except instead of getting taxed at the +35% bracket, it get's taxed at 15% capital gains tax (lowered from 20% by Bush).

shiranaihito 17y ago

Summary: "I can't have people work for me for free. Boo-Hoo!"

doki_pen 17y ago

With unemployment so high, why should there be free labor? It is not in the best interest of "We the People".

Vivtek 17y ago

There is a really simple way around this, used only by everybody online this century: set up a fan organization and allow your so-called "interns" to do volunteer work. Make it a collaborative community, and give some fricking minimal thought to quality control by means of a voting system, and your problem is solved. It's 2009. Why is the owner of the Mavericks not aware of this sort of thing? Answer: he wants full ownership control of the resulting content. But he doesn't want to pay for it - that would make him less of a billionaire. So actual volunteer work is out. He wants the benefits of ownership without the disadvantage of paying people. The government is right, here. Unpaid work for somebody who fully owns the results and benefits from it directly is a scam. It's spec work for God's sake, and I certainly see plenty of people coming out of the woodwork decrying that every time it comes up. Yet here, everybody's piling on the government for trying to prevent a billionaire from taking advantage of a bunch of out-of-work creative staff. (If people want "valuable experience", there's no shortage of volunteer work that won't involve a billionaire laughing all the way to the bank.)

anonjon 17y ago

Don't Want to Pay to Have Someone do a Shitload of Work for You? Screw You! Not paying someone to do business related work devalues that 'sort of work', across the board. If I can get interns to some amount of work for free, then I am not employing and (more importantly) paying someone to do that same work. This may be good for the company, but it is bad for people who are unemployed and the other employees of the company. This is because the practice drags down the average price that any company can expect to pay for one unit of that 'sort of work'. This may be great for shareholders, the CEO's bank balance, but it is not good for anyone else. (Economically it is better to have an intern making minimum wage, and spending it than to have the money aggregating in some billionaire's bank somewhere). To act like the intern has any choice in the matter is wrong; as the majority of companies now precondition employment for even the 'starting' positions with some amount of experience. It used to be that employers would hire kids right out of college and actually take the time to mentor them in the business world. Then it was internships during college, and now it is unpaid internships, and soon I'm sure we will be paying for the opportunity to work! It strikes me as incredibly arrogant that someone would think that the mere experience of working for him is equivalent to any sort of compensation. (What am I really gaining out of making photocopies for you, Mr. Cuban?) When profitable work gets done, someone should get paid, end of story. To me that seems to be morally and ethically correct, even if it drives my bottom line down by a few dollars an hour.

tptacek 17y ago

Just pay the fucking interns, billionare. If we can do it, so can you.

clistctrl 17y ago

I did an unpaid internship about 4 years ago.. it got my career started, and for that i'm thankful. But it makes me wonder, could I ask for back pay? I know the work i did provided value to the company.

abalashov 17y ago

For example, there was a case of an internship for working on a train. The company had the interns driving trains from one end of their yard to the other under close supervision. The moving of the trains was completely unnecessary and was just being done to train the potential employees. It seems to me that this is a rather vague, academic argument. Maybe the trains benefit from occasional movement in order to keep their mechanical systems lubricated, so that certain fluids and pressure chambers don't go flat, etc. Obviously, I have no idea if that's true. I don't know a thing about trains or other mechanical systems. The point is that if one wants to, one can probably make the claim - however tenuous - that just about any sort of 'kinetics' of supposedly "no value" to the company do, in fact, have some benefit. Grooming potential future employees by having them do "useless" work can lower future recruitment costs and reduce risk. Isn't that "valuable?"

Mcuban 17y ago

Lets add some reality to these discussion. to add a person, regardless of how much they are paid has a significant cost. So its never free to an employer. Paid or unpaid. An unpaid intern is going to be someone we know is looking to Use Us to create value for themselves. That if the experience doesnt create value for them. They are gone. That in exchange for not being paid, they in essences have far more flexibility. They can stay or leave at their whim. We have nothing more to keep them showing up to work than the experience we create for them. That is a far different challenge than someone just looking for a job. This is particularly true when you are trying to create a new dimension to a business. When we started MicroSolutions as one of the first local area networking systems integrators in 1983, we had unpaid people who saw the long term benefit of LANS. Many we hired and who benefited as the company established itself and then was sold to HR Block. In 1995 we had unpaid people who saw the opportunity to get involved with broadcasting on the internet. Some got jobs and made millions. Others leveraged the positions to bigger and better things. in 2001 we started HDNet under the proposition that eventually HDTVs would be ubiquitous and cost far less than 10k in future years. We brought on unpaid interns who went on to become full time employees and others that leveraged the experience into jobs. Like those in my companies before them, it was valuable to them to have experience and unique knowledge as an employee of a company that is an early innovator and a leader in their field. in this case, I was looking for new ways to create a profitable media endeavor for the Mavs. One look around you is all it takes to see that making any media endeavor profitable is very difficult. I was willing to absorb the overhead and use my existing employees and infrastructure to train the interns and then see if we could get anything going at all. Its an opportunity for the Mavs and for those who want to gain experience in trying to develop new sports media models. So why not just pay them ? Whats 8 dollars an hour ? First of all its a paperwork nightmare. I had to ask HR if we could even do unpaid internships, which is a ridiculous concept in and of itself. Starting or extending a business is no longer just about an idea and execution. Its about paperwork. Its about having employees to manage all that paperwork. Its about work rules.Its about insurance. Its about introducing hassle to existing employees who already have enough to do. so to bring on say 10 paid interns isnt just about paying the interns, its about making the choice to either further burden existing employees, or to possibly hire another back office professionals who doesnt want to take a job with the possibility they could be fired a few weeks later because my new media idea didnt pan out. Businesses live in a paperwork and overhead prison these days. So instead of bringing on the unpaid interns, I had a meeting with our existing people and found 1 person who i could push a little harder to try to experiment with some things. I dont think its the optimal way to test some ideas, but it will have to do.