Mises.ca: Google “unfair internships” and you get a blizzard of complaint. Interns are underpaid. Internships favor the rich. They are exploitative. They are a strategic way of getting around federal labor law. Some want mandates on pay. Others want them forbidden.
Here we have a narrow means of escape for young workers, a slight glimmer of hope in a job market that is growing increasingly dark for them. Following college, they can work for free or at a very low rate, for a time, and then perhaps have a greater chance of building a career, or at least avoiding the label “loser.”
And then what happens? The opinion elite conspire to wreck that opportunity too. Our laws and institutions set them up to fail, and then smother one of the few chances they have discovered to avoid that fate.
Why Internships?
Kids spend as much as 16 years sitting in desks, listening to experts, and taking tests to demonstrate that they can recite information. Then after undergoing all this, and paying ghastly amounts for the privilege, they are stunned to discover that they lack skills for the workplace.
Interns are great. They make great cigar humidors. Just ask Bill Clinton