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

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship-so-you-can-get-valuable-experience-screw-you/

by jasonlbaptiste • 17 years ago

45 178 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

masklinn3• 17 years ago

> Hmm, one is an equal partnership, the other isn't.

Is it really? Is SM play "an equal partnership" between master and slave?

imp• 17 years 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.

dbul2• 17 years 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.

uopnuiyb2• 17 years ago

Simple solution - call the job a training course and charge the interns $10k to do it!

te_platt• 17 years 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".

yummyfajitas5• 17 years 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"?

ahoyhere11• 17 years ago

Employment is not a private act, it has huge social ramifications.

kingkongrevenge3• 17 years ago

Procreation and norms of marriage and family have enormous social ramifications. There is no distinction.

cperciva2• 17 years 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.

apotheon45• 17 years ago

One need not be licensed to be honest.

tvon3• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

cwan17• 17 years 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.

doki_pen2• 17 years ago

Freedom doesn't really come into the equation. Of course you can do work for free, that is your right. If your neighbor asked you to mow his lawn for free, there is no law to stop you from doing that work for him.

Corporations aren't people though and have different rights. They don't enjoy the right to employ people free of charge.

Confusion• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

drhodes• 17 years ago

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

pbhjpbhj3• 17 years 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.

apotheon45• 17 years 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.

dbul2• 17 years 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.p...

tnovelli3• 17 years ago

Volunteering is something you do for a charity.

cdr• 17 years ago

I volunteer for a huge corporation, along with hundreds of other people, to do things that couldn't be done if they had to pay employees. It's a hobby that has aspects of a side-job.

I don't see why it couldn't work for Cuban.

(Interestingly enough, volunteering is illegal in France, where the people that would be volunteers for this otherwise are actually employed and in a union.)

cwan17• 17 years 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-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.

pbhjpbhj3• 17 years 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.

cwan17• 17 years 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

gaius• 17 years ago

Well, this ought to be obvious. A trade union exists to promote the interests of its members and its leaders (not necessarily in that order). As the union itself creates no added value, it can only do this in a zero sum fashion - at the expense of both employers and the unemployed and anyone else who isn't a member.

euroclydon• 17 years 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.

timr5• 17 years 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.

rapind8• 17 years 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.

cwan17• 17 years 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?

akeefer2• 17 years 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.

timr5• 17 years ago

"Value is subjective - so in the end, why would we rely on the government to establish value in the first place?"

We don't. The government takes the logical position that all such internships are illegal, so regulators don't need to make that subjective judgment.

In this light, the answer to your second question is "yes" -- the government is erring on the side of worker safety. It's a judgment call, and you can disagree with it, but both sides of the debate have perfectly reasonable arguments.

rapind8• 17 years ago

I thought I did explain my opinion, but yes you've stated it much more succinctly than I have.

I believe the law protects people (specifically young people starting their careers) from exploitive practices. It also hurts them by penalizing non-exploitive and beneficial practices. I personally beleive the protection outweighs the potential benefits in this law, and thus agree with this law.

Is this a little big brother'ish? Perhaps, but nonetheless I would vote in favour of it.

byrneseyeview2• 17 years ago

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.

The government can't figure it out. Can the interns? If there's a huge population that's willing to work for free, and they're all undervalued, then a company that hires interns for minimum wage will be able to get all the good ones.

tnovelli3• 17 years ago

Second that. We had unpaid interns at my last job, and their work consisted of telemarketing, harvesting email addresses, web form spamming, data entry. It wouldn't be cost effective if their earned even $5/hr. What did they get out of it... cynicism?

What happened to paying your way through college with paying jobs? Kids need to put their bottom line first, just like employers do.

apotheon45• 17 years ago

What were they promised?

cwan17• 17 years ago

"Kids need to put their bottom line first, just like employers do." - Absolutely - and you don't think they do? Are they better off to have been denied the choice? Why didn't those unpaid interns quit? Could it possibly be that they made the conscious choice that their time spent doing these tasks was better than not at all (or working in fast food or whatever other job for that matter)?

pjvandehaar• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

apotheon45• 17 years 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).

ahoyhere11• 17 years 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.

apotheon45• 17 years 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.

ahoyhere11• 17 years 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.'

timmaah3• 17 years 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/

pbhjpbhj3• 17 years ago

Is The Whitehouse a for profit privately owned business (eg via stock).

timmaah3• 17 years 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)

JimmyL• 17 years ago

Congress and the White House have always been exempt from most workplace and labour regulations - for example, you can't file an OSHA complaint if you work in a Senator's office.

apotheon45• 17 years ago

Government wants free labor, but doesn't want people to get internships in the private sector. This is hypocrisy -- not a defense of government.

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

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

apotheon45• 17 years 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• 17 years 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?

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Yes. That's what he's complaining about. His business has a project that only works if he can start it with people he doesn't pay. You just said nothing at all: we knew he wanted to do something with the interns, apotheon.

alex_c2• 17 years 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.

fatdog789• 17 years 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.).

mattchew• 17 years ago

You want ME to be grateful for the privilege of getting the experience of making YOU money for nothing in return? Screw YOU.

No one is talking about making you take an unpaid internship that you don't want. We're talking about whether Joe Q. Eagerbeaver should be prevented from taking an unpaid internship that he does want.

Whatever happened to treating people like mentally competent adults capable of making their own life decisions?

Mcuban2• 17 years ago

amen

alex_c2• 17 years ago

No one is talking about making you take an unpaid internship that you don't want. We're talking about whether Joe Q. Eagerbeaver should be prevented from taking an unpaid internship that he does want.

Yes, I agree, this isn't about me. I have the luxury to avoid unpaid internships, which not everyone does. There are situations where unpaid internships are good, and situations where they're bad. I'm arguing that the bad heavily outweighs the good.

Whatever happened to treating people like mentally competent adults capable of making their own life decisions?

Strawman. By that logic Ponzi schemes should be legal.

bokonist• 17 years ago

In every employee relationship there is:

a) a wage cost to the employer

b) a non-wage cost (supervision, office space, communication overhead) etc.

c) a benefit the worker provides to the company

Note that in general the benefit c) starts off low for an entry-level worker and grows over time with work.

If c) is equal to or less than b), then the employer cannot afford to pay that worker a wage. By creating a minimum wage or banning unpaid work, you are simply banning an employment contract in the situation where c) is less than b) plus the minimum wage.

Sure in some cases employers may suckering kids via a bait in switch. But in a lot of real cases, the internship or apprenticeship is a path upwards. By making it illegal, you are cutting people off. You have not made the kid any better off or engaged in charity. You have simply made a voluntary contract, that for whatever reason this kid thought was better than all his other options illegal. This kid will now simply have to choose a less preferred option.

I used to work at a non-profit helping to find jobs for the homeless. A lot of the people off the streets simply would not be able to produce $7 an hour worth of value to an employer. Perhaps though, they could produce $2 an hour. But that is illegal, so the pathway into the workplace is barred for these people.

ismarc3• 17 years ago

I agree with all your points. However, the laws are there to protect the "desperate" and to enforce a minimum worth of an employee. In many situations, unpaid internships provide a cost to the employer. The trade-off is that any exceptional interns can become full time employees, already having had most of the training, resulting in a lower initial cost to employment (training, etc.). Even for full-time positions, straight from college hires are not ready to directly contribute. There's a window of time (depending on the job itself) that the college graduate, even having completed an internship, will not be able to meaningfully contribute. Most people who have just completed an internship at the company has this time drastically reduced (I'm not going to give made up statistics, but I've seen it reduce the time by 8 months).

Now, the laws for unpaid internships are actually protecting the interns from non-internships. Based on the description in the blog, what they wanted as an army of people to compile a bunch of information without any direct supervision. This provides no benefit to the interns. They get the benefit of being immersed in corporate culture, but they are not receiving any relevant training or exposure to the field they would supposedly be interning for. This is exactly what the law is to protect against. If I'm a software development firm and get 15 unpaid interns to load servers into a moving van to change data centers, and all they do every day is load the van and unload it, they are directly providing benefit to the company with nothing in return, except they know that DL585's are heavy. Now, if they were part of the transition process, involved with the documenting and preparing for migration of the data center, document each step, what moves when and how, then the cabling/racking and bringup of machines at the new data center, they have suddenly learned some invaluable skills that are not taught in school. The point in the law is to defend against these situations by guaranteeing recompense for the student, whether it's invaluable skills (by guaranteeing they won't be used as free labor), class credit (helps towards degree), or a paycheck.

bumbledraven• 17 years ago

An unpaid internship with a company like Berkshire Hathaway or Pixar could actually be worth a lot of money. It's incredibly valuable to point to work you've done for a respected organization, paid or not.

mattj• 17 years ago

Except that by being unpaid, they're saying that what you did for them wasn't worth enough to pay them for it.

brandnewlow• 17 years 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?

apotheon45• 17 years ago

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

dannyr• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

apotheon45• 17 years 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.

voidpointer2• 17 years 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.

apotheon45• 17 years 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.

voidpointer2• 17 years 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.

onlyafly• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years 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?

codexon2• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

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

doki_pen2• 17 years ago

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

Vivtek• 17 years 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.)

tptacek2• 17 years ago

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

clistctrl• 17 years 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.

abalashov2• 17 years 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?"

Mcuban2• 17 years 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.

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

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