Do companies hold interns prisoner? If so, you've got a point.

I would've done anything to be an intern. They need to stop complaining, because they are privileged and are most probably cutting years off of their job search by doing an internship.

I just moved to California it is bad like that here. Many hospitals are hiring, but not giving any benefits. Ironic, working in healthcare but no healthcare for the hospital employees..

There is confusion between internship as a principle of education, and internship as it is practised in some places. Internship as a principle is outstanding. The internship I had changed my life (in a good way). We mustn't give up on internship just because there are some assholes out there.

It's sad to think of it, but perhaps there needs to be more regulation or standardization of how interns are treated.

hola

That is very true !

I'm talking about the UK, so I don't know how this works in the US. The graduate unemployment situation in the UK means that you get situations like this. My daughter did History of Art. She got an unpaid 3 month internship with somebody putting on art events in temporary spaces. So far so good. Except that there were 200 people applying for 3 positions for an unpaid job. When she got in there, she found there was money, the role was a real job working late and weekends but all she got was travel expenses.

Now read the article. MadBid.com is a VC funded startup. They use interns to staff their help desk and put them on the graveyard shift on 3-6 month rotation. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of examples like that.

The problem is that youth unemployment is so high that there's big competition for even unpaid jobs just to get that first job experience on the CV. The balance of power has switched in the labour market from the individual to the company. There's no doubt that this situation is being exploited by companies to keep costs down on the necessary but unpopular jobs.

I'm all for employing people still at school or Uni on short term contracts on minimum wage to help out. These days I can just about justify taking recent grads on a minimum wage trial for 3 months. Some times you luck into people who later turn into valuable full employees. But doing that as a policy to replace employees and just paying a notional expenses wage is exploitation and it is actually illegal. We have minimum wage legislation for a reason.

Now of course, using the word "Slavery" is link bait. But I'm not going to apologise for it.

It's worse than that. There's now a whole industry building up around this issue. There are companies being created to take recent grads and long term unemployed from the job centres, place them in unpaid "Intern" and "apprentice" positions and take a handout from the government for doing so. The same and similar companies are offering "mentor" and "re-training" courses and taking money from both the government and the prospect aimed at soaking up redundancy money and savings from desperate people.

All this turns into another debt problem. As a parent you've got to support your kids till they're 16. Because of the qualification bubble, they can't get a job without a degree, so you have to support them till they leave Uni with a huge pile of debt at 22-23. Then you have to support them through a period of unpaid internships (24-25). And you have to do this out of taxed income so you re-mortgage the house or run up your own debt. Which is only possible if you're already reasonably well off.

Internships have to be paid here in Ohio, USA. Occasionally the news reports someone who wasn't paying. A radio station was the most recent. I turned down an internship, it wasn't a good idea.

Unpaid? Hmm. They're paid here in Canada too, as far as I know. Unpaid internships would be bad, especially considering how much an education costs these days.

Now the majority of arts based grad jobs are through future jobs fund too (or were when i was looking a from graduating Jun 2010 - a few months ago). I had a job (not graduate, well paid, or brain utilising, but a job all the same) and so couldn't apply for these entry-level opportunities, and wasn't prepared to give up a paying job to take an unpaid internship or to qualify to apply for entry level grad work, and so spent much longer not using my degree/brain than I would have liked. I've ended up in science instead, where everything is a little less about who you know etc. I like it.