This is a reply to your post and all of your subsequent posts.
I see you are looking at this in a very ‘means’ orientated way, in that workers are just capital, and the means to operate a company in the same way that oil is just the means to operate a truck. From an ethical point of view, especially a Kantian ethical point of view, this is extraordinarily ill-sighted. It is probably the worst possible way to morally operate an economy. This is the type of thinking that allows the existence of unpaid internships, the working of drones until they burn out, and then the throwing away of their ‘carcases’ when they aren’t useful anymore. It is the type of thinking that makes companies like Facebook decide to not hire older workers, or more companies today to simply use contract workers so they don’t have to worry about pensions or healthcare. It is our economy, and it is about the most immoral thing conceivable.
The solution is to use the power of our laws to regulate it. We use laws to force the world to operate per our morality, and in this case the laws would enforce a sharing of the burden of educating a worker between the companies who profit off them and the individual. It would force the companies to pay for the training that they benefit from. It would force them to pay their interns, and not to discriminate against older employees. It would regulate the work hours and compensation for overtime. And it would force them to provide pensions and healthcare. In the end, the goal would be for the workers themselves to be the ends, and not the means. And if some economic efficiency is lost, so be it.
The graph stops sometime before the worst part of the financial downturn, which was not in '08. You know, before it really got bad. Every graph I look up just now show the line continuing to climb until about mid '09 for jobless claims.
That argument against unpaid interns is a lot better than the line I used on the head of the department back in college: “I can’t afford to take an unpaid internship. I have to work full-time this summer.”
That’s why most people don’t take an unpaid internship; given the force of necessity, most people don’t need to be persuaded to reject unpaid internships. The folks who need persuading are people who could afford to take an unpaid internship, that they should act in solidarity with others.
In response to the people debating the “there ought to be a law” question. There already is a law. Most unpaid internships are illegal under a reasonable reading of this part of the fair labor standards act: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
A more pertinent discussion would be about why we don’t enforce these very sensible rules that we already have.
The tl:dr of the rules:
The following six criteria must be applied when making this determination [of whether an internship is lawful]:
The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment;
The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;
The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;
The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded;
The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and
The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.
Unfortunately, there already is (UK at least). But there’s a bit of a variation of Prisoner’s Dilemma going on. If you do unpaid work then you can sue for min wage and maybe fees (or more, exact numbers mildly irrelevant). However, your career in that industry is over.
The only solution to that problem I see just now is some sort of witness protection scheme for whistleblowers.
There’s no free higher education here, hasn’t been for 20-odd years. I am of the last generation to get those things. And I was offered an unpaid internship (for an IT job. Surprise!). It takes the piss, so it does.
It is illegal in California to not pay an intern. If you are offered an unpaid internship check your state laws and share the information with your peers.
I’d certainly vote in favour of it, yes. And we can, indeed pay for it. Same as we pay for schools. your stereotypical IT Industry Libertarianism is getting a bit wearing.
I agree that circumstance can quickly put someone in a bind. I’ve been there myself a few times.
Yes, I see that. My point was that this is where humanity is headed- information age an all that. Just wait till decentralized manufacturing becomes commonplace. Talk about disruptions.
Yep, my point is they’re a small fraction of the work force.
Yes, the idea of work is changing. Change is scary and disruptive. Although there will always be bad actors technology is, IMO, the main culprit. Creating a bad guy, as I think the tweeter does, serves no one.
That’s one opinion. Mine is that it’s the governments job to protect me from force, fraud, and coercion. Modern society is complex and requires constant work to keep it working, but it individuals and voluntary interactions that keep it going not commissars and bureaucrats.
Right wing nutcases?! Wow, that’s not called for.
But how do you set the prices? Evey social experiment using a central authority seems to have failed spectacularly.
Yes, it’s always been expensive. Jobs requiring more intellectual skills would, it seems, be more costly.
OK. hair pulling
Well this is a much debated issue. My take is when power is centralized it’s easier for people to subvert it. The bigger the government the easier it is to use and the larger the motivation to do so.
Nope, economies (and markets) are too complex to manage in any real sense. All planners do, IMO, is confuse price signalling and create a target for those who would bend the power to their own ends.
And who is going to write it? You? People you agree with? The arrogance of that statement astounds me for two reasons. The first, as I already hinted at, is how on earth would one keep control of such a movement- answer one wouldn’t.
The country is better for labor laws. They have helped with the 40 hour work week, child labor, weekends, Lily Ledbetter act and minimum wage. It’s not exactly a new arrogant concept, it’s basic American history. We’re a nation of laws, most I agree with, some I don’t. This could be written as a good law. Cat’s been out of the bag for about a century depending how you slice it, stuffing it back in because Scary Government = Bad is mindless at best, facilitating greed at the expense of human suffering at worst. Taking advantage of people by getting them to work for you for free because you have a large business and they can’t find work is (in an ethical sense) unethical.
Yes, but less so since there has been a constant chipping away at unions since the 50s and 60s. Businesses and worekrs are rarely on equal footing, except when a larger body is behind the workers–unions play that role, provided they are protected by law.
You really want to live in a country with no public education? How far do you think that will get us in the shining bright future of the “new economy”? I’d guess not very far, when only a few can afford an education. Just a guess though. The fastest growing period in the American economy was in a period with high tax rates, especially on the wealthy, and vast government programs, that helped to expand the (to be fair, white) middle class. The very field that is allowing us to have this interaction is not the result solely private corporations, but of a partnership between the federal government, academia, and private contractors and corporations. Moreover, it was the enforcment of labor laws that ensured fair compensation for fair work.
We live in an economy where the vast majority of people only have their labor to sell. Now that is being taken, too, and they/we are being told that it is a privilege to have a job at all, and if you don’t have a job, you are just not working hard enough.
I do have to say that, much as I respect the history of unions, too many these days act like big businesses themselves, complete with all the arrogance and unreasonableness. Unions used to understand that they needed the public’s support to push from the customer’s side; now, they’ve mostly stopped even trying to explain their grievances.
I’ve seen just enough bad examples that I have trouble giving unions a blanket endorsement. The labor movement, yes; unions… depends on which and where and when.
Agreed. Part of that comes out of the AFL-CIO, which has become ossified and institutionalized.
Smaller unions and the labor union more broadly has retained its importance, even as they are ignored generally, or smeared with the same brush. Don’t forget that the service workers unions have been staging some protests in the past couple of years that are getting people discussing wages for service workers.
