How Corporate America Made Slaves of the Young

It’s Just Business

Posted on Aug 9, 2012 By Christian Neumeister

Companies across the nation are gleefully denying interns fair wages for their work, in flagrant violation of long-standing labor law, and have the nerve to tell the world they are doing these people a favor.

Huge numbers of college students and recent graduates in a tight labor market are too scared to ask for compensation. Consequently, many interns must work for years in unpaid positions to build their résumés while depending on their parents for financial support. Not only do unpaid internships stop some from paying down a collectively exploding student debt, they compound the economical class differences between those who can afford to work for free and those who can’t. 

This exploitative practice has evolved over the generations since the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 and a 1947 Supreme Court ruling about railroad trainees that officially defined unpaid internships; that ruling was mostly ignored by businesses, and today’s systemic abuse of interns eventually developed.

Now, a disturbing percentage of U.S. companies accepts as routine the illegal work of unpaid interns. One of the legal challenges to the abuse is a class-action lawsuit against the Hearst Corp. being pressed by the New York employment law firm Outten & Golden on behalf of interns who claim they were improperly denied wages and benefits at 19 of Hearst’s magazines. The law firm is pursuing two other corporations on similar grounds, Fox Searchlight and television’s “The Charlie Rose Show.”

In the suit against Hearst, the principal complainant, a former intern at Harper’s Bazaar, says she often worked 40 hours a week without pay or benefits. Hearst’s lawyers maintain that the corporation can lose in the proceeding only if the court reads the law in “a novel and rigid way.”
 
The corporation’s lawyers, by in effect admitting that a “rigid” reading of the law could vindicate the interns’ charges, suggest there is validity to the widespread charges that the letter of the law is being ignored in the American marketplace. Indeed, any objective analysis of unpaid internships in the U.S. points to illegal exploitation not only in the journalism industry but in almost every other business sector as well.

This prevailing, callous attitude toward interns was affirmed in a July 11 article in Forbes—Kate Harrison’s “Why Interns Are Your New Best Friends,” which offers tips on how businesses can best use interns. However welcome those tips may be to companies, the Forbes piece fails to address the basic issues that afflict unpaid internships. 

Interns, few of whom receive a paycheck or benefits, can be found performing a wide variety of duties, including data entry, filing, writing copy and running social media campaigns. The use of interns for such tasks was popularized in the fashion and telecommunications industries and has since spread to nearly every other area of business. These unpaid workers are desperate to make industry contacts and build their résumés, and fear of creating a bad name for themselves usually keeps them from complaining about how they are treated. 

Because of the informality of the arrangement, statistics about U.S. internships are sparse. The Department of Labor estimates that between 1 million and 2 million Americans work as interns, and Robin Richards, the CEO of Internships.com, says that only about 34 percent of those listed on his website are paid. Statistics compiled by Business Insider indicate that 75 percent of students at four-year colleges have had an internship and that corporations save almost $2 billion each year through internships. 

The reality is that interns perform many important day-to-day corporate operations, especially the most monotonous work. One summer intern contacted by Truthdig left a major human rights advocacy group after just a week when she realized she would be performing only “mundane tasks such as editing grammar mistakes for papers, running errands for the boss and waiting on others everyday.” “I wanted an internship that can heighten my skills, not simply buying groceries for a wine and cheese party,” she said in an email interview. 

The prevalence of unpaid internships means that the usual employment path for service workers has disappeared. Gone are the days when young workers could walk from their college graduation into an entry-level position in a mailroom or running copy at a small newspaper. Now, a graduate’s career may hang on landing an impressive internship through the connections of relatives, friends or former teachers. It may take years of internships before a person can find a paid position with career potential. In the meantime, homeownership—a major part of the economic engine—and marriage may have to be delayed. Unpaid internships ultimately work to the detriment of both the interns and the overall economy.

* * * The most fundamental question in a discussion of any economic practice should be its legal status. Companies, interns, governments, universities and their respective lawyers differ widely in their interpretations of laws and rules related to internships. The Forbes article makes a great show of explaining the legal distinction between paid and unpaid internships. Harrison, after citing six criteria of the Labor Department for companies’ use of unpaid interns, notes that the federal government requires that any intern who produces “immediate advantage” to an employer be paid at least the legal minimum wage. “In other words,” she writes, “if you want interns to do data entry and coffee fetching, you’d better offer them minimum wage.” 

Although the Forbes article has a hyperlink to the Labor Department criteria, which appear in government documents under the heading “The Test for Unpaid Interns,” Harrison does not present them in full. Here they are:  

1. 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;
2. The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;
3. The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;
4. 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;
5. The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and
6. The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

If those standards seem naive and a departure from contemporary practices, it may be because they were enacted in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. But nonetheless they are the law, regardless of how often businesses violate them. The primary message of the official standards is that an unpaid internship must stem from the good will of the employer, which must provide education to the intern and receive nothing in return.

These government criteria come with a caveat, however: The rules apply only to internships at for-profit organizations. There are exceptions for nonprofit and government work, in which interns can be called “volunteers” (those exceptions are currently under review by the Labor Department). But Chris Tilly, director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, does not absolve nonprofits from criticism. He maintains that nonprofits’ heavy use of unpaid interns, apart from having negative effects on the young employees, is detrimental to the organizations themselves. “Nonprofits need to be sustainable, which includes sustainable careers,” he said in a telephone interview. Unpaid internships, he pointed out, involve a quick turnover rate, which detracts from the viability of long-term positions at a nonprofit.

* * * Internship conditions vary considerably according to the size of the company involved. Whitney Green, a former executive of the Walt Disney Co., told Truthdig, “It’s work for a company to have to do it legitimately [employ interns]—you have to teach [them].” She went on to say that Disney has only two or three corporate internship slots and does pay its interns. Green noted that many smaller companies keep payrolls down by using unpaid interns in the production of low-budget films.

Here’s one example of how a small company—in this case a Brooklyn merchandiser—uses an intern to lower company costs. The unpaid employee, a junior at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, said in an exchange of emails with Truthdig that he enjoys his job and that “while I get my fair share of ‘intern work,’ like making deliveries … using the subway or a minivan, I’ve also had my fair share of more substantial responsibilities: opening new accounts, negotiating deals with buyers, drafting applications for substantial grants, cleaning up and streamlining [the] sales database and managing a campaign to bring the product to college campuses.” Although he is benefiting from the work experience and isn’t complaining, an outside look reveals that the company is violating some of the criteria set by the Department of Labor.

Even though the particulars differ, it’s almost as if this intern’s employer had read Forbes’ article. Harrison, the writer, gives five ways that employers can benefit from interns, most of which fly in the face of her advice that businesses pay interns. For instance, her second tip: “Offloading: Even unpaid interns can take on some of the more time consuming tasks that every organization must deal with. …”

No, they can’t. The Department of Labor says so. Check out requirement No. 4 in the list above.

Assume that an unpaid intern is being used to operate a business’ social media campaign. Such a program clearly adds to the value of a company. If you want an unpaid intern to work on social media for your business, he or she must do it alongside a paid employee performing that function and must be in a position to learn about how a company uses social media. An unpaid intern working alone on social media is not in an educational environment; probably would be displacing an employee who would normally work on social media; and surely would produce immediate advantage for the employer. All of which violate the official criteria. 

Which brings us to a key question: How does an intern get fair compensation in today’s marketplace? Interns are usually desperate, and companies exploit that. Some employers feel that an unpaid intern has received enough reward by simply being hired, and they also play on the emotional pressure inherent in the arrangement—interns’ anxiety about asking for money.

* * * I myself am an intern, and when the time came during the hiring process for me to ask about compensation I hesitated to do so out of concern that I would immediately be shown the way to the door. I did ask, and I was not thrown out, but the fear is very real for prospective interns across the country.

Some might say I’ve been overly critical of the author of the Forbes article, Kate Harrison. After all, she does urge organizations to pay their interns. However, her article slyly perpetuates the idea that there’s a free lunch for companies. She calls interns the “best task force money can’t buy,” suggests that employers hire interns for second, out-of-office jobs like baby-sitting, and pitches interns as cheap guinea pigs, saying they “can allow you to test new ideas or programs at little or no cost.” In pushing its pro-business agenda, Forbes descends into hypocrisy.

The reason I have singled out the Forbes article is because the negative attitudes it has toward interns are not isolated. Many businesses share Harrison’s cost-minimizing approach, along with a casual willingness to ignore state and federal law.

Larger businesses, like NBA teams that have public relations interns, in most cases can afford to pay a few interns and thereby avoid the risk of public censure that might come from being sued over unpaid internships. 

Aware of that risk, many businesses at least make some attempt to meet the criteria for an unpaid internship. Usually, this consists of requiring an in-college intern to register for academic credit at the intern’s college or university. Many graduate programs require internships as part of routine coursework, and undergraduates can earn course credits through an independent study or a special internship class. Sixty percent of students report that their schools require internships for graduation, according to InternBridge.com. 

Awarding and institutionalizing academic credit as compensation for unpaid work acts as a seal of approval from colleges and universities that fosters the erroneous belief that academic credit alone satisfies the Labor Department’s requirements and ensures that the internship is educational.

Academic credit for the intern does not mean that the program is educational, and educational value is only one part of the Labor Department criteria; “academic credit alone does not guarantee that the employer is in compliance.” Under the law, internships with academic credit still must not produce any value for the organization and still must not replace any paid employees.

Despite a 2010 letter to the U.S. Labor Department from 13 college and university presidents claiming that “our institutions take great pains to ensure students are placed in secure and productive environments that further their education,” accountability for and enforcement of educational working conditions still vary greatly within and between schools. The letter urged Labor Department officials to ease regulations on unpaid internships, promising that schools could ensure the educational value of internships themselves.

UCLA’s Tilly points out that many schools are decentralized, meaning individual departments that issue the academic credits for internships have their own processes for ensuring that the positions are educational. Interns might write papers, submit reports, give presentations or do nothing whatsoever that could be evaluated, and their evaluators could be either department heads or graduate students, depending on the institution. Given the variations in quality of evaluation, neither employers nor colleges and universities can rightly claim that awarding academic credit accurately reflects educational value in an internship. 

Besides concerns about misrepresentations of the value of academic credit, there are strong societal and economic forces at work here. If wages represent the value of an employee’s work, an unpaid intern has no economic value. However, interns clearly are valuable to companies, illustrating an inconsistency in the market for workers derived from an intern’s lack of bargaining power. Internships demonstrate to employers a willingness to work for free, devaluing interns’ work for both the workers and potential future employers. If the résumé of a recent graduate is full of unpaid work, he or she well might be hired only for more unpaid internships or, if a real job is landed, be underpaid.

Only the well-off can afford to work without pay for two years after graduating, or for that matter during college summer breaks, and this bars even middle-class graduates from competing in job markets that look to internship experience. Such fundamental inequities in access worsen an already unfair system of wage denial.

However, interns can take heart; there are a variety of solutions available to them.
First among these is building awareness of interns’ legal status among colleges, employers and the interns themselves. If every student knew that many unpaid internships are illegal, students would have less fear that others would work for free if they themselves refused to do so. If businesses continued to participate in illegal unpaid internships, colleges and student groups could join forces to protect interns. Unpaid interns, made aware of their disenfranchisement, could organize, or join with existing labor groups such as the SEIU. (After all, wasn’t the labor movement’s primary goal fair wages and benefits for abused workers?)

Actual enforcement by state and federal governments would build awareness of interns’ rights as well. Jose Millan, former California labor commissioner, noted in a phone interview for this article that “any time there’s a scarcity of resources on a governmental level, it behooves [federal and state agencies] to pool resources and take on high-profile cases and publicize them.” The current method of enforcement based on individual complaints, he said, is ineffective because it is underfunded. Although prosecuting every case would be an overwhelming task, taking a few major cases and making examples of them would scare companies into compliance. Once most companies follow labor laws, a complaint system becomes workable.

It is a testament to moral blindness in our economic structure that companies can tell young workers they won’t be able to find work without a résumé built around what amounts to slave labor. The abuse of unpaid workers will continue until the government decides to enforce its own laws, or interns collectively realize the truth about their servitude and decide to take action—by organizing, by suing or by boycotting employers. Otherwise, improper unpaid internships will continue to the detriment of interns, schools and the entire country.
Ms. Harrison and Forbes, both complicit in this de facto serfdom, should own up to the sad reality they have helped perpetuate. Better yet, they should call for actions to remedy the problem and properly reward the interns so many companies depend on.

Why Our 21st Century Slave Society Can't Last

We're the slave masters of energy-driven gadgets that replace human labor. But don't count on it sticking around.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
Posted on May 30, 2011

"A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of lifestyles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist." -- Radical Catholic Theologian Ivan Illich

In 2009 a British family living in a four-bedroom house became the subject of a subversive energy experiment about modern slavery.

While the foursome flicked on gadgets one Sunday with the abandon of Roman patricians, an army of volunteers (The Human Power Station) furiously pedalled 100 bicycles next door to generate the needed energy.

The unsuspecting family, of course, had no idea they had been unplugged from a power grid fueled largely by fossil fuels.

At the end of the day the slave masters literally dropped their jaws when a BBC television crew introduced them to the exhausted slaves that boiled their tea. (Get this: it took 24 peddlers to heat the oven and 11 cyclists to make two slices of toast.)

At the end of the experiment many of the cyclists collapsed. Several couldn't walk for days. The peddlers actually consumed more energy in food than they generated by peddling.

The experiment crudely illustrated the global state of North American energy consumption (just imagine an empty yet well-lit house powered by 100 hungry cyclists). It also convinced one of the experiment's designers, Tom Siddall of Electric Pedals, that "volunteer slavery" (hordes of sweating cyclists) or old fashioned shackled labour will power the future. "I have no doubt that slavery will return as the world's energy resources get increasingly scarce."

Oil removes the toil

Now most people don't regard oil, say, as an energy slave or a liquid replacement for human muscle, but they probably should. Thanks to petroleum, every North American now behaves, thinks and often looks like an obese and overbearing 19th century slave owner.

Oil slaves, of course, are more portable and versatile than human muscle and now order our world. They grow and deliver food; transport friends and goods; and energize fields and cities. Every laptop computer arrives impregnated with 240 kilograms of oil. Like any good slave, oil removes the toil.

How many slaves for you?

How many energy slaves does a typical Canadian have at his or her disposal? Dave Hughes, perhaps Canada's premier energy analyst and the nation's former coal specialist at Natural Resources Canada, has done the math and we are not an emancipated people.

Hughes calculates that one barrel of crude (non-renewable sunshine captured in plants over the past 500 million years or so) contains approximately six gigajoules (six billion joules) or about 1,700 kilowatts of energy.

Now a healthy individual can pump out enough juice to light a 100-watt bulb or (360,000 joules) an hour. With weekends and holidays off and a sensible eight-hour day, Hughes figures that it might takes one person 8.6 years on a bicycle (or treadmill) to produce the energy now stored in one barrel of oil.

(Of course we could work those slaves 12 hours a day, seven days a week with no holidays, argues Hughes. In that case a barrel is equivalent to 3.8 years of human labor. But this columnist favours a more humane treatment.)

Given that the average Canadian now consumes 24.7 barrels of oil a year with scarcely a blink of the eye, every citizen employs about 204 virtual slaves. That's a spectacular amount of power for any mortal to wield and much more than any Roman or Egyptian household ever commanded. Or five times more than average 19th century U.S. plantation owners.

Oil slaves fueled human population

What worries Hughes and many other energy analysts is that cheap energy slaves have created a formidable global dilemma. Before the Fossil Fuel Age (it started with coal burning around 1700), humans numbered less than one billion for their entire evolutionary existence on this planet.

After coal and then the discovery of oil in the 1850s, Homo sapiens exploded to an astounding population of 7 billion in just 170 years. And non-renewable energy slaves paved the way. Oil, in other words, was a powerful Viagra for the species (with unwieldy erections and other side-effects).

Oil also broke all previous energy thresholds. While human population grew 5.4 times since 1850, per capita energy consumption exploded at a rate of 8.5 times. In fact total energy consumption jumped 45 times.

These extraordinary changes gave peasants vicarious lifestyles once only enjoyed by minor kings and queens. In 1850, the average Tom, Dick or Harry claimed but 2.2 fossil fuels slaves thanks primarily to machines powered by coal, says Hughes. But by 2009, each member of the average human family crowded their household with 93.8 slaves thanks to the combined work of oil, gas and coal. (Add wood, hydro and nuclear energy and another 17.6 diligent slaves must fit in the door.)

Unsustainable

Given the realities of peak oil (the end of cheap slaves and the advent of extremely brutal substitutes) and the fact that China and India now want more petroleum slaves too, that level of consumption or slavery can't be sustained. In fact Hughes warns that the world of the petroleum slave owner can only get smaller. He calls it "the Energy Sustainability Dilemma."

This indelicate dilemma will be ugliest for those who employ the most slaves. Right now the average Canadian lives as extravagantly as the feverish English master of a large Caribbean sugar plantation. In fact Canadians typically boss around five times more slaves than the global average.

"Your average Canadian consumes five times the world average per capital consumption, seven times the per capita consumption in China and 29 times the per capita consumption in India," calculates Hughes.

(For the record the new and leaner slave masters of Shanghai or Tianjin burn but 2.4 barrels of oil a year which puts 20 coolies at their beck and call.)

"Maybe we have been even less cognizant of the services provided by fossil fuels than people did from their slaves," reflects Hughes. "Slavery, after all was in your face. Now it's all about filling up the tank."

In his thoughtful 1973 essay, "Energy and Equity," the radical Catholic theologian Ivan Illich questioned whether "the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command."

While most people worried about the scarcity of fodder for these slaves, Illich asked whether free men really needed so many slaves in the first place.

The iconoclast concluded that each and every human being was entitled to a certain amount of energy, but beyond a certain threshold, people lost both their freedom and humanity as slave owners typically do.

Even if nonpolluting slaves were feasible and abundant, Illich reckoned "that the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving."

He then dropped a Promethean question that most economists, philosophers, environmentalists and energy analysts avoid: can a society be progressively hooked on a larger numbers of energy slaves and remain autonomous?

It remains civilization's central question.

Noticing Our Own Slavery

Lock Heed
By DAVID Ker THOMSON

The left fears corporations and the right fears the government and the far right feareth the Lord, but the distinction between the three is nominal.

We teach our children that democracy is good because we were taught thus. We were taught by our parents to send our power away from our own neighborhoods and watersheds to distant city halls and to even more distant, violent watersheds along the Ottawa or in the Chesapeake, because we were taught not only that democracy is good but that we must never, ever, under any circumstances think about democracy. We progressives are the Margaret Thatchers of democracyland, programmed to respond to the notion of alternatives to democracy by saying, “there is no alternative.”

The propaganda we give our children is that the vote is the important feature of democracy and the corporate lobbyist an inessential that can be overcome by more strategic voting. Good luck with that.

The truth of democracyland is that the corporate vicar is the first among equals, world without end. This is a constitutive, not contingent, feature of democracy. Corporations are slavers, they thrive in slave cultures like ours—did you really not notice how many black men we have enslaved in our gulags at this very moment? Democracies arise in slave nations and their bills of rights are drafted by slave owners. Do you really think that by chanting “constitutional rights” and “the rule of law” you can get around the fact that the very warp and woof of the rule of law is the enslavement of others? Warp. Woof. Growl.

Twelve thousand police marched this week in Toronto for a fallen comrade, and the press licked and licked at the boots of the marchers, getting their tongue right in to the smallest fissures and sucking the tanning chemicals from the leather, because the press is democratic—it loves the boot, the display of power, the feeling that someone somewhere is in charge, that it isn’t just us and our hori hori knives and a few acres giving peas a chance. No such honors will be forthcoming for the victims of the police, for the same reason—the press is democratic and loves only the boot.

We tell our children this nonsense about voting, that the Franchise will save us, because we are raised so thoroughly inside a slaving nation we cannot hear our own fictions, even as they tumble from our lips onto our children. In slavocracies like ours here in N’Am, all things tend to Lockheed, but will we heed our own locks?

Just for curiosity, would you call the “Lockheed Martin tax” of $260 per American household a government tax or a corporation tax? If Lockheed Martin’s clients are the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture and more than two dozen other government departments and agencies, according to William Hartung’s reckoning, who is the shadow and who is the government? And since Lockheed Martin not only receives the tax but acts as the tax collector and as the spy in the bedroom who oversees both tax and collector, in what significant sense is Lockheed Martin not God?

The point is to repudiate not just gods, but God. We must do this not out of hubris but in humility, in an awareness that with anything less we fail to mature as humans. We must learn to submit to the necessity of our own freedom.

The wise woman knows that no “leader” can help us. We cannot learn independence by studying dependence. Democracy is not an answer to anything. It is the problem itself. An addiction cannot be cured with more vigorous application of the drug. Do you think that if you abdicate your responsibility to some green party “leader” who after years of kowtowing to democracy manages to reduce the Lockheed tax from $260 to $240 that you will have done something worth doing? What you will have done, then, is to own with your own blood $240 of your own binding and subjugation, and you will have squandered the years you might have spent resisting evil. Was there some part of the fact that democracies arise in slave states that you failed to understand? Do you think Lockheed Martin and its shadows are some docile beast you can placate with a vote?

The beast wants to rape your sons and marry your dotage to an imbecilic old age and divorce your reason from sense and squeeze every drop of blood from the angels of your better nature.

I am writing in the anus of a new asshole I’ve ripped in the body politic, but the hole is a loophole for white boys of a certain sort and it is closing, while you’re over there fiddling with your democracy. Spend a few moments at the shrine, USdebtclock.org in real time, watching the red pulse in the veins of the infinite beast pumped up on the blood of the martyrs, and tell me your vote is going to do anything but provide more succulent flesh for the beast.

Embedded in the midst of tar nation, we’re only ever a flash mob away from remembering we will never again need a leader. What? What? We’re the what in tar nation. Our life is right here to hand, gardening, fucking, overwintering, gleaning, parkouring, dancing, quelling tar nation with our absolute ungovernability, our skill at going to ground.

In a world where everyone loves the boot, you don’t have to make a lot of points. One good one will do. This is it:

The smaller the point, the sharper the nail. Sole food.

Rep. Trent Franks: Blacks Better Off Under Slavery

This boggles the mind...why isn't this guy being ridden out on a rail? Or censured at the very least? What a moron!

Rep. Trent Franks: Blacks Better Off Under Slavery
February 26, 2010
by Walid Zafar

Arizona Congressman Trent Franks told blogger Mike Stark that African Americans were much better off under slavery. Franks, the most conservative member of the Republican caucus, who has in the past called the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision "the greatest holocaust in the history of mankind," is not new to conspiracy and bigotry.

Last October for example, Franks accused a prominent Muslim advocacy group of "trying to infiltrate the offices of members of Congress by placing interns in the offices." Franks, an on-again, off-again birther, has called president Obama "un-American," accused him of going "against American interests" and even called him "an enemy of humanity." His comments to Stark, as repulsive and abhorrent as they are, seem to be consistent with the reactionary mindset that some on the right hold.

FRANKS: In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say "How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible." And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

The excerpt starts at the 6:22 mark.