Take the issue to its extreme - suppose you are wealthy, and the society you live in is very poor. You can pay people next to nothing, and they will work themselves to death for that pittance (to try to keep their family alive, perhaps). You can afford to pay a living wage, but you don't have to, because there are people who will take what you offer. Is it ethical in this situation, to pay only what the market will bear?
Isn't this why we have a minimum wage? Because we as a society say that you shouldn't be allowed to take advantage of others, even though you could without coercion?
First of all, I would be extremely uncomfortable in this situation. It makes me quite uncomfortable to walk past one very poor person on the sidewalk, while I and hundreds of people around me enjoy fresh coffee, wear clean clothes and play with our smartphones. To be surrounded by poverty-induced misery on all sides would make me miserable, if not suicidal. So your suggestion of starting some kind of business and offering people jobs is appealing. Specialization of labor and voluntary exchange have been a powerful force in generating wealth around the world. Let's assume I can figure out some business that can be successful in this environment. Probably I can't offer jobs to everyone around, not at the beginning anyway. Even if I could, probably some people won't have skills that contribute to the business, or there will be more unskilled people than I can usefully employ. So I have to choose: do I use my limited budget to employ a smaller number of people at a higher wage, thereby improving a smaller number of people to a greater extent? Or do I employ a larger number of people at a lower wage, thereby spreading the wealth more widely but with less individual effect? It is not obvious to me that one is clearly better than the other, so I think it might be justifiable to aim for a workforce size and corresponding salary that is best for the business and therefore best for everyone since this business is the best hope we have of pulling people out of poverty. What would you do?Take the issue to its extreme - suppose you are wealthy, and the society you live in is very poor.
Hi again, briandmyers. I regret that our discussion earlier didn't lead in constructive directions, and I thought this thought experiment very interesting. I will respond to it honestly, and I would be interested to see how you would respond as well.You can pay people next to nothing, and they will work themselves to death for that pittance
But at least there is some hope. I have some wealth. It is obvious to me that the only possible comfort to be had in this situation would come from trying to elevate as many of my neighbors as possible from their wretched states. I could divide up my wealth equally among everyone and distribute it, that would be fair and it would help some. But I am too selfish to completely impoverish myself in order to provide a small benefit to many people (I must admit this as long as I, in the real world, have plenty to eat and a comfortable home while people elsewhere starve).
Thanks for the follow-up. Here's the heart of the matter, right here. You or I, as human beings, are uncomfortable, and wish to improve the wealth of our society. Good on us, but we're a tiny minority. It will be a faceless corporation which will in reality be supplying the majority of those jobs, and that entity will have a very different idea of what is "best for the business", and is (I assert) much less likely to give two shits about raising the community out of poverty. That's why a minimum wage makes sense - because in general it is NOT ethical to pay people as little as you can get away; and corporations have no ethics that are not imposed on them (not being human like you and I).I would be extremely uncomfortable in this situation.
Out of a sample size of 2, then, 100% of us care about the welfare of others and would not selfishly improve our condition if it meant harming others. This is not much data, so I did an experiment. I looked through my phone's contact list and counted all the people I think I know well enough to decide if they are also like us. By the time I got to about 50, there were none of whom I was certain they would be willing to hurt others to get ahead, and only a few of whom I was not sure. The majority of the people I know seem decent and I believe they are also very uncomfortable seeing other humans suffer. Is your experience different? Do you know a lot of people who, in this scenario, would be comfortable paying a "pittance" to have people mow their lawn and wash their car, not caring that they are trying to "keep their family alive"?You or I, as human beings, are uncomfortable, and wish to improve the wealth of our society. Good on us, but we're a tiny minority.
Exactly as b_b says, I meant "tiny minority" in the sense of the jobs we might provide. Sorry for being unclear, and thanks also for showing my mistake in framing the original postulate as a wealthy person. It's a business that I should have posited, since as you rightly point out, people in general are extremely moral in most circumstance.
I read briandmyers' comment to mean that a corporation, being incorporeal, lacks a sense of justice, and that regulations, in certain cases, can guide the behavior of a corporation to act more like individuals might act toward one another. This isn't to say that this goal is always, or even often, accomplished, but merely that it may be an aim. I, for example, used to work for Dow Chemical. My boss at Dow was an Indian fellow who worked for Union Carbide before Dow purchased them. Both of us were (are) good, caring people. Both companies are soulless and evil, having given the world such gifts are Agent Orange and the Bhopal disaster. The aggregate behavior of the companies did not reflect the morality of the individuals within. Although FWIW my boss thought Union Carbide was an excellent firm, which is a great lesson in relativism, given that the man was dirt poor as a child, and UC helped him get out of poverty, get a PhD in chemistry from University of Michigan, and live a generally good, upper middle class life in America. Bhopal didn't even enter into the calculus of how he felt about them. I can't see it that way, because I don't know what it's like to grow up picking garbage to stay alive.
This is why I'm generally against unpaid internships, especially those that don't seem like education is their priority. I find the situation where one has to live and work unpaid for months or even a year just to have a chance at getting gainful employment to be coercive. We all, left or right, seem to agree that coercion is wrong, but we seem to disagree as to what it consists in. I would say that any market that demands unpaid labor is coercive. One can say that there are other industries that don't demand such situations, but then the free marketer is going against his own assumption that a laborer will find the thing that (s)he is good at and fill that niche. It appears to me to be an undue barrier to entry that automatically excludes less well off workers.
This was an unusual paragraph in which I disagreed with every sentence. I hope you won't mind if I respond point by point. Do you not trust the worker to determine what benefit they get from a working arrangement, and whether it is worthwhile? Isn't volunteering a laudable form of unpaid work that can provide benefits unrelated to education? The cost of rent or food might compel someone to work more or accept comparatively less advantageous working arrangements, but most people do not consider such facts of life to be coercive. Who is doing the coercing? Many people feel compelled to spend many years and a lot of money on education so they can earn a better living in the future. Are they also victims of coercion? I have tried to define the word, but have not seen you do the same. In particular, I would like you to explain how someone who voluntarily accepts a working arrangement, and is free to abandon it the moment any better alternative becomes available, is a victim of coercion. Who is doing the coercing? The "market" does not demand anything; the market is a place where people meet to offer and make exchanges. "Demand" in an economic sense is nothing more than being able to say what you are willing to exchange for something. Starbucks demands $2.40 in exchange for 16 ounces of coffee. Some people demand 16 ounces of coffee in exchange for $2.40, and a deal is made. Some people don't want coffee that much, or already have plenty of cheap coffee or tea, so they "demand" a price of zero. Nobody is under any obligation to give them free coffee. No one tells the journalism major to pass on the internship at Condé Nast and work as an astrophysicist instead, since it pays better. The assumption is that the laborer will try to find best opportunity available, given their skill set and other realities. Your position suggests that we prohibit people from considering one possible means for gaining work experience, without considering whether they have a better alternative. The worker can already choose to decline an internship if they have a better option. If they choose to accept it, and you step and prevent the arrangement, your behavior is clearly coercive and, in my view, a barrier to entry that particularly applies to the less well off who have fewer alternatives.This is why I'm generally against unpaid internships, especially those that don't seem like education is their priority.
I find the situation where one has to live and work unpaid for months or even a year just to have a chance at getting gainful employment to be coercive.
We all, left or right, seem to agree that coercion is wrong, but we seem to disagree as to what it consists in.
I would say that any market that demands unpaid labor is coercive.
One can say that there are other industries that don't demand such situations, but then the free marketer is going against his own assumption that a laborer will find the thing that (s)he is good at and fill that niche.
It appears to me to be an undue barrier to entry that automatically excludes less well off workers.
Frankly, the more I've read about unpaid internships, the less clear I am on my stance on them. I wonder way more why people take them rather then why they exist (which is obviously because of the former). The fact that so many unpaid internships exist is proof that there is a supply problem in a number of fields. I won't back off my statement that unpaid internships are huge barriers to entry, but I'll qualify it to say that were I running a business, I wouldn't personally offer unpaid internships. The evidence that I read seems to suggest that offering a low-to-fair wage for these jobs actually attracts higher quality, more diverse groups of candidates than unpaid positions, and that the interns are more likely to stay on with your company after the fact. What's the point of training a worker to work for someone else? Like with may subjects, the older I get, the less I feel I understand them. I think there's a disconnect between entry level workers' expectations and reality. I think that if more kids got themselves educated, then very few would take a job with a media company that offered to pay them 0. I think the situation I find unjust is that it appears that taking an unpaid internship often doesn't increase one's job prospects, even though they're marketed that way. As is often the case, the more the worker can rebalance the information scales in their favor, the better. Sadly, educating oneself is not often a priority for too many people. Business owners have an obligation to follow the law, and currently the law says that for a job that is not mostly educational in nature, the minimum wage applies. Seems like a fair compromise. Sorry I can't be more argumentative.
"Hi, Mr. b_b, I am not old enough to legally work, but I would love to pick up balls on your golf course and clean carts and just hang around and learn about the golf business because I dream of owning my own course one day. Also, someone told me that 'The ability to make decisions for oneself is among the most important things that makes us human' and I decided that staying home and watching TV is a waste of time." "Scram, kid." Of course offering higher wages attracts higher quality workers. That's the whole point. You get what you pay for, and better-qualified workers will compete for richer compensation, pushing others out. I thought you were worried about "less well off workers"? "The chief practical negative of minimum wage is increased unemployment among the most vulnerable workers, who would most benefit from greater access to employment." The numbers have improved since the last time I checked, but the pattern is still the same: Compared to what? If you are saying one's future job prospects would increase more if one got a paid position instead of taking an internship, I think that's reasonable. If you are saying one's future job prospects would increase more if one remained unemployed, I doubt it. If an unemployed person has to choose between an unpaid internship and a similar but paid position, I don't think we need FLSA to nudge them in the right direction.were I running a business, I wouldn't personally offer unpaid internships
The evidence that I read seems to suggest that offering a low-to-fair wage for these jobs actually attracts higher quality, more diverse groups of candidates than unpaid positions
The number of unemployed youth was 2.8 million in July 2015, down from 3.4 million a year earlier. The youth unemployment rate was 12.2 percent in July 2015, 2.1 percentage points less than a year before. Among the major demographic groups, July unemployment rates were lower than the prior year for young men (12.7 percent), women (11.7 percent), whites (10.3 percent), blacks (20.7 percent), and Hispanics (12.7 percent). The youth jobless rate changed little for Asians (10.7 percent).
it appears that taking an unpaid internship often doesn't increase one's job prospects
If you are saying one's future job prospects would increase more if one remained unemployed, I doubt it. The only large survey I'm aware of (and I'm not an expert here by any stretch) indicates that there isn't a statistically significant difference in finding a job after college between those who have had unpaid internships and those with no work experience. This itself isn't an argument against not paying interns, but it is an argument to young people about not subjecting themselves to them. The potential caveat of that study is that they don't show the numbers by field. It could be that unpaid positions are more likely to be offered in field with high unemployment to being with, which supply and demand should dictate. In engineering, where I had my college internships, unpaid positions are unheard of. I got $14 an hour as an intern in 2004 at Dow Automotive, and my classmates told me I was getting fucked.Compared to what? If you are saying one's future job prospects would increase more if one got a paid position instead of taking an internship, I think that's reasonable.
Four months after that article appeared, the National Association of Colleges and Employers responded to "misapplication" of their survey conclusions, emphasizing that they only looked at intern-to-hire data prior to graduation, not after, and (as usual) more research and analysis were needed. In particular, they observed "that NACE does not have sufficient information about the individual students and their job searches to adequately explain" why the unpaid interns did not exhibit the same improvement in intern-to-hire statistics. The controls for gender, ethnicity, and academic major did not clear it up, and they do not know if "something distinctive about the places and kinds of jobs for which students with unpaid internships applied (e.g. not-for-profit vs. for profit organizations)" might explain the difference. There is a lot of variation in the places and kinds of jobs that offer unpaid internships, according to an informative report from Intern Bridge, another source for the Atlantic article. Some highlights: • Women are more likely to take unpaid internships (77%) "because they tend to be more involved in social justice, environmental, and social service issues." • Students with family income below $80,000 participated in unpaid internships at 46% compared to 40% for students with family income above $80,000. (While some complain that unpaid internships exploit the poor and give little benefit, others complain that only wealthy people can afford to consider them, so the experience and networking benefits of unpaid internships go to them.) • Unpaid internships are more common at non-profits (57% of internships unpaid) and government (48%), while for-profit companies have 34% internships unpaid. • Smaller firms have higher levels of unpaid internships (55% for those with fewer than 100 employees). The largest companies, with over 5000 employees, offered fewer than 20% of their internships as unpaid. • The largest proportions of unpaid internships were found in government (here stated as 54%), health (62%), non-profits (63%), and arts/entertainment/broadcasting (68%), while companies in the utilities, transportation and manufacturing sectors provide less than 17% of their internships unpaid. NACE concludes that "Unpaid internships can be legitimate, valuable extensions of classroom learning, if properly constructed." Thanks for keeping up with the conversation. I am not as clear on the value of unpaid internships as I may sound, arguing for their virtues. Maybe they are not that helpful. What I am unclear on is the confidence with which some people condemn voluntary working relationships that are not highly paid (in salary). You are one of very few people I have seen acknowledge the benefits that accrue to really desperate people who accept working conditions that most Americans would consider undignified and beneath them, and I think that is an important perspective to include in the it's-not-perfect-so-ban-it discussion.there isn't a statistically significant difference