Help Wanted: The Free Work Generation

The job market is tight and companies are literally getting free labor

You’re young, you’re talented, you’ve gone to school and you’re ready to hit the streets for your first job. You find a few listings and then you find something that just fits you perfect, the descriptions sounds like you wrote it about yourself. There’s just one catch: it doesn’t pay. Your heart sinks, you move on hoping that you can find something better. Nothing comes up, you are getting frantic, the bills are piling up, and something is better than nothing right? It might lead to something right? It has to be better than working fast food, right? So you move back in with your parents, you reduce your expenses down to the minimal amount. You take that internship and you start working for free hoping that employment will be right around the corner. But what happens when that employment never comes even after 2 or more internships? How much longer can you keep working hard for no compensation?

The Lawyers and activists at InternJustce.com are working to end the harmful practices of bringing in entry level workers with no compensation of any kind. News outlets of a wide variety have highlighted the perils of the younger generation trying to figure out how to make it in a tight job market with few opportunities. They are filing lawsuits against former employers and only charging clients when they recover the lost wages.

Under the legal definition, interns should only do tasks and jobs that support their learning process about their job and field. What’s more is that the business is supposed to gain no direct benefit from the intern. Bringing people coffee, running copies, and other tasks (you know actual work) is not within that description. Ask anyone who has ever taken an internship, you do a lot of actual work, especially in competitive internships. Internships don’t always equal jobs and often you end up just working at a company for free. Worse yet, you get paid in things that don’t pay bills like “connections” and “exposure.” Working at a company for free in the hopes that it will turn into something is often a losing game despite the success of a few. It is time for this practice to stop and for companies to follow the existing law around internships. I know for myself, I have spent a good deal of time working for free and basically doing real work for no compensation while bills and obligations went unpaid.

This movement has spun into a whole activist community helping people recover stolen wages (times they worked for free) and they are helping lobby for raising the minimum wage which is a proposal that has been voted on in several states and passed. The working world should be fair, a fair days wage for a fair days work, even the Republicans can get on board with that.