Unpaid Internships are Illegal

So you want to work for free to gain valuable experience? Get your foot in the door? Grab that first rung of the ladder? It's a FEDERAL crime. I once worked for free to gain experience- there are many forms of compensation in this world!  At the same time, they have dramatically increased the minimum wage- like it wasn't already hard enough to make a new start in this miserable economy. Just goes to show how much of what is government exists to prevent voluntary exchange between people.  Mark Cuban is on the case:

One silver lining of a “great recession” that we are now in is that there are a lot of incredibly talented people without jobs, or who have lost their jobs. I didn’t care if they were 18 years old or 73 years old.  I thought we could assemble a talented group who would enjoy the internships and could also gain valuable experience to add to their resumes.  When the economy opened up, one of two things would hopefully occur.  We were generating revenue from this effort and we could hire them, or they had just built up their resumes and improved their chances of finding a paying job.
Makes sense right ?
Wrong. Enter the US Government.
This is what our HR person, who his supersmart and really knows his stuff came back with
“The law says that interns have to be paid unless they are perfoming work that is of no value to the organization; ie., helps them in some way but we get no benefit from their work.  Thus we would have to create work that is useless to us  if we choose not to pay them.  How silly is that?


http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship-so-you-can-get-valuable-experience-screw-you/