Fighting words from Eric Woodard, defender of unpaid internships. “It seems to me that a lot of people who are crying havoc about how it’s discriminatory, they all look alike,” he said, before making a not-so-veiled reference to Glatt. “It’s not any of the people who might be victims, it’s people who are going to Georgetown Law. You know, these are people — they’re fine.” [I can think of numerous critics of unpaid internships who are not white, not rich, not graduates of an elite institution. I have no idea if there is a greater proportion of those types of people speaking out against unpaid internships, but if there is, it might have something to do with a racially and economically unjust system that pipelines certain individuals into positions that allow them to consider such internships.] “Look, I am very sympathetic to labor, obviously. I fully support people’s right to have a living wage, but I still come back to the point that it’s not a labor issue. This is about education,” he said. “You don’t have labor in classrooms, defending students because they’re getting too many papers assigned. And that’s what this is. Nobody’s forcing anybody to do an internship.” [Employers are hiring full-time workers to do essential labor for little or no pay. Many of those workers have a college degree. Sounds like a labor issue.] Mikey Franklin, organizer of the Fair Pay Campaign, on how even progressives are resistant to a stance against unpaid intern labor. “I’m pissing off quite a lot of my friends,” he said. “We’re not a progressive organization per se; we’re not associated with the progressive movement and we’re certainly not partisan. But I came up in the progressive movement. None of my friends don’t support our campaign, but lots of them say they can’t support us publicly because their employer has unpaid interns or they themselves have unpaid interns. So, yeah, we are fighting a culture that’s deeply ingrained.” buzzfeed/evanmcsan/why-wont-obama-pay-his-interns
Posted on: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 22:41:37 +0000
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