The recent New York Times article on unpaid internships highlights all the potential problems with companies “hiring” unpaid interns, including the problem all the politards in Washington and elsewhere have with the practice. While I agree that unpaid internships are a bad idea, my reasons have nothing to do with all the hibberty-jibberty nonsense (pdf) a bunch of folks who’ve never had real jobs spew out:
1) If your company offers unpaid internships, you are severely restricting your potential candidate pool. Not many, particularly now, can AFFORD to work with no pay, no matter how “valuable” the “experience” might be. I know I certainly couldn’t when I was a student. Do you really want to limit your company to only candidates that don’t actually need the job?
2) The candidate pool is unnecessarily limited in a second way: I value my time and my life too highly to work for nothing, on the basis of some stranger’s “promise” that my “experience” will be “valuable” and that therefore I should enter into some arrangement whereby my time and effort is valued at zero. I fervently hope today’s youth have at least some marginal level of self-respect and believe similarly. Do you really want to exclude candidates with a healthy level of self-respect?
Let’s be honest here. If your company has a legitimate need for junior-level employees, you can afford to pay them something, even if it’s only minimum wage or a flat stipend for the summer. If your company is doing it out of some sense of “public good” and “lending a helping hand” or “giving a leg up” to people who want to make a career in your industry, you can afford to pay them something. And if you pay them something, you will have your pick of the ENTIRE potential candidate pool, not just the ones who can afford to do it for nothing and/or the ones willing to suffer through a summer because they are not self-aware enough to value their time and effort. If your company CANNOT afford to pay them something, then I would suggest that either you have no real need for them, or your company has real issues far larger than deciding which person to hire to do filing this summer.
If you respond to this with “well, that’s how I did it,” or “we’ve never done it that way in the past,” that’s not an actual reason to continue with the practice, and if you think it is, well, I don’t want to work for a person like you or a company like yours.
I would suggest all the would-be interns out there think about why, really, they want to work in an industry or for a company that values them at zero. What does that say about you and your career choice? Life’s too short to work for nothing. Find a company willing to do the right thing, like, say, the publisher of The Atlantic. I’d work for them (now). An organization that can change its mind and do the right thing (and retroactively, too) is the kind of company I would consider worthy of my time and effort.

MA beats four states in recent poll
According to a recent poll of 600 CEO’s by Chief Executive magazine, Massachusetts ranks 47th of the 50 states.
Of course the four we beat are all bankrupt, too, but MA trails even that bastion of malfeasance and graft, Illinois, which I personally find perhaps even more embarassing.
[Sigh.] I guess it’s not that surprising considering the gaggle of never-had-a-real-job buffoons we have runnin’ the joint, and the utterly-clueless voters who keep them there.