There is a certain, almost ritualistic, dance one goes through when discussing the minimum wage. It goes something like this:
- Someone says that increasing costs for labor decreases the demand for labor, citing basic economic theory and common sense;
- a proponent of wage hikes says "nuh uh" and points to the Card and Krueger study showing "nuh uh";
- the first person responds by saying "Yeah huh!" and points to Neumark and Wascher who published a book backing the "Yeah huh!" point of view;
- Rinse and repeat with any number of studies until each side wants to stab the other in the face.*
I'm going to sidestep this whole show and instead deal with some anecdata, which we all know is far, far superior to facts and figures.
Conde Nast—the publishing house responsible for Vogue, the New Yorker, and all manner of glossies—is eliminating its internship program altogether after getting sued by a pack of disgruntled ne'er-do-wells who agreed to do a job for a certain amount of money and later sued their bosses after deciding that the amount of money they agreed to work for was not to their liking. Let's leave aside the general silliness of getting upset at someone else for paying you what you agreed to be paid, and instead focus on the consequence of increasing the cost of unskilled labor:
Magazine publisher Condé Nast, fighting allegations by former interns that they were paid less than $1 an hour for tasks such as proofreading articles and organizing jewelry, is ending its internship program, a company spokeswoman said Wednesday. ...
"Our goal isn't to end internship programs," said Rachel Bien, a lawyer with Outten & Golden LLP and the lead attorney for [the disgruntled prats suing Conde Nast. "Our goal is to…make sure they're legal, either by paying minimum wage or making sure they meet the criteria the Department of Labor has spelled out."
Well, whether or not it's your goal to end the internship programs, that's what's happening. And I can't say I'm terribly surprised, having both been an unpaid intern and supervised unpaid interns. The problem with interns is that you have no idea what you're getting. College resumes mean exactly nothing. Clips aren't much better. References are good, but who knows if the referee is just doing a family friend a favor? You're shooting almost entirely in the dark.
So if you present a business with two options—pay all of your interns a minimum wage or hire no interns—it's not much of an option at all. Why do you want to pay the incompetent nephew of a contributor to take up space in your office?
You know who this is entirely unfair to? The competent intern who lucked his way into your office sitting next to the incompetent nephew staring out the window at all the merry squirrels.** He misses out on valuable experience, loses out on garnering the all-important recommendation from editors in the industry, and is altogether worse off. These are the people that Rachel Bien's law firm is hurting with their absurd suit.
I'm sure there are some that will respond "Well, good. The system is unfair to poor students who can't afford to take an unpaid internship. What about them?" And while I'm tempted to respond "Well, life ain't fair," I will instead respond by quoting one of our era's great philosophers, Neil Peart. Here is the closing verse of "The Trees," his hymn about what happens when you try to force equality on everyone:
So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights
'The oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light'
Now there's no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe and saw
The point, if it isn't obvious, is that leveling the playing field by scorching the earth is an asinine way to level the playing field. "If everyone can't have it NO ONE CAN" is just as childish as saying "If I can't have it, NO ONE CAN." Perhaps moreso, given that such language is couched in childish utopianism rather than general selfishness. Sometimes the government can't level the playing field and shouldn't be in the business of trying. Forcing industries to pay unskilled labor is a perfect example of why that's true.
As Matthew Yglesias has noted, another unintended consequence of this may be to drive would-be journalists hugely into debt by encouraging them to attend journalism school to get the connections they need to nab jobs. Writes Yglesias:
My worry would be that we'll replace zero-salary work/training positions with what amount to negative-salary training in the form of graduate school. Both the unpaid summer internship and the master's degree in journalism are based on the idea that eight semesters worth of college leaves most people ill-qualified for a paying journalism job without some further seasoning. And while requiring people to spend months working for free does put a substantial barrier in the way of someone who can't get financial assistance from his parents, requiring someone to spend a year or two paying many thousands of dollars to a school creates a much larger barrier.
But hey, egalitarians! Keep trying to help those poor, oppressed interns out. Soon enough their discontent will drop to zero—because there won't be any of them.
*Watching this debate play out over the last five years or so (when I first became interested in the topic) has more or less destroyed my confidence that there is anything even close to objective truth in the world of policy debates and statistical modeling. But that's a post for another day.
**To head off your complaints: Yes, I know the line in Office Space is "and I could see the squirrels, and they were married," but that don't make no sense. So I changed it. Sue me.