Ravenwood - 09/21/05 06:30 AM
James Taranto points out Josh Marshall's blatantly hypocritical hiring practices. For the past several days, Marshall has been worried that the Gulf Coast rebuilding effort in the wake of Hurricane Katrina will use cheap, non-union labor. In what he calls wage-gouging, Marshall laments contractors being allowed to hire people for wages dictated by the market (rather than by labor unions). But then there's this bit of hypocrisy.
TPM is looking for a new web intern who'll be responsible for various aspects of on-going site design, site maintenance, assistance administering the TPM community site, TPMCafe, and work on our various projects like . . . our new tracking of which members of Congress are supporting President Bush's Gulf Coast Wage Cut. . . .Taranto opines: "When your money is at stake, Marshall is willing to let unions dictate wages. When it comes to his own money, he not only refuses to pay prevailing wages, he won't even pay the minimum wage--or indeed any wage at all!"This is an unpaid internship.
Category: Left-wing Conspiracy
Comments (2) top link me
Not that I want to defend that guy, but it is pretty common practice in some fields for college students to work in unpaid internships. In those fields the paid internships are especially coveted (gee, wonder why) and therefore give the employer their pick of the litter while the rest of the people get stuck with unpaid internships. I have no idea if that is typical in computer science (I kinda doubt it) but it's not unheard of. In most of those cases, the compensation is considered to be the training and experience gained by the student.
Posted by: ANdrew Upson at September 21, 2005 10:50 AMDoes Marshall claim to be doing "journalism" or "political campaigning"? (I know what it looks like, but what does he tell the FEC?) Much campaign work is done by unpaid volunteers, but is journalism actually such a good job that college students would be willing to work for free to get a leg up?
As for computer science students doing unpaid internships for the experience and training: back when a college might have just one computer, taking up a large room and tended to continually by a large staff, I worked in the college computer center for free. The training and experience were well worth it. BUT, I wasn't going to another site to work, I wasn't putting in full time over a summer, and I was supervised by computer science teachers and got a few course credits. Going off to somewhere that is probably lacking in technical gurus doesn't seem to be nearly as good a way to add to one's knowledge.
Posted by: markm at September 21, 2005 12:00 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
