[sterling312]

Feel free to comment, I want to hear what other people think on this issue.

I think there is nothing inherently wrong with unpaid internships. If the market price for your work is low enough to only compensate experience gained, that's perfectly fine. What's wrong with the system are more generalize than that, and there are two problems that causes it. I would break it down to A) industrial organizational problem and B) market downturn (and to an extent upturn) + inefficiency and lagging effects.

Part A is more about the over abundance of certain firms in the market supply-demand that makes it very difficult to pay interns. Since I've never worked as a unpaid-intern before (it might happen soon though :/), correct me if I'm wrong, but most of them are either in marketing, legal assistant positions, or journalism. Marketing firms that do not offer paid internships are usually small agencies that are barely able to survive on their own; same thing is true with journalism; the whole legal market has wage flooring that artificially reduces the supply of laws and therefore law firms. It seems to me that these industries needs to better allocate and either become more competitive via innovation, and people going into those industry might want to reconsider their path.

Part B is more on the fact that labor market is inherently inefficient, and in a recession, it exaggerates the underlining problem in part A. This is why we are starting to see more unpaid internship instead of flat wage cuts.