[ghaspland]

I don't think unpaid internships should be illegal. I worked in a lot of unpaid internships early in my career, and it helped me build my skill set. In some cases, a position didn't exist, I just asked if I could work for free to learn. Those are jobs I wouldn't have had, much to my detriment, if the employer feared being sued or fined for not paying me.

I think this is particularly important if you're trying to learn how to run a company rather than learn specific job skills.

[chasing]

The problem is that internships can very, very easily turn exploitative -- not just to the individual but to an entire class of individuals.

If this company just let you tinker at their offices so you could learn, that seems fine. If you were producing production-quality work for free, well, that's a more complex problem. In that case, you're devaluing the work itself (giving away for free what would normally be sold). And while it's not going to have a huge effect if just you do it, if this scenario was allowed to become the norm it would impact the paychecks of everyone in your industry. Except the owners, who would love the overall cheaper labor.

And, just to say it: It's this sort lack of labor protections that lead to ever-widening income gaps. If companies aren't bound to pay employees fairly, the middle class gets poorer and the wealthy owner class gets wealthier.

[Daniel_Newby]

Unpaid internships cannot reduce lifetime income by more than about 1%, and might increase total income by providing higher quality training than would otherwise be economically viable.

[gte910h]

If you add basic income for all, then unpaid internships become far more tenable. Otherwise they're discriminatory to people of lesser means.

[king_jester]

How on earth did you do this while still being able to eat and afford rent?