“Tesla Is Reportedly Revoking Internship Offers to College Students Weeks Before Their Start Dates: ‘I Spent Thousands On Housing’”
“Tesla Is Reportedly Revoking Internship Offers to College Students Weeks Before Their Start Dates: ‘I Spent Thousands On Housing’”
In the US, completely unpaid internships are rare. Most are paid, but fairly poorly. There are a few major reasons for this:
You have to meet a lot of requirements for unpaid to be legal, and it all has to be documented.
Internships are a “farm” program- many interns are offered and accept a full time position afterwards. If they were unpaid, they are unlikely to accept.
Minimum wage is an absolute joke everywhere in the country. Why bother fighting it when you can pay as little as $7.25/hour? Even doubling or tripling that makes it appealing to poor college students and the farm program, and won’t cost much.
(Your example would be illegal in the US, and possibly even enforced)
Nice to know that’s not free labor.
Here instead it’s even forbidden by law to pay interns because theoretically should teach them (be a cost to the company) and they shouldn’t actually work, just watch and do basic stuff. But what actually happens is they get free slaves, for example they sent a poor student to do the job of a skilled metalworker and die in a work accident https://www.fanpage.it/attualita/chi-era-lorenzo-parelli-il-18enne-morto-nel-suo-ultimo-giorno-di-stage-gratuito-a-udine/
When it was my turn to be the intern, the company lied about what they were doing, they said that they would do something related to my study field instead they were a moving company with a ratio of 2 interns per 1 minimum wage workers (we don’t have a minimum wage in my country, I mean paid the minimum agreed by the unions). I just walked out and didn’t show up to the “internship” anymore but I should have reported that. I was too naive