As the media gins up strife against fast-food restaurants to pay entry level workers the ridiculous pay of $15 bucks an hour, they seem to not practice what they preach.
NewsBustersreports Charles Davis at Vice.com has written an eye-opening expose of “Exploited Laborers of the Liberal Media” – unpaid or poorly paid interns at liberal magazines, websites, and radio networks that claim to speak out for the poorly paid working stiffs.
Davis notes Harper’s magazine wants interns to “work on a full-time, unpaid basis for three to five months” and The Washington Monthly is offering internships that are “unpaid and can be either part-time or full-time.” ButSalon.com’s hypocrisy is the most perfect:“Some professional experience is required,” says a listing for an editorial internship at Salon. If you get that job, you’ll be helping “research, report, write and produce our news and culture coverage,” which sounds a lot like a job. The position, based in New York City, is unpaid.
Though it does not pay its professionally experienced interns a dime, Salon (which has published my work in the past) has had the chutzpah to run a number of stories on the plight of unpaid workers, such as, “'Intern Nation': Are We Exploiting a Generation of Workers?” and “Unpaid and Sexually Harassed: The Latest Intern Injustice.” The company did not respond to a request for comment.The New Republic is owned now “by a co-founder of Facebook worth more than $600 million, Chris Hughes,” who was also a tech adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign. But they don’t pay interns. Davis offers other nifty profiles in hypocrisy:– Robert Reich served as labor secretary under Bill Clinton and is outspoken in his support for a living wage. But when I asked him about the trend of entry-level jobs being relabeled “internships” and being stripped of the pay, benefits, and legal rights they once offered recent college grads (by some estimates, half of the estimated 1.5 million interns in America are unpaid), he professed ignorance.
“This is not a topic I've given much thought,” said Reich....In a recent listing, The American Prospect, a magazine founded by Reich and other veterans of the Clinton administration, announced it was looking for editorial interns to assist “with fact-checking and research.” The interns will be “encouraged to contribute editorially and participate in meetings in addition to pursuing their own projects.”
Sounds good, but, “This is a full-time internship and comes with a $100 weekly stipend,” according to the listing. That comes to about $2.50 an hour, or “not nothing” if you are a glass-half-full type. However, there is a catch: “Interns who receive full course credit are ineligible for the weekly stipend.”
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Is it surprising that progressives are proven to be hypocrites?
