this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
507 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
60076 readers
3262 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AOL had volunteer assistants. Ultima Online had volunteer assistants. The courts ruled that those were employee positions based on the way those positions were managed.
Don't even get me started on unpaid internships.
Fair enough, I wasn't aware of there being any precedent there. However, at least from those two cases, it seems that they were both settled out of court, so there hasn't actually been a legally binding ruling on this kind of issue.
To be clear, I'm not saying that unpaid internships etc. are good; only that I'm not sure a court would find them to be literally illegal (regardless of whether or not I think they should be).
Unpaid internships are legal so long as the business receives no value from the intern, and the courts would uphold that, if ever a case came before them about it.
In practice, the only people who have the option of taking an unpaid internship - where they have to spend many hours a week in a workplace that doesn't pay them, to the exclusion of spending those hours in a workplace that does pay them - are already finanically stable enough to do so, probably because of generational wealth. AOL and UO were exceptions, probably because people wanted to participate in those communities in their spare time, as a kind of hobby.
Those people are being inducted into the system that propagates that generational wealth. It's not in their best interest to protest not being paid when they should be, because the repercussions of doing so would be being excluded from that system. So it's highly unlikely that any real "this should be a paid internship" case would ever be filed. The amount of hours which would be ordered to be compensated, even if it was treble damages, wouldn't be worth the cost of going to court, let alone being excluded from whatever industry.