An article with the above title (from The L Magazine, hat tip mental_floss blog) opens with this question: “Did you know that it’s against the law to “employ” people and not pay them?” It then goes on to give us a fairly complete analysis of how internships work and where they are most likely to occur.
All very interesting. But I don’t buy the premise. When did it become illegal to volunteer, that is, work for no pay? And I don’t think that “interns” are forced to accept the jobs they take. It is an act of free will, perhaps only for educational or psychic rewards, but they can quit any time if it’s not working for them.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 James Ament 
An acquaintance, a friend of my son’s, took an internship after college working for a cultural organization. It paid nothing, except for room and board at the organization’s big event at the end of the summer. It was not a hardship to her family to subsidize this, for the AP classes she had taken during high school meant that she graduated a semester early.
My objection to this was less for the effect on her parents’ finances than for the effect of such internships in excluding the young whose parents have less money or are less willing to part with it to provide free labor to such an entity. I am troubled by a system in which the children of the well-off get to spend the summer or semester networking, and the children of the less well of go to wait tables or stock shelves. We do a pretty good job of putting the fix in with the school system as it is; do we need to continue the effect after school ends?
While I fully understand your point…”I am troubled by a system in which the children of the well-off get to spend the summer or semester networking, and the children of the less well of go to wait tables or stock shelves,” I think this is one of those cases where an “is” does not necessarily translate into an “ought” that must be fixed by some authoritative means. The solution may be worse than the problem. Forcing organizations to hire employees instead of allowing interns, or outlawing such programs, would simply mean the end of them. And God forbid that we should create another entitlement program by offering subsidies to those desreving folks that cannot afford to work for no pay. I realize that many people would find any of these alternatives quite acceptable. I don’t. We need less coercive interference in the free will acts of human beings rather than more.