UW–Madison’s Matthew Hora shared his expertise with The Washington Post for their recent story, “Unpaid internships have been criticized for years. Why are they still around?”
Hora is an associate professor of adult and higher education with the Division of Continuing Studies and with the School of Education’s Department of Educational Policy Studies. He is also co-director of UW–Madison’s Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT).
According to The Washington Post, Hora “wholeheartedly endorses a ban on unpaid internships and associated training programs, but he isn’t optimistic that they are going away anytime soon.” The article states that many fields require unpaid internships for graduation, as well as some employers. Hora adds that the government seems to “ignore the unethical nature of free labor.”
“Labor should be compensated — period,” Hora states, “… but especially for students who are too often juggling other responsibilities, struggling to make ends meet, and in many cases vastly under-resourced.”
Kelsey Ables, author of the Washington Post article, also interviewed other professionals as well as students about their experiences with unpaid internships
A member of the European Youth Forum states, “Despite it being a universal right that work must pay, employers know that young people are anxious to land their first job, and they are willing to exploit this.”
Read “Unpaid internships have been criticized for years. Why are they still around?”