It does stink, but even if the US required interns to be paid, it would
still stink because they'd be paid minimum wage, which is so low here that
anyone earning it is condemned to terrible poverty. The minimum wage in the
USA is a mere $7.25 an hour. That works out to about $200 a week pay after
taxes are taken out. I live in a city with one of the lowest costs of living
in the USA, and even here you cannot survive at all on less than $11 an
hour. That's if you're all alone. If you have children, you need more. Many
internships are offered in places like New York City and Los Angeles, where
the cost of housing is 4-5 TIMES what it is in Fort Wayne. Yet, the minimum
wage in these places, where apartments START at $1000 a month for the
cheapest places in town, the minimum wage is still $7.25...less than rent
costs! You still need to eat and pay for your electricity too!
I did a lot of research on costs of living and the concept of living wages
for a graduate seminar on human rights that I took a couple of years ago.
Some economists put together a living wage calculator on the web (I need to
look it up, I can't remember the website now) where you could look at cost
of living in different American cities and it would tell you what you need
to earn to barely survive by yourself, and with kids. In Los Angeles, it
said a single person needed $20 an hour to just barely survive. Few
Americans anywhere earn that much, which is a solidly middle class income in
Indiana, and for most young people...my generation and younger, an
impossible dream. Employers here want people with degrees and experience and
only want to pay $8 an hour.
--
Chris Crawford
Fine Art Photography
Fort Wayne, Indiana
260-437-8990
http://www.chriscrawfordphoto.com My portfolio
http://blog.chriscrawfordphoto.com My latest work!
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On 10/18/11 1:11 AM, "Chris Barker" <ftog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Good for him, Nathan. It's likely that he was worth it, then.
>
> I think that the system, in the UK and the US, now stinks.
>
> Chris
>
> On 18 Oct 2011, at 06:07, Nathan Wajsman wrote:
>
>> In Switzerland, interns must by law be paid a decent wage. My son just spent
>> a year working at Nestle for a salary that would be considered middle class
>> in most countries (including the US).
--
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