Madam, what a handsome moustashe you wear!

stfuconservatives:

An Atlantic Monthly article saying what I’ve been saying for a long time: unpaid internships are terrible and should be illegal. There is no reason businesses should expect unpaid labor from anyone.

Full disclosure: I worked an unpaid internship at a major newspaper in college. I was very lucky that I still had time to go to class and work a part-time (paid) job waiting tables at Chili’s. And that my parents paid my rent, bills, tuition and books.

That internship has given me a leg up in my career ever since. And you know what? That’s unfair. It’s not that I didn’t work hard at it or deserve the internship. It’s that I was privileged enough to be able to afford to take it. Only students who could afford to work for free could take an internship like that. It was a gigantic newspaper and could have easily, easily afforded to pay us minimum wage. But they didn’t, because they didn’t have to.

The most galling is when internships are offered in exchange for college credit. At many universities, students pay per unit. So in order to take an unpaid internship, they have to pay more in tuition. Essentially, they’re paying to work. At least my school only charged a flat tuition rate per quarter.

But there is a silver lining to my tale of privilege. At every job I’ve had since then, whenever someone mentions hiring interns, I personally insist we pay them. On three separate occasions I’ve made paid internships available to people when my bosses wanted them to work for free. If you have ANY chance to do the same, please do. Businesses, if you can’t afford to pay your employees, you don’t get to have employees.

I’m not saying interns should get a salary and benefits or anything. But minimum wage and a modicum of decency should be standards for all workers in America, no matter what level they’re at.

-Jess

I know this isn’t about reproductive rights but I’mma talk about this anyway.

Unpaid internships are truly unfair and they are, at times, absurdly selective and sometimes nothing short of slave labor.

My background isn’t in journalism or business, it’s in theatre and I can tell you that not only are paid internships like finding a unicorn in theatre, but the amount they pay you isn’t even as much as the federal minimum wage of a waiter or waitress.

At one internship, I worked 12 hours a day (sometimes more) for three months straight with one day off a week (but that was usually spent helping the theatre recover as much of their stuff due to extreme flooding in the area). I was given a weekly stipend but when I did the math, I made 15 cents an hour.

At another I made 1.26 an hour for two months of work. And after working nearly constantly for them and doing everything they asked (and even going beyond that by helping the props designer and coming in to work load-in with less than an hour’s notice), they chose not to renew my contract for a second show because I refused to work unpaid.

Unpaid internships are bullshit. When I was looking for a job, I can’t tell you how many unpaid internships required ridiculous amounts of skills. Some of them wanted master’s degrees, other’s required a special driver’s license or expected skills that a paid position wouldn’t even have. Unpaid internships have become pretty popular during this time of recession and I think they should be abolished and illegal. You should not be able to pay someone in “experience”.

For one, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get experience that these places claim you will. For the internship that paid me 15 cents an hour, I was a stage management intern but I spent the majority of my time working on props, the rest of my time was spent working in the costume or construction shops or shuttling intern actors around in my car so we could get to the performance locations.

I never attended a production meeting or spent more than half of a rehearsal not working on making props. The most time I spent with the stage manager I was supposed to be learning from was when we went to the bar after every performance (and sometimes, depending on where everyone went, I couldn’t even do that because I was 19).

Unpaid internships take advantage of people who want to get involved in a particular field and it teaches the organizations that employ such internships that it’s okay for them to do so.

Love,

Rabble

Operation Rescue (an anti-choice domestic terrorist organization with ties to Dr. Tiller’s murder) supposedly happened upon the medical records of patients from a Kansas City abortion clinic, which OR has now published online (though they promise to withhold sensitive info like addresses and such - sure.). 

The state of Kansas, which you would think would investigate OR for HIPPA violations if nothing else, has instead cooperated with OR and is now looking into supposed sexual abuse claims that these stolen medical records indicate.

The ONLY reason OR would make known that they have these records is to intimidate and implicitly threaten people who have sought abortions in Kansas and those who will.

The state of Kansas has its priorities messed up.

The Department of Justice needs to step in.

Please sign this petition and then re-blog this link.