Is Chairman Harkin Exploiting His Unpaid Staff?
Reasonable people might assume that legislators who support raising the federal minimum wage would pay their employees the current minimum wage of $7.25 or their proposed wage of $10.10. But, once again, congressional leaders are telling Americans to do as they say
, not as they do.
The Fair Minimum Wage Act is sponsored by Senate Committee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Congressmen George Miller (D-CA 11), ranking member on the House Education and Workforce Committee. The bill has over 200 co-sponsors—none of whom are Republicans. The Act calls for raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour over two years, and then indexing the rate to inflation.
Neither Miller nor Harkin pays their Congressional interns, and the double standards extend to other sponsors too. The Employment Policies Institute found that 96 percent of the sponsors do not pay any of their interns. This means, as the EPI report states, “the same Members of Congress who are supporting a 40 percent wage hike on private sector employers are simultaneously failing to provide any wages to their own employee interns.”
“People do see the minimum wage as a matter of justice for people who don't have the ability to bargain for decent wages,” said Miller last March when he introduced the legislation. Well, how about justice for interns?
Unfortunately, Harkin and Miller’s offices and their respective committees had no comments when I called.
These senators and representatives would most likely defend their hypocrisy by claiming the benefits offered to interns justify the lack of pay. Clearly this is what the young people who take the internships believe, or else they would not have applied for the highly competitive positions.
The benefit of internships is the experience, which leads to stronger resumes and better jobs in the future. Students can also try out different workplaces. No one forces students into unpaid internships. Quite the opposite—unpaid internships on Capitol Hill are difficult to find.
The Act’s sponsors could also argue that if they were forced to pay their interns, they would not be able to hire as many young people. Interns are coming to the Hill to learn and gain experience. Call it an investment in education that will pay off in their future careers.
The same economic reasoning can be applied to minimum wage jobs. Young people, half of those earning the minimum wage, are looking to gain the hard and soft skills that come with holding a real job. They use entry-level positions to prove their work ethic and develop their human capital.
Raising the minimum wage removes organizations’ abilities to hire inexperienced young workers. Businesses always have the option to not pay people at all—by letting workers go or not hiring new applicants. Employers are only forced to pay minimum wage to people they employ. The CBO recognized this in its February report on the labor market effects of increasing the minimum wage, and projected that 500,000 fewer people would be hired if the hourly minimum wage were raised to $10.10.
Non-profits are exempt from paying their interns. For-profit firms have to pay, if the internship is not for college credit. This forces students to pay for the internship—often at a high rate--since they owe tuition to colleges in exchange for internship credits. Participating in for-credit internships can cost students thousands of dollars.
The labor standards lawmakers apply to the private sector should also apply to government. Imagine the outrage if the minimum wage rose to $10.10 an hour for private sector workers, but stayed at $7.25 for government employees. As with other laws, Congress wants to exempt itself from costly side effects.
Harkin and Miller earn easy political points by claiming that raising the minimum wage has no costs, yet they would hire fewer interns if they had to pay them. In the same way, employers would hire fewer workers if they had to pay them $10.10 an hour.
Unpaid internships, in Congress and elsewhere, are beneficial most of all to interns. For the same reasons, minimum wage jobs are beneficial. Congress understands basic economics when negative consequences of laws and regulations affect its members. If members of Congress would apply the same reasoning they use in decisions that affect their staffs and their families to the country as a whole, many destructive economic policies would not be voted into law.
Jared Meyer is a policy analyst at Economics21, a center of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. You can follow him on Twitter here.