Recent rules issued by the U. S. Department of Labor have mandated overtime pay for employees who work more than 40 hours
a week if they earn $47,476 per year or less. That adds a lot of people to
overtime and will put a much-deserved dent into the business models of
innumerable shady corporations. It’s one of those rule adjustments that
outgoing administrations do: it’s something Obama wants credit for but wasn’t
willing to spend any political capital on.
The New York Times pointed out that this plan threatens to
disrupt the “Prada Economy,” referring to the
novel and film “The Devil Wears Prada,” a fictionalized account of working for
Vogue editor Anna Wintour. That many
publications or institutions of measurable influence are horrible places to
work is no surprise at this point. I know people with Masters degrees who are
brilliant at what they do yet live in poverty because access to paying work in
their field is through unpaid or nearly-unpaid work.
A friend I worked with years ago once had a job interview
with the prestigious ParisReview. George Plimpton asked her at once point, “How important is
it to you to get paid?” She was newly arrived to New York City and getting paid
was very important with any job she took and she told Plimpton that. She did
not get the job.
When I was trying to get a writing job I managed to get an
interview with a trade publication (Chemical Week – it is still around) and
after a few rounds of interviews and a writing test they wanted me to come in
and work for a while. “Don’t do it unless you can stay at least four hours,”
the editor told me. I came in and worked a full day, writing some stories,
re-writing news briefs and the like. I never heard back from them. A year or
two later I discovered that they had published some of my work and never paid
me for it. When I contacted the editor all he did was send me a photo copy of
the pages of the magazine in which my work appeared. As rotten as that is, it’s
kids’ stuff. I know freelancers who struggle to get paid by name-brand
companies and mainstream publications.
There are instances where low-paid or even unpaid
internships are acceptable and permissible. When I was in college and able to
live with parents, I had an internship on a gubernatorial campaign. I worked
some incredibly long hours driving our candidate around the state of Georgia in
the summer heat for a month, at one point not sleeping for more than two or
three hours. It was an incredibly fun time and I was paid only $100 per week.
But that was when I could afford to do that and it was only a temporary
assignment. Colleges and parents can often subsidize interns. Once people
graduate college, they usually have to start paying the rent and start trying
to pay down their student loans.
Using an internship as an unpaid apprenticeship for large,
for-profit institutions is unacceptable. You shouldn’t’ have to be a sucker to
pursue your dreams. And in the end it’s the publications that suffer. If the
only people able to work in the arts or media are wealthy scions or sociopaths
who still live in their parents’ basement past the age of 30, then you’re not
going to get the best minds of your generation.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a lot of companies give
raises to overworked employees to $47,477 per year just to skirt these rules.
But maybe that may be a kind of back-handed victory in and of itself if enough
people get raises. They’ll still be overworked and underpaid, but underpaid by
a little less. In these times, we’ll take what we can get.
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