20 Reasons Gen-Y Shouldn't Work for Free
1. This whole generational “work for free’ thing is not the way things have always been – its a dysfunctional feature of Great Recession where everyone was pinching pennies and a class of unemployed young people were available to be exploited.
2. We often “hired” free interns simply because you were being hawked by your universities and graduate and professional schools. We’re sorry. We weren’t thinking clearly. When we were young, we could live off of $200/month and still pay our enormous tuitions somewhere between $600 and $3,000/year. We interned. Why not you? Because we didn’t graduate burdened by tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. Our debt was manageable. Forgive us. We weren’t thinking clearly.
3. Anyone in business – including non-profits – must generate enough money to operate. They must pay their gas and electric bills for the power they receive. You should not give your power away free just because some organizations don’t believe they can afford it.
4. There’s a one percent difference in obtaining paid employment for young people who work for free and those who do not. In other words, if you’re working for free, you only have a one percent advantage over your presumed competitors in a lazy job market.
5. Many employers don’t give internships any credence at all when reviewing your resumes. They figure, “she worked for free; this ‘job’ doesn’t tell me whether she was good enough to be hired.”
6. If you get a paid job doing clerical work in your field, you can promote yourself there while you’re being paid and rise up through the ranks (it’s a low bar to move from a clerical position where some people are working at full capacity to a more professional position)
7. You are depriving yourself of future benefits when you’re not paying payroll taxes – social security, for instance, the pay-out from which is based on your lifetime earnings.
8. If you’re working for free, you’re likely displacing clerical workers who make a living doing clerical work and cannot find jobs because – among other things – recent grads are doing their work for free.
9. No matter how little people have told you you should think of yourselves, you are a store of enormous value. If you weren’t, why did you go into debt to ready yourself for the job market . . . tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In a market economy, value is exchanged for value. It’s the way the economy works.
10. I am stealing from you if I use the value you possess to make my business more efficient and my work more effective. STEALING!!
