True, there are a good bit of client and friend-referred unpaid internships. If a top client, employee, or friend asked about such an internship for a son or daughter or for a friend of his kid, a company would be nuts not to put them at the top of the list. Hey, depending on the person asking, I would have directed an unpaid internship be created for him / her.
The “unfair” part to the middle class and poor is a bunch of nonsense, and really is just more of the middle class jealousy schtick that is so prevalent on CC. People need to drop this whiny working-class BS and look at the facts.
The fact is a company, which favors people who it knows in distributing internships and jobs, is not doing anything any differently than anyone else in another job / profession does on a daily basis.
Does a lawyer charge his neighbor the same as his corporate clients for the exact same advice? No. Does the lawyer have some silly obligation to extend that treatment to others he does not know? No. And is it unfair if he does not extend this to strangers? Of course not. The lawyer treats his neighbor better, as he should, because his neighbor is also jointly invested in the neighborhood and the lawyer’s overall well-being.
An acquaintance from the gym is a pediatric surgeon and cardiac specialist of some sort. When his wife got an issue with one of her glands, his doctor buddies treated her with the very top procedures within 2 days, when the wait for the average person would have been one to two months with all the tests etc. Do the doctors have some obligation to extend that to everyone who is middle class and poor and whose insurance may not cover that procedure? No. And is it unfair if they do not extend? Of course not. He said that the most unexpected thing was that surgery cost him less than his kid’s bout with pneumonia, i.e., the doctors and the hospital extended professional courtesy with very low rates, less than 80% of what it should have cost.
I was talking to my favorite bartender just last night, and he filled me in on his new walkway. When he told me the materials and what was done, I had to ask him, “How in the world did you pay for that?” I asked because what he mentioned was way beyond common sense on a bartender’s pay. He then smiled and said his BIL is a contractor and did it using left over materials from a job where the client bought stuff and then changed his mind and did not use 15% of it. Is the BIL under any obligation to extend that goodwill to anyone just because they are middle class and poor? No. And is it unfair if he does not extend? Of course not.
When the middle class professionals and the poor stop doing each other favors and stop practicing nepotism with people they know, only then can they ask a corporation to treat the people it knows like strangers. Therefore, I call absolute BS that a company, which has relationships with its executives, with other companies, with paying clients, and others, is under some made-up, pie-in-the-sky “unfair” code to treat people they do not know at all the same as people with which they have business and personal relationships, i.e., treat the people who actually spent capital and time helping it succeed, as if what they did for the company did not matter anymore than someone who has done zilch.
But this devaluing of relationships will never happen because, after all, a corporation is simply the relationships between a set of people for the sole purpose of producing a product or service. And the most efficient way to produce the best product or service is to make sure the people who work for you and with you know that, in the long-term, you value and treat them better than the stranger who just walked in off the street. Instinctively, people know and get this, and thus, practice it.