Work Minus Pay

Obama “Summer Jobs+” program touts unpaid internships despite administration’s pledge to crack down on practice.



BY: Bill McMorris - June 1, 2012 5:00 am

Barack Obama has turned to industries accused of taking advantage of young workers in an attempt to fulfill his promise of a better future with lower unemployment and student loan interest rates for young Americans.

The president’s “Summer Jobs+” program looks to put at least 180,000 young people to work in internships for major companies. However, only 70,000 of those opportunities will offer young workers any type of pay, according to the Department of Labor, which runs the program.

http://freebeacon.com/work-minus-pay/

Well... you could work for... the State Department cultural exchange program...

The State Department, responding to a wave of complaints from foreign students about abuses under a summer cultural exchange program, issued new rules on Friday significantly revising the types of jobs the students can do, prohibiting them from most warehouse, construction, manufacturing and food-processing work.

The rules are the most extensive changes the State Department has made to its largest cultural exchange program since several hundred foreign students protested last summer at a plant in Pennsylvania that packs Hershey’s chocolates. The students said they were forced to work on grueling production lines lifting heavy boxes, often on night shifts, isolated in the plant from any American workers.

After paycheck deductions, the students said, they were paid so little they could not afford to travel in the United States, as the program promised.

Those students were “concentrated in single locations for long hours in jobs that provided little or no opportunity to interact with U.S. citizens,” the department wrote to explain the rules. They were “exposed to workplace and safety hazards” and “subjected to predatory practices through wage deductions” for housing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/us/po ... ogram.html

http://j1visa.state.gov/programs/summer-work-travel/

Making or saving jobs since 2008.