"The illegal practice of failing to compensate interns has eaten through the architectural profession like a cancer. In addition to the ethical and moral considerations inherent with the failure to compensate employees and effectively transforming them into slaves, there are monetary consequences which have a far reaching impact on the profession as a whole. Employers who utilize unpaid labor are able to keep their fees lower and have an unfair advantage over those firms who are abiding by the law. This practice has the potential to create a chain reaction where more employers may be forced to either use unpaid labor or reduce the salary of full time employees. The inevitable result is salary erosion which can cut across the entire profession affecting all designers at all levels. If a large number of skilled or unskilled interns are willing to work for free, there is little incentive for employers to adequately compensate other skilled designers of the same level."
Add to that the "Unpaid Overtime" problem... if you require employees to work 5 hours unpaid overtime per week (couched in the notion of "Salaried Positions"), for every 8 employees you have, that displaces 1 full time additional employee from the workplace.
i've been researching that very issue, menona, and was shocked to find that (in the US) it's 100% legal for an employer to demand that salaried employees work an UNLIMITED amount of unpaid overtime for the same salary. really, there is no limit. they can request 60 hrs/wk instead of 40, or even 100 for that matter, or a full, 7-day week, as long as the hourly wage doesn't fall below minimum.
Regarding overtime, I think its absolute crap that it isn't paid to salaried workers. I know some that worked their butts off, but due to a lack of people in the office, always had to work overtime (myself included as an intern...although I fought with HR until they gave me overtime).
There were promises heard that as more people were hired there would be less overtime, bonuses at the end of the year, comp days to make up for overtime, etc... none of those came to fruition as well as the next summer (I had worked at the firm while going to school for 2 years continuously) I was not allowed to work past 40 hours while the everyone else had to work mandatory overtime. Its ridiculous how they treated their employees and also how layoffs were handled once they started (people that actually were valuable being laid off before people who sat there and didn't do their jobs...I was part of the first round, but as a part-time intern that was expected since you don't get rid of a full-time person before a part-time one).
Long story short, I plan on doing my time to get licensed and then I'm starting my own firm (I also plan to teach as well to keep one foot in academia).
If there are any managers of firms reading this, you are driving out the next generation with these practices. They sure made me question what I was doing.
If you quantified the amount of expected, unpaid, work that is squeezed out of the workforce - I wonder how many additional people's livelihoods that would represent?
Beyond the traditional "Overtime", scenario - I know one place that officially "Reduced" their full-time employees' hours to 32 per week. Each employee's salary was then reduced by 20%... "temporarily".
That lasted for 2 years (and may still be going on). And did the amount of work those employees were expected to produce go down...? I'm sure you'll be shocked to find out that, no... no it did not.
Well actually, many employees took Friday Afternoons off. But as one of the Project Managers would often comment, "I'm sure (The Owner) would have an aneurysm if I only billed 32 hours."
And in a environments like that, there's no real good reason for an employee to be actually efficient.
The only that this problem can be drawn down I think, would be to have the "Professional" classes (en masse) go through some sort of "Unionizing" effort, similar to what the Labor workers went through in the Industrial age.
What's Sally Field doing these days? I've got some extra cardboard and a Sharpie around here somewhere.
unpaid internships are bad. but, hell if you can afford it and thats the way in and you want it, so be it. other professions do it. people who want to be chefs go do it. other designers do it as well. for me it was never an option. but, if i had say an afternoon or evening paying gig and could work for free in the field i dreamed of being in then i would do it. in my view, the real tragedy in this profession is the debt that students are taking on just to be able to sit for an exam that has about zero to do with anything that is studied in school. i would like to see a complete overhaul that would combine intensive studios AND taking the A,R,E. while in school. Therefore, we would have graduates who, although may be lacking practical experience, are still architects and, therefore, worth more in the marketplace.
Unpaid internships are abusive and wrong. As employers, one should not offer or accept it no matter who they are, and as students, one should not be fooled by rainbows in the sky of what an unpaid internship means in the long run. What no one is discussing in this topic however is efficiency: Why so much overtime and waste in time? Please convince me that those who work 12-14 hour days are actually producing efficiently. The same bad habits created in studio in school translate into the workplace because of poor time managment skills and lack of guidance by employers on that topic.
Apr 4, 11 9:37 pm ·
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NYT op-ed piece on unpaid internships
an excerpt from Mathew Lynch:
"The illegal practice of failing to compensate interns has eaten through the architectural profession like a cancer. In addition to the ethical and moral considerations inherent with the failure to compensate employees and effectively transforming them into slaves, there are monetary consequences which have a far reaching impact on the profession as a whole. Employers who utilize unpaid labor are able to keep their fees lower and have an unfair advantage over those firms who are abiding by the law. This practice has the potential to create a chain reaction where more employers may be forced to either use unpaid labor or reduce the salary of full time employees. The inevitable result is salary erosion which can cut across the entire profession affecting all designers at all levels. If a large number of skilled or unskilled interns are willing to work for free, there is little incentive for employers to adequately compensate other skilled designers of the same level."
Add to that the "Unpaid Overtime" problem... if you require employees to work 5 hours unpaid overtime per week (couched in the notion of "Salaried Positions"), for every 8 employees you have, that displaces 1 full time additional employee from the workplace.
i've been researching that very issue, menona, and was shocked to find that (in the US) it's 100% legal for an employer to demand that salaried employees work an UNLIMITED amount of unpaid overtime for the same salary. really, there is no limit. they can request 60 hrs/wk instead of 40, or even 100 for that matter, or a full, 7-day week, as long as the hourly wage doesn't fall below minimum.
Astounding.
And not just the architecture business, but business anywhere. It's stupefying.
elinor, President Bush passed a legislation back in 2004 called FairPay (which had the opposite intent of what the name implies).
The result is that additional 8 million workers in America became exempt from being paid overtime.
As a lowly architectural drafter or an intern, you used to be eligible for overtime pay. Not any more.
Assault on middle class continues to this day, with half the victims being willful participants.
Regarding overtime, I think its absolute crap that it isn't paid to salaried workers. I know some that worked their butts off, but due to a lack of people in the office, always had to work overtime (myself included as an intern...although I fought with HR until they gave me overtime).
There were promises heard that as more people were hired there would be less overtime, bonuses at the end of the year, comp days to make up for overtime, etc... none of those came to fruition as well as the next summer (I had worked at the firm while going to school for 2 years continuously) I was not allowed to work past 40 hours while the everyone else had to work mandatory overtime. Its ridiculous how they treated their employees and also how layoffs were handled once they started (people that actually were valuable being laid off before people who sat there and didn't do their jobs...I was part of the first round, but as a part-time intern that was expected since you don't get rid of a full-time person before a part-time one).
Long story short, I plan on doing my time to get licensed and then I'm starting my own firm (I also plan to teach as well to keep one foot in academia).
If there are any managers of firms reading this, you are driving out the next generation with these practices. They sure made me question what I was doing.
If you quantified the amount of expected, unpaid, work that is squeezed out of the workforce - I wonder how many additional people's livelihoods that would represent?
Beyond the traditional "Overtime", scenario - I know one place that officially "Reduced" their full-time employees' hours to 32 per week. Each employee's salary was then reduced by 20%... "temporarily".
That lasted for 2 years (and may still be going on). And did the amount of work those employees were expected to produce go down...? I'm sure you'll be shocked to find out that, no... no it did not.
Well actually, many employees took Friday Afternoons off. But as one of the Project Managers would often comment, "I'm sure (The Owner) would have an aneurysm if I only billed 32 hours."
And in a environments like that, there's no real good reason for an employee to be actually efficient.
The only that this problem can be drawn down I think, would be to have the "Professional" classes (en masse) go through some sort of "Unionizing" effort, similar to what the Labor workers went through in the Industrial age.
What's Sally Field doing these days? I've got some extra cardboard and a Sharpie around here somewhere.
that should read "...an Environment..."
sorry.
and it should read, "the only way that this problem can be drawn down..."
sorry again.
i'm in! (breaks out jar of sharpies...). I'm short and have dark hair, though not nearly as cute as Sally.............
unpaid internships are bad. but, hell if you can afford it and thats the way in and you want it, so be it. other professions do it. people who want to be chefs go do it. other designers do it as well. for me it was never an option. but, if i had say an afternoon or evening paying gig and could work for free in the field i dreamed of being in then i would do it. in my view, the real tragedy in this profession is the debt that students are taking on just to be able to sit for an exam that has about zero to do with anything that is studied in school. i would like to see a complete overhaul that would combine intensive studios AND taking the A,R,E. while in school. Therefore, we would have graduates who, although may be lacking practical experience, are still architects and, therefore, worth more in the marketplace.
Unpaid internships are abusive and wrong. As employers, one should not offer or accept it no matter who they are, and as students, one should not be fooled by rainbows in the sky of what an unpaid internship means in the long run. What no one is discussing in this topic however is efficiency: Why so much overtime and waste in time? Please convince me that those who work 12-14 hour days are actually producing efficiently. The same bad habits created in studio in school translate into the workplace because of poor time managment skills and lack of guidance by employers on that topic.
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