The Set It and Leave it Alone Minimum Wage Act of 2015 (Signed)

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Aye.

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Aye

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If we do apply this law to internships, then I will be proposing an amendment that exempts government and non-profit organizations from having to pay their interns the minimum wage. I have no problem with compelling private organizations to follow these laws, but government and private non-profit positions can often hardly afford to pay their interns $8 an hour, much less Atlasia's very high $15 an hour. Despite this, these organizations do a lot of good work, and can provide students with just as much experience as private organizations that can afford to pay their interns.

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I move that the rules be suspended so that this bill is not tabled and we can continue to debate it.

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I would be willing to sponsor it but I'm pretty sure I can't do that until after we've suspended the rules??

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I will sponsor this bill then.

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Of course in an ideal world I would hope that government offices and non-profits would be able to afford inexperienced college students with $15/hour wages. However, especially with the thin budgets facing these organizations these days, I fear that if given the choice between hiring a $15/hour intern and not hiring an intern at all, they would too often pick the latter. Rather than encouraging low income students to take these positions, legislation like this would make these positions disappear entirely.

Perhaps legislation that subsidizes non-profit/government hiring of interns, or provides stipends/grants/loans to low-income students seeking unpaid work would be a better idea (but beyond the scope of this legislation).

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Like I've said, I fully support requiring private employers (like law firms) to pay the full minimum wage (in fact I've never heard of a law firm that does not compensate their student employees generously). But I know from experience that many of the unpaid internships I and friends had during college, where we were working for cash-strapped government offices or non-profit organizations, would simply not have existed at all if they had been required to pay us $15 an hour.

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I'd rather we pass this bill, then draft a separate one dealing with government/non-profit interns and any sort of subsidy scheme to encourage their hiring/cover the costs of their hiring. Like Cris and Hagrid I worry about turning this bill into something it was not intended to be.

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The distinction between volunteering and interning is not hard to make legally, and should not be a stumbling block. In the United States, that once extant country that disappeared off the face of the globe about a decade ago, their government defined volunteer and intern in the FLSA and Department of Labor regulations:

http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp
http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm

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So where are we on this? Was Polnut's amendment (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=207236.msg4510373#msg4510373) adopted?

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I second Senator Cranberry's question.

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Nay, I think there should still be some sort of compensation. But perhaps that is beyond this bill's scope.

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Considering that July 1st about 3 months away, the following amendment would give businesses more time to budget for any changes and non-profits time to apply for waivers from the DoIA. I also want to introduce an amendment to increase federal spending to cover the costs of these internships and provide funding to the regional governments so that they can afford to hire $15/hour interns; trying to find out how much that would cost at the moment (i.e. how many interns work for the federal and state governments in any given year).

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Aye

If we're going to implement this waiver system for non-profits, then we need to give both the DoIA and nonprofit organizations time to comply with it.

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AYE