Well, well, well… after the beauty of the proliferation of internships for everything from advertising to museum curators and every thing else we now have the new Troika inspired solution for “reducing” unemployment in Greece (and no doubt elsewhere too).
Now the beauty of internships (for the employers) is that they get high quality people doing difficult jobs for free. Ok, so, we are told this is so they can gain experience for a well paid job down the line. Very far down the line. However this is not a training. It is exploitation. If it were for bona fide training reasons these hapless whiz kids would be called Trainees and not interns. The trainee has the promise of being taken on properly once he has completed his training. The intern does not. In fact the various establishments using them opt for a string of interns one after the other. The only thing they are not interested in is training someone for the job.
It is legalised slave labour and nothing more.
Similarly the troika inspired plan has gone one better. The proposal is that unemployed youth from 15 (yes, 15… isn’t that too close to child labour?) to 24 should be taken on to work for FREE completely FREE for one year so as to reduce the number of unemployed. I am not making this up. Furthermore, there should be NO minimum wage for the young thereafter either.
This is not economics. It is the revenge of the aged. It is the implementation of hatred of youth from the baby boomers who have become old and sour and completely dispensable.