Illegality of unpaid internships

The New York Times ran a very interesting article on Friday about how state governments are starting to crack down on employers who use unpaid internships as a source of free labour (hat tip to William Wolfe-Wylie). It seems with the recession, businesses are using interns as free labour, which violates minimum wage laws.

I know some companies in Canada offer unpaid internships — they're particularly common in the media industry, where many outlets are struggling financially and there is an overabundance of qualified graduates looking to get their foot in the door somewhere. I wonder if these internships violate minimum wage laws here too.

Thanks, Ontario government, for increasing the cost of pizza

Proponents of increasing corporate taxes and minimum wages often argue that businesses pay for the increases. The logic is that tax and wage increases can't be bad if big, evil, profit-seeking corporations pay instead of workers and consumers. Unfortunately, that's a fallacy.

On Wednesday, Ontario raised its minimum wage by 75 cents, to $10.25 an hour. It now has the highest minimum wage of any jurisdiction in Canada or the United States. So when I visited my local Little Caesars' yesterday evening to pick up a pizza, I wasn't surprised to see a notice saying they have raised the price of their Hot-and-Ready medium pizzas (other than pepperoni) by 50 cents. Coincidence? I think not. Little Caesars' is facing higher costs with the minimum wage increase, so it's passing most of those costs on to the consumer.

Faulty political incentives

A storm is brewing at my alma mater, where student union politicians may override the decision of an electoral officer and boot two candidates who won election to next year's board of directors.

The prospect of partisan politicians disqualifying another party's politicians is creating quite a controversy, and rightly so. But it shouldn't be a big surprise, given the rules in place for dealing with electoral complaints:

Kahneman pokes holes in happiness research

Behavioural economics pioneer Daniel Kahneman is featured in a recent TED talk, in which he discusses problems with measuring happiness.

Corporate charity makes me ill

The Ontario government recently donated $81.2 million to Ford's coffers, according to the Toronto Star. The money will be used for Ford's engine factory in Windsor, and is in addition to $17 million in provincial money and $80 million in federal money given to the engine factor in 2008.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain why government is giving away $178 million to a single corporation, other than it will help Ford: "We've been able to bring the Essex engine plant back to life and transform it into a leading-edge facility with a significant role in the company's long-term engine production … plans," Ontario economic development minister Sandra Pupatello told the Star.

Irrationality and hockey tickets

Vancouver newspaper The Province reported over the weekend that despite astronomically high market prices for tickets to the Olympic men's hockey final, many people were planning to hang on to their tickets.

This is somewhat mind-boggling. Olympic tickets were originally sold in a lottery, which means that the people who originally bought the tickets from the lottery paid far less than the market value the morning of the big game (in the neighbourhood of $3,000 per ticket). Personally, if I had a pair of tickets that someone was willing to pay $6,000 for, I'd sell. I love hockey (and it was a great game). But I could do a lot more with $6,000 than with a pair of Olympic final tickets.