Define Work

The recent American uproar about unpaid internships has its German, more muted, equivalent.

And guess what?

The German federal government is having numerous unpaid internship positions. The most sought after departments, like foreign affairs, pay zero Euros, which comes out to zero dollars, to their interns for 40 hours of work a week.

Despite recent changes to the law, they can do this because of a not very subtle but effective differentiation of the kinds of internships offered.

There are two, voluntary and mandatory internships.

A voluntary internship is the kind where a youngster wakes up in the morning and says to himself or herself, hey, I want to do an internship at the German treasury, let's apply. If you get this kind of internship, you get paid the awesome amount of 300 Euros per month. Which may or may not be enough to have a daily warm meal.

Then there is the mandatory internship. The kind your college makes you do in order to get credits, the kind someone makes you do for whatever reasons.
You do not get paid for these.

The ingenious difference lies in the definition of "work". Mandatory internships are legally not "work". Schlepping boxes, writing speeches, organizing events as part of a mandatory internship do not count as work. The law does not say as what these activities count. We assume they count as "fun". And the German government - still - does not like paying people to have fun. A point sometimes overlooked but felt accutely by those citizens on the basic social welfare program Hartz-IV. There is no fun allowance in this program either.

By offering only "mandatory" internship positions to the couple of thousand people who land one each year, the German government saves what must be huge amounts of taxpayer money (300 x 12 x 2000 Euros per year).

It is not known what the savings are used for, but there is a new airport in Berlin that is set to gobble up a few hundred years worth of savings on internships.

The concept of defining work as needed might have other applications, if you find the courage to think outside of the box. Retiree benefits, for instance, are tied to the number of years in "work". Creative redefinition of work could save the government massive amounts of money. All they need to do is codify the view out on the street that government employees don't really work, and bingo, the majority of government debt would be wiped out.