It Used To Be Called "Scabbing"

An arcane term now seemingly all but lost to history which meant, among other things:

An employee who works while others are on strike; a strikebreaker.
A person hired to replace a striking worker.

A million years ago when there was an active worker's rights movement, scabbing used to be considered contemptible.

Now, it's a resume builder!

From the Chicago Tribune:

Chicago interns move up corporate ladder

By Tracy Swartz

Derek Moody came to Chicago prepared to make coffee.

A student at Brigham Young University in Utah, Moody moved to Chicago in May to intern at Grant Thornton, an accounting firm in the Loop. Moody had never had an internship before, so he came to Chicago ready to do anything and everything, including run errands and other expected "intern" tasks. But Moody, 24, said he has yet to ask his co-workers how they like their coffee. Instead, he said he verifies that clients' accounting records are accurate and sits in on important meetings.

"I've done some copying, but most weeks I'm given my own tasks," said Moody, who is renting an apartment in Logan Square. "I've actually been given quite a lot to do."

Call it the Revenge of the Intern. For years, "intern" has characterized the doe-eyed, ambitious twentysomethings willing to do anything to get the job done--from Monica Lewinsky to the gophers Diddy employed to satisfy his every cheesecake-loving whim.

But not this class--the summer 2009 internship class has, well, class. Thanks to the tanking economy, this year's crop no longer has the time to fetch salads for bosses because it is filling the void left by employee layoffs, hiring freezes and cutbacks.

Still, they're paying a price. Interns who talked to RedEye said they are gaining experience to prepare them for the workforce, but increased intern responsibilities typically don't come with increased pay or perks or even more respect. Yet businesses are relying more and more on cheap talent, HR professionals told RedEye, instead of paying for experienced or more trained workers.
...

Done right, internships are of value to both parties; interns gain professional contacts and exposure to the on-the-ground realities of their chosen profession, and employers get a primer in what's going on in the wider academic world, someone to temporarily pick up some of the slack that any organization accumulates, and some decent coffee for a damn change.

But that's not what this is.

This is displacing the cost of sacking experienced, trained workers onto the backs of cheap naifs without enough real-world experience to realize that they are being used as class war cannon fodder. This is just another iteration of the "race to the bottom" economic model which has dominated America for last 30 years.

What's new is that since the wholesale economic butchering of the Middle Class has now been going full blast since the Age of Reagan, at least some of this latest wave of wage-killing youngsters are probably the children are of the first generation of replacement workers. Men and women now in their 40s and 50s who have seen the sharp downward spiral towards wage slavery and corporate feudalism from the inside:

• Who were themselves hired in their summer years to displace the expensive old timers;

• Who grew into jobs based on an anti-union "trickle up" business model that massively enriched the very few at the very top, and which has not only left them far less secure and well-compensated than their predecessors, but also demands of them far more hours-per-week in unpaid overtime than their predecessors ever worked;

• And who have now lived long enough to see their own friends, family members and colleagues stamped "obsolete" and fired/laid-off/outsourced into poverty and oblivion in favor of the next generation of even-lower-paid suckers.

I wonder what they tell their kids?