This is one of the most controversial articles of the week -- it's flying around blogospheres and email inboxes. With the dismal job market, more and more parents are paying employers to hire their kids for unpaid internships:
...The whole idea of paying cash so your kid can work is sometimes jarring at first to parents accustomed to finding jobs the old-fashioned way -- by pounding the pavement. Susan and Raymond Sommer of tiny St. Libory, Ill., were dismayed when their daughter Megan, then a junior at a Kentucky university, asked them to spend $8,000 so she could get an unpaid sports-marketing internship last summer in New York City. Paying to work "was something people don't do around here," says Ms. Sommer, a retired concrete-company office worker; her husband, a retired electrical superintendent, objected that if "you work for a company, you should be getting paid."
But Megan, then 20, had already applied for 25 summer internships and hadn't received any replies. The Sommers gave in, and Ms. Sommer says they're glad they did...
Read the rest of the WSJ article
here.
