El 08/03/2015, a las 12:03, John Blischak <[email protected]> escribió:

> Certainly a highly trained SWC instructor, who typically has at least
> a bachelor's degree plus some advanced training, leading a workshop to
> teach employees of a company to use computational tools would not pass
> this test.
> 
> http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/13/are-unpaid-internships-illegal/
> 
> What are the policies of other countries? Have they passed similar 
> legislation?

We have a similar lawn Spain. The law prevents Monsanto from hiring an 
instructor for free or peanuts, as the benefit of the teaching goes mostly to 
Monsanto, and not to the instructor. It even applies to graduate work: the 
Supreme Court has ruled that if you're doing a PhD, which in principle would be 
ok to be unpaid because you're getting a degree, you must have an employment 
contract under Labour Law after the first two years. That is because it's 
understood that from the third year the benefits the university gets form your 
work as a student overcome those you get from your PhD studies.

However, it's completely legal that Monsanto "hires" SWC to teach the workshop 
and that you volunteer for the non-profit SWC. Nobody gets paid, beyond 
reimbursements or fees, and the teaching fits under the reasons for which SWC 
is a non-profit. If you get paid though, it may get tricky, and not for 
Monsanto. You could claim that you *work* for SWC (because you are getting 
paid, not just reimbursed), so you are a SWC employee working without an 
employment contract, not paying social security taxes, etc… 

It may be different in the US, but in my opinion having paid instructors by 
default would be a huge administrative burden, specially if we want to expand 
to other countries with an international pool of instructors under many 
different immigration status. 

In my opinion, the simplest solution, leaving aside the ethical part, would be 
charge a flat fee as we do know and then, after the workshop, have someone call 
these wealthy companies and schools asking for an extra donation. This scales 
better than changing the default and allows to really pick the wealthy ones 
without misguided preconceptions.

Best,

Ivan
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