could treat them like drones and make them work long hours for less pay.
During the heyday of the .com madness, I happened across a job fair on the UC Berkeley campus and stopped in to see what people were offering. One employer told me that her company was a small startup, but a great place to work because they celebrated everyone's birthday and if you made it six months, you got a free DVD player.
I pointed out that nice DVD players were under $100 and six months is over 1000 hours of work, so that's like a $0.10/hr bonus and asked about things like quality of life, flexible work schedules, and things that *I* think make a good work environment. She said "We're a startup. We expect people to work a lot."
It was all I could do to keep from telling her that she was insane and that if she wanted to hire someone with decent analytical skills, she would need to be smarter about how she presented her awesome work culture. But I'm sure there were some desperate college students who thought that all sounded cool. I'd guess few of them had the skills the company needed though.
Since then it's gotten worse. Tons of young people work for a year or more on unpaid internships if their families have the resources to support them in fields where supply outstrips demand (national park ranger being one such field). It's a little-discussed driver of inequality in America.
http://www.epi.org/blog/unpaid-internships-economic-mobility/