Fine, Hillary Clinton Will Pay Her Interns

By Joanna Rothkopf  |  July 8, 2015 | 3:15am
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Hillary Clinton wants you to know that she took your criticism to heart: it is shitty she didn’t pay her “Organizing Fellows” anything. She will start now. Shhhh. Remember how kind of fun she is on Twitter.

Clinton, champion of unemployed youth, became a bit of a hypocrite after a number of reports found her “Organizing Fellows” program to be not much more than full-time free labor from some of the most qualified aspiring young politicos in the country (I’m sorry I just vomited while writing that phrase).

Now, the campaign has reportedly hired eight full-time “summer fellows,” in addition to a handful of full-time field organizers in Iowa.

The Guardian writes:

As first reported by the Des Moines Register, eight of those new hires had previously served as full-time “organizing fellows”. In that capacity, fellows performed almost identical duties to field organizers, who do the most basic work on a campaign: recruiting volunteers and endorsements, going door-to-door and calling voters, often outside the confines of a 9-to-5 day job.
Now, those people will be paid, the Clinton campaign confirmed to the Guardian on Tuesday.

Still, the new hires don’t do anything to interrupt the trend of forcing even high-ranking staffers to work as unpaid “volunteers” before being officially hired.

“As we’ve said from the beginning,” Clinton’s Iowa director Matt Paul said in a statement, “we are taking nothing for granted in the caucus and these organizers will increase our campaigns ability to work with supporters in every neighborhood and precinct to get the word out about Hillary Clinton’s campaign to fight for everyday Americans.”

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Image via Getty

 
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