[From Goodreads 08w12:3]

Society has always benefitted from unpaid or underpaid labour; in the past it was blatant slavery, but when that became unfashionable (and unprofitable contrasted to the production offered by machines rather than muscles) the emphasis shifted to calling unpaid labour ‘volunteers’ and nowadays, the most obvious example of all, ‘interns’. But since it is so unpalatable to recognize this as a contemporary form of slavery, we euphemize it away, and consider that we don’t have a slavery class, although there are many people working for a legally determined absolute minimum wage. In other words, we had to be legally coercive to get people paid for basic services. So now it’s officially illegal to not pay people below a certain amount, but this amount is so low that it’s guaranteed to keep the recipient poor. That way, there’s a lot more money available (which could otherwise go to the volunteers, interns, and making the minimum a livable wage) to those in the upper levels of the management.