When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes office next month, representing New York’s 14th District, she will be a part of the “blue wave” of new Democrats in the House. And as part of a bipartisan effort for members of Congress to pay the interns they employ, Ocasio-Cortez pledged that her interns will make $15 an hour.
Talk about landing the dream position! Most full-time employees don’t even make that much. “Time to walk the walk,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Tuesday. “Very few members of Congress actually pay their interns. We will be one of them.”
Last year, two former unpaid House interns, Carlos Mark Vera and Guillermo Creamer, founded an organization called Pay Our Interns. They collected data about who pays what on Capitol Hill, and found that about 90 percent of House offices don’t pay their interns at all — a figure that Creamer called “abysmal.”
On the Senate side, half of Senate Democrats pay their interns at least a stipend, while 55 percent of Senate Republicans do.
“It is unjust for Congress to budget a living wage for ourselves, yet rely on unpaid interns & underpaid overworked staff just bc Republicans want to make a statement about ‘fiscal responsibility,'” Ocasio-Cortez further tweeted.
Currently, only three members of Congress pay their interns well: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Doug Jones, D-Ala., and Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington state.
Congress has taken steps to address the pay issue with an appropriations measure signed by President Donald Trump in September, which included an annual allowance of $20,000 per House member for internships. That money is in addition to the overall Members’ Representational Allowance given to each lawmaker to pay employees.
By: Maytinee Kramer
