for cheap work, and "free" is pretty cheap. Workers are desperate for,
well, anything, and students and recent grads are willing to negotiate
their wages down to zero. But the ethics aren't so clear-cut. If unpaid
internships are the key to better jobs and bigger salaries, should we be
concerned about the millions of lower-class students who can't afford
to work for free?
Yesterday, I asked you to tell me your experiences and opinions about unpaid internships.
Hundreds of you responded. Here is the first batch of answers -- against unpaid internships. Forthcoming today: in defense of
working for free.
THE BIG PICTURE: The vast implications of a class that can afford to work for free
I think that it's important to consider the implications that all
of this unpaid (and likely stemming from the upper-class) labor has on
society as well, especially within the industries that largely require
entire chunks of time and resources from those aspiring to join them.
Particularly within the public sector, one glaring example of this is
the field of legislative aide job opportunities that are often only
handed out to those who have toiled away for months (and indeed
sometimes years) on end as campaign volunteers.
This creates a setup
where an entire profession (any job offering Congressional support)
effectively shuts out the very large proportion of the college-aged
population who do not have parents (or some other richer benefactor)
that can afford to subsidize living costs for however long they need to
gain the extensive and unpaid experience necessary to enter the good
graces of a Congressman or Senator. The implications of this are
far-reaching and structural; and reinforce the culture of privilege
already rampant in Washington D.C. where not only do federal lawmakers
themselves often lack valuable perspective on the issues plaguing lower-
and middle class Americans that constitute the majority of the nation's
citizenry, but also with the advisors and assistants working for them,
who by virtue of being able to land their jobs in the first place
already were fortunate enough to have been born into the nation's
wealthy economic minority. This creates a cycle of dissonance between
the real world economic reality that Americans face and what the
legislative class in Washington understands the proper solutions are to
those very problems.
'Unpaid internships cannot continue to exist'
Unpaid internships cannot continue to exist. It's really immoral.
Not only is college ridiculously expensive, students are
now required to spend their summers for no money? For example, in the
broadcast industry, internships are concentrated in New York, Atlanta,
and Los Angeles. The costs to move there and work for no money
eliminates thousands of low-income students from what is essentially
required to gain future employment after graduation. And the press
wonders why their ranks are so often colorless. I literally did a
clinical trial to pay for a summer I spent doing an internship. Which
was fun but most people aren't so adventurous with medications they put
in their body.
The idea companies are paying to provide experience is
nonsense. If a friend pays thousands of dollars to take a photoshop or
HTML class in college, employers are getting free labor to utilize that
skill. If the company was instructing students in photoshop, I'd see the
value. But those skills are required to get the internship in the first
place. So what is the point of learning a skill when it is being used
for nothing? Companies that otherwise would have to pay a worker for
that technical ability can utilize it for free. So, not only do students
pay internship credits, pay for housing, they pay for the skill to work
for free. That's wrong.
In economics, people value what they pay for. When companies
have a financial investment in someone, they are more inclined to gain a
full return on that investment. If I'm a zombie on the 17th floor,
anything I add is to their credit, but they have no risk if I'm not.
Which is why its hard to differentiate between committed interns and
lackluster ones. Companies have no real interest in an interns personal
or professional development. But if they pay for that intern, they do.
In a corporate environment, interns take ALL the risk, employers take
none.
Unpaid interns 'lower wages for everyone'
My experience has been that they overall devalue the actual work
being done, lowering wages for everyone, not just the unpaid interns.
Furthermore the use of interns in general as draftsmen has all but
eradicated a legitimate career path for high school graduates. - Evan MacKenzie
Unpaid internships are the new entry-level position
If internships still worked to give people valuable skills that
they didn't have in exchange for some free labor I'd be all for that,
but for the most part it seems people are looking for interns that come
fully trained and with a lot of experience already. When the recession
hit jobs that would have been well paid the year before turned into
unpaid "internships." My wife was looking for work during that time,
and it wasn't unusual for her to see ads on Craigslist like "Artist
intern needed. MFA required. Must have minimum 5 years professional
arc welding experience in shop environment. Must have proficiency with
sanders and drill press and know how to crochet. Please bring portfolio
and listing of everywhere your work has been shown. Must have network
of gallery and "art world" contacts. Internship requires 6 month to 1
year commitment and is unpaid."
We would have chalked these things up as either ads from already
famous, well established artists or so much Craigslist wishful
thinking...but the thing was on the other end we worked with the people
who were "hiring" the interns and they weren't anymore successful, and
in some cases not even as successful as my wife's business was. There
would be no paid job at the end of the tunnel for any of those interns,
because the people who hired them didn't make any money. Yet they
still didn't have a shortage of people willing to work for them for
free, mostly because they wanted to have something they could put on
their resume to show they had been "doing something" with their time.
'Nursing internships'!?'
Hospitals are jumping on board to the free-labor train with
"Nursing Internships." They now prefer that you work anywhere from 4-12
weeks unpaid, then they'll consider you for employment. Total
horsesh*t.
THIS IS KEY: The difference between an apprentice an intern
An apprentice would be taken into the master's household with food
and shelter provided. That doesn't happen with unpaid internships. Only
kids that have someone else to rely on for food and housing can take
advantage of the opportunities provided.
I don't particularly care if colleges offer academic credit for
internships. I would like to see them offer food and housing for kids
that work internships when not in school. It would probably be
counterproductive to require employers to do so, and the schools are
already fleecing the kids because price signals are so poorly understood
in education. Sack some administrators or something. Slow down campus
renovation for a while. I imagine this would be about the cheapest way
to improve outcomes for students a college could provide. - wjaredh
'The system works against class mobility'
The problem is not that the unpaid interns themselves necessarily
get a bad deal, the problem is that the system works against class
mobility.
Only the comparatively privileged can afford to make the
"investment" of accepting an unpaid internship. I have several friends
who had to give up their unpaid internships in order to work paid jobs
elsewhere when they found they couldn't make ends meet.
Now as for the old-fashioned system of apprenticeship, I'm not
really qualified to say whether they tended to increase class mobility
or not. I know that in many fields the apprentices tended to come from
the same social class as the "master", and that it was not unusual for
the family of the apprentice to pay for the privilege of having their
son work there. At the same time, such practices were not universal. I
think it is clear though that in many cases the apprentices at least
received room and board - something obviously not provided by most of
today's unpaid internships.
I do think there is much to be said for the apprenticeship model of
education. But that is separate from whether people are paid or not.
Medical students in their residency are essentially apprentices, but
they are paid. The same could be said of law clerks. - Lasker
The Labor Department's bizarre rules
Since one of my close relatives is about to begin an unpaid
internship, in a situation with which I am very familiar, I was very
interested in those Labor Dept. requirements. They boiled it down to a
list of six criteria, most of which seem ... somewhat reasonable.
Requirements 2, 3, 5, and 6 seem workable. Unpaid internships should be
primarily for the benefit of the intern, closely supervised, not linked
to a future job, and the terms of the internship should be clearly
understood up front.
But requirements 1 and 4 seem mostly concerned with making sure the
employer does not benefit in any way from the intern's services. These
rules emphasize that "The internship ... is similar to training which
would be given in an educational environment, " and that "The employer
... derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern."
In fact, it goes on to suggest that the employer's "operations may
actually be impeded" by having the intern. How do we train someone in
the skills necessary to do some sort of work without having them
actually perform, at least on some level, that kind of work?
This seems absurd. We don't demand that actual colleges provide
education without deriving "immediate advantage" from their students.
They get paid MONEY for providing this training. Why is it somehow
wrong for an employer to derive some benefit from providing valuable
training to an intern? Would that not be similar to an "educational
environment" where the student gives up something (MONEY) in order to
receive training? Why can't an intern trade his or her time and effort
in a similar way? The obvious answer is that they should be allowed to,
which is why these internships exist.
I'm not against some kinds of safety precautions here - limits on
hours, working conditions, that kind of thing. But insisting that
employers provide the benefit of training to an intern while actively
striving to eliminate any possibility of benefit to themselves? That is
ridiculous.
WAKE UP, EVERYBODY: 'It absolutely is free labor'
I went to Smith College, and at least when I was there they had a
program called "Praxis" which provided each student a $2, 000 grant,
one-time only, to compensate for unpaid work done over one summer during
college. It's a start. I know it was implemented specifically to
address the issue you raised here: that lower-income young people simply
can't afford to take unpaid internships, and thereby miss out on some
key stepping stones.
Overall, it's my experience as well that the legal guidelines for
"internships" are a total joke. It absolutely IS free labor for the
employers, and I wish the trend was heading more in the direction of
shunning than normalizing.
How can progressives support free internships?
I actually got into a heated argument with senior management at my
previous employer over this. My former boss (the organization's
President) fancied himself as a progressive, so when it came time for us
to hire summer interns I strongly advocated we pay them a reasonable
hourly rate to make the opportunity accessible to those that don't have
parents who can support them while they work for no pay. I was promptly
shot down. It's not as if we didn't have the budget! $10-15/hour
without any type of benefits is chicken-scratch. I would often spend
more money on a single business-class ticket to China than paying an
intern to work 20-hours a week for 3-months at $15/hour.
Nope, my old boss would rather spend no money so he could bring in
wealthy interns from his ultra-expensive Alma mater. Progressive my
ass...
'It is a crime to not pay your interns'
I graduated in December 2010 from the University of Oklahoma with a
Bachelor's Degree in International and Area Studies. It's pretty
obvious that if I wanted to do something related to my major, then I
would have to move out of Oklahoma. I started searching for all kinds
of internships in DC to "get my foot in the door". The more and more I
looked, though, I noticed that none of these were paid internships. It
caused a lot of stress in my life.
How could a person like me, from small town Oklahoma, afford to
live in Washington, DC, where the average rent is more than my parents
monthly house payment? And without any pay? I don't come from a
privileged family and feel guilty when I ask them for money, even $20. I
worked two jobs
throughout college to pay for school, car insurance, and gas, among
many other things. (I am proud to say that I graduated debt free, too)
There was no way that I would be able to utilize the Mommy and Daddy
Foundation, as so many people do out here. It really is a class thing.
Sorry, but all these Georgetown kids who don't have to worry about
funds and can get an internship on the Hill
just doesn't seem fair to me. How are small town people, such as
myself, ever going to get a chance to come out here if there is no way
they can afford it?
I am fortunate and grateful to say, that I landed a paid
internship in Washington, DC that recently turned into a full time job
with a salary, health care and benefits- something the average 24 year
old can't say. Every single day I entered my hours into my intern
timesheet, I was so grateful that I was being paid and that I wasn't a
burden on my family. I am one of the lucky ones. That said, I really
feel like it is a crime
to not pay your interns, especially in expensive cities such as
Washington, DC or NYC.
'This is supply and demand'
This is Economics 101, where supply and demand curves intersect to
determine the true price of an intern, zero. If the economy doesn't do
better, this curve may even shift downward because of increased supply,
meaning interns will have to pay for the privilege of working for
companies.
If you don't care about the middle class, don't worry about unpaid internships
In the years since 2009, my pre-professional graduate program has
eliminated about half of its paid assistant-ship positions for graduate
students, positions that came with funding, gave grad students valuable
work experience in the field that we're going into, and helped keep the
departments we were working afloat financially (since we were doing work
that would otherwise be done by fulltime workers with a degree). The
work that those students used to do has been replaced by a combination
of unpaid internships and, even more insidiously, for-credit practicum
and independent study opportunities, where students pay the school for
the chance to do labor that they would have been paid to do as recently
as 2009, and that some of their peers are still getting paid to do. If
you fail to get an assistant-ship and opt not to work for free, or not
to pay for the privilege of working at some point during graduate
school, you will probably not be able to find a job after you graduate
because experience is now required for entry level positions.
The shift towards students paying the full price of their education
(as state subsidies to universities decline and tuition goes up) and
away from employers being willing to actually train their employees
(even in skilled jobs that don't require a college degree it helps to
have a certificate from a vocational high school or community college in
the field you're going into), is a new phenomena in the last thirty
years. It was not the system under which the baby boomers worked their
way into the middle class. I think a trend where students increasingly
have to either work for free or pay to work to get entrance into
professional fields and jobs that require skilled labor will contribute
to a combination of a decline in economic mobility and increased debt in
the U.S. If your labor isn't rewarded with pay then you need to get
money to live on elsewhere, and the two places most students turn are
their parents (for those who already have opportunity and extra cash
lying around) and loans. Some students do take on a second paid
position to supplement their unpaid position, but that can increase
their loan burden by making them stay in school longer and those
students tend to have lower retention rates.
If you don't care about students from lower and moderate income
backgrounds having the same opportunities as kids whose parents can
afford to support them into college and graduate school, if you don't
care about working yourself out of poverty and into the middle class
being a real possibility for most people, if you don't care about US
citizens taking on increasingly high levels of debt to finance their
ability to work, then I would say don't worry about unpaid internships
and decreasing state support for education. But if you do care about
those things, then I think you should take a serious critical look at
both phenomena.
'No one who believes in equal opportunity could support such a system.'
I'm a recent college graduate working in the sales department at a
mid-sized company. I didn't know I wanted to be a writer when I was in
college. I do now.
Unfortunately, you can't just practice writing, put together a
portfolio, and then send off clips and resumes to prospective employers.
An entry level writing gig, often even freelance work, requires prior
experience and contacts, two things that an unpaid internship is perfect
for obtaining.
However, I have school loans, rent, and utility bills to pay. The
economy is still in a recession, at least for workers (if not their
employers), and my hourly wage is adequate for living in a three bedroom
apartment with three other people, but not much else. As a result,
taking a few months off from my job, even if they would allow me to do
so (which they wouldn't), would simply be unaffordable. Even after
saving for nearly a year, working long but rewarding hours at an
internship with one of the local media outlets just isn't financially
practical.
I can of course continue to save, and eventually spring for 12
weeks of career forwarding servitude, but by that time I will be even
older and at an even greater disadvantage. Every new season that goes by
that many more people are getting a leg up in an extremely competitive
field where every edge counts.
I would love to work for free to pursue the career I want. And an
internship is a great way to do that. But far from being an egalitarian
or meritocratic institution, unpaid internships unintentionally
reinforce already existing socio-economic divisions. No one who believes
in equal opportunity could support such a system.
