Lawsuits brought against companies such as Condé Nast and Fox Searchlight this summer by disgruntled former interns began a reevaluation of the internship culture these companies rely on. And that’s a good thing.
If landlords and supermarkets accepted job training or LinkedIn contacts for rent and food, the world of unpaid internships which so many of us are forced to inhabit would be a much different place. As it stands, those who cry ‘class warfare’ at new opposition to this widespread practice would do well to look at the big-picture ramifications of over-reliance on these work/resume item exchanges Hillsdale students are often embroiled in.
While half of internships nationwide are paid, unpaid internships are concentrated in competitive fields like politics, television, and film. The standard entry-level position in many (especially creative) fields is now unpaid, making it difficult to break into a field for those who find it necessary to, you know, earn money.
The problem rears when one considers what these internships mean for those taking them: eight to ten weeks in a city away from home and all those imply. Rent, food, and transportation all need to be taken care of. This doesn’t pose an unmountable challenge, but it’s a high bar to clear. It costs a significant amount of money to live in the major cities where these internships are located; New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are not havens for cheap rents or fares. NYC rent averages more than $1,600 per month and D.C. trails not far behind. This barrier makes the students most able to work an unpaid internship those whose parents can afford to put them up for the summer.
When young people leave school, they need prior work experience to be competitive with their peers. A system that weighs the odds of the most qualified new employees coming from a wealthy background isn’t conducive to a diversity of viewpoints. This is a poor foundation for any industry but especially unsound in creative fields whose sole purpose is to export their views to the public.
Unpaid internships are not analogous to traditional apprenticeships either. Rather than a years-long training period of learning a profession under a professional, most internships are fleeting tastes of work in a field. In “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy,” Ross Perlin examines the pervasive internships that dominate the lowest level of employment in many fields. Unlike early internship programs that arose after World War II as training and recruitment programs in certain large corporations with almost guaranteed employment, too many internships today offer little benefit to their participants.
An unpaid internship can be a valuable, rewarding experience, and many of the recent lawsuits to hit internship programs are wrongheaded in inspiration—appeals to unenforced minimum wage laws for voluntary positions smack of simple exploitation. But while there’s nothing wrong with these internships at face value, their cumulative effect on the fields that rely on them is pernicious.
Unpaid internships may offer great experiences to students willing to work, but the extreme difficulty they can introduce to potential hires and the favor they give to people from certain backgrounds makes them structurally unworkable.
