The Labor Movement: Internships in the 21st Century

As the midpoint of summer nears, the college internship season is in full swing. Millions of college students — some paid, but many unpaid — are laboring away in businesses, organizations, and government offices across the country.

For those who are paid, the bargain of the internship is clear: work is provided and compensation is handed out. Those who are unpaid, however, do not fare as well. The bargain for them — at least in theory — is that they provide free labor in exchange for experience, contacts, and resume filler. The unpaid internship process is depicted as a form of helpful education, not that dissimilar from the master-apprentice model long practiced in the trades.

This rosy picture of unpaid internships is a fantasy; in reality, unpaid internships are a form of labor exploitation pure and simple.

Consider the example of an intern who works at a profit-making firm, working most of the day answering calls, filing documents, making copies, and other sorts of typical intern tasks. The labor of this intern helps generate revenue and therefore profits for the firm, revenue that the intern never sees a penny of. Being profited off of while being paid nothing is a paradigmatic case of labor exploitation.

The negative impacts of this exploitation do not end at the student however. Firms that take advantage of unpaid interns may do so in order to avoid hiring more staff. A few unpaid interns from the local university can provide enough clerical assistance year-round to replace one or more office workers. Unpaid internships then can functionally displace paid workers, boosting the profits of the firm while providing nothing near a reciprocal benefit.

Despite this, college students continue to take on unpaid internships during their undergraduate careers. While some may remark that the willingness of students to take on these internships indicate that the experience really is worth the cost, I am more inclined to view the unpaid internship boom as a classic case of a race to the bottom.

As soon as some students are willing to work for free, other students are left with few options. If they seek compensation for their work, they will be passed over for interns who are financially able to work for free. If they choose to forego unpaid internships altogether, they will be behind their peers in the search for jobs.

This race to the bottom has a disproportionate impact on poor students who are simply unable to spend months at a time without an income while they have bills to pay. Their inability to access these internships puts them at a disadvantage relative to their wealthier peers, stacking the deck against them in the competition to find employment after college.

Many universities — instead of working against these predatory internships — have actually found a way to get in on the exploitation. These universities offer academic credit for students who take on unpaid internships, this an outgrowth of the farcical claim that internships are a facet of a college education. To get this academic credit, students pay for course hours just like they would an actual class. Unlike an actual class however, the university provides no educational instruction whatsoever.

So, students pay their university hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars to work for free at an outside firm. The university profits; the firm profits; and, the students get nothing but a lighter wallet (or heavier debt) and some valuable phone-answering experience.

That is not to say that all unpaid internships are made the same. For instance, unpaid internships at non-profit organizations do not have all of the same components of exploitation as those which take place at for-profit firms. But even in those cases, in a truly just economy, unpaid internships would have no place.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 1st, 2011 at 7:28 pm. It is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.