Like a lot of other college kids, I have nervously begun to glance at the calendar and wonder about my summer plans. Like even more college kids, I’ve scanned for opportunities to earn some extra cash. That’s where the search for a job ends and the hunt for an internship begins: for an increasing number of college students and graduates, unpaid internships are the only chance to get their feet wet in the job market. Of the 63 percent of students who participate in an internship at some point in college, the Boston Globe reported anywhere between one-third and one-half of their internships are unpaid. However, unpaid internships harm our economy and effectively constitute a race to the bottom.
We have an image of the unpaid intern as someone who waits on every behest of his or her employer — picking up dry-cleaning, going on coffee runs, grabbing food for the office or running enough copies to keep Kinko’s in business. If this stereotype reflects the reality of an internship, then an internship is a glorified waste of time — this experience enhances the ability to perform thoughtless tasks. If, however, the internship is truly instructive and consists of meaningful work, then do the interns not deserve compensation for their efforts? As many Dartmouth students who have worked in top companies can attest, the days are often long, and the work is tiring. Worked-to-the-bone interns should get paid for their work, just like any other adult would be. No matter which experience is true, unpaid internships do not provide the goods.
The existence of unpaid internships takes away work that could be done by older people who have families to feed and bills to pay. Since companies or government offices can tap into unpaid labor in the form of internships, they can keep costs low by delegating work for which they would otherwise have to pay interns. With millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed and others struggling to stay afloat, there is a dire shortage of well-paying jobs. Although the concept of getting young people job training and skills has merits, so does the concept of creating jobs for unemployed or underemployed Americans.
Unpaid internships have increasingly become tenable for only wealthier Americans. Generally speaking, internships are clustered in major cities. If a potential intern neither lives near a major urban center nor receives a stipend or any sort of compensation for his or her work, the money required for travel, housing and food must come out of pocket. In major cities, where prices for food and housing are generally high, the prospect of paying for these expenses is unacceptable without disposable cash. More and more college students — their budgets tighter than ever in the midst of a recovering economy and rising tuitions — simply cannot afford to give their labor away for free. Who, then, can afford to fill unpaid internships without stipends? Fortunate Americans with money. As a result, the well-to-do individuals who can take unpaid internships can get on the inside track to lucrative jobs. Both sides of the current political debate, now using their platitudes and vapid rhetoric about “expanding opportunity,” should see unpaid internships as further impeding class mobility.
The concept of unpaid internships hints that future members of the labor market must do more and more to present themselves as employable, a larger trend in today’s workplace. You only speak English and Spanish? Learn Mandarin. You only interned for Goldman? Try Google. The phenomenon of resume padding is not inherently disconcerting — learning a new language or acquiring a useful skill is certainly worthwhile and fulfilling. But where do we draw the line? Without evoking the image of a slippery slope, I wonder when this race to the bottom will end. As is increasingly common, will unpaid internships be something for recent graduates instead of ways to pass summers? Will the notion of “employability” one day require that a graduate work an unpaid job two years to boost “job skills”?
Throughout history, we have had different names for the status of individuals who work without pay, and while students do not necessarily have to take internships, the point stands: doing work without receiving any sort of compensation is unequivocally wrong.
