We hear it all the time. It’s a mantra that never ceases; it’s pounded into our skulls with the regularity of the swings of a clock’s pendulum.
We need at least one internship before we graduate, or no one is going to want to hire us.
Sure. Fine.
Employers want hard proof of our employability beyond our abilities in the classroom. That makes sense.
But according to a 2014 study analyzed by the Brookings Institute, more than half of the internships students have in college are unpaid.
In America, we try to cultivate a comforting vision of a meritocracy. If you work hard, we whisper to ourselves, you’ll succeed. Even those born in poverty can succeed if they really want to, we say as we screw our eyes shut tight. Get good grades, get a scholarship to college, and anything is possible, we yell at those actually born in poverty.
It’s hard to maintain that illusion when a virtual requirement for postgraduate employment relies on having the time and money to offer your services to the world for free for a year or two before you’re deemed worthy of being paid.
If you’re working full time in order to pay for going to school full time, there is not a chance that you’ll be able to afford an unpaid internship. So these internships at prestigious companies are going exclusively to the already-wealthy, those who don’t have to consider their survival as well as their career.
Unpaid internships actively subvert the ideal of the American Dream.
They should also largely be illegal. In a recent Second Circuit opinion on a case involving interns on the set of the Darren Aronofsky movie “Black Swan,” judges unveiled a new set of criteria in which unpaid internships were deemed unlawful if the primary beneficiary of the internship was the employer and not the intern.
That’s a start, and a startlingly obvious one. A lot of Point Park students, especially upperclassmen, have probably had at least one internship. You can hear them talking on campus, stressing out about their responsibilities, the office cultures they’re now part of, the events they’re planning and stories they’re writing.
They are doing the work of a (sometimes full-time) employee, and they are doing it for free.
Put in plain terms, it’s almost devastatingly obvious how unethical unpaid internships are. They are an abuse of workers, an abuse that’s coveted in today’s college culture.
But because they’re coveted, because they have become the norm, we have accepted it.
Let’s not accept it anymore.
It’s an insult to yourself to think that the work you’re doing does not merit at least the minimum wage.
To get personal for a second: I had an internship my spring semester. It required me to work full-time, and I chose to go to school full-time simultaneously. I was paid a stipend through Point Park’s School of Communication, something for which I’m very grateful, as someone who cannot afford to take an unpaid internship.
But I did some math, and what I was paid averages out to less than four dollars an hour. I did the work of a full-time employee, and I was paid significantly less than I was paid when I worked at Burger King.
And if my parents weren’t middle class, I wouldn’t have been able to afford the internship. If I needed to make a living wage, I would have been precluded from what turned out to be an incredibly valuable experience.
To the employers of the world I offer a small plea, in a measured voice, with the confidence of someone who knows she deserves to be compensated for her labor:
Pay your damn interns.