8 ms·

Unpaid internships are essentially a form of serfdom. The serf system in Russia IIRC started with free peasants who sold themselves into slavery to the landown

Unpaid internships are essentially a form of serfdom. The serf system in Russia IIRC started with free peasants who sold themselves into slavery to the landowner when they fell into debt - unlike African slaves in the US, who were essentially kidnapped into servitude. In the same vein people are taking up voluntary servitude in order to get a paid job - sometimes even paying for the privilege. Moreover - a point not raised in the article - in expensive cities the only way a fresh graduate can survive without salary is if their parents subsidize them. Who can afford to do so ? Rich families. So it's a form of discrimination. A company has no excuse for not paying at least minimum wage. If you can't afford the employees you need you shouldn't be in business, period. Any company that uses unpaid internships is morally bankrupt and should be boycotted.

irishstu 15y ago
I did raise the point about discrimination at the end but it's easy to miss in the wall of text. I fully agree with Intern Aware http://www.internaware.org/ http://www.internaware.org/ on the issue of discrimination
- zeemonkee 15y ago
  Sorry, thanks for pointing it out. Good article that raises the issues with this appalling practice.
Retric 15y ago
Your ignoring the use of collage students as interns. At many schools it's possible to get collage credit for internships. Also many companies use interns as a recruiting tool they might not get any net value from interns but they get to evaluate recruits for longer periods of time, which is not worth paying 7.25$ an hour for ~3 months. Anyway, legally you are required to pay interns that create net value for your company.
cturner 15y ago
There's a temptation in politics to see patterns and then fit language to it that kind of fits. It's important not to do this, because it ruins the sense of scale. For example, when someone describes a politician they don't like as a "fascist" it's disrespectful to the memory of people who are squashed under tanks and who are taken in the night by state agents, raped and murdered. Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship. When I was young I worked in a computer assembly shop for basically no money. In the course of this work I plugged a power cable into a motherboard and fried it. I probably rubbed customers up the wrong way, and certainly did dumb things. My labour was worth less than nothing, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to be allowed near the place or customers. As I became valuable I struck a private agreement with the owner and spent a summer working full-time, for which I was paid one gravis ultrasound ACE. I think I ended up better on the deal than the owner, but it was a close-run thing. Another time I was contracted to do a job for an oil company. It took me a month to do something that would now take me a day, and the end result was so bad that they got no return on investment of the the AUD 300 they paid me for the job. Note that in the case of the oil company work, I already had most of a computer science degree, and so was more qualified than the average kind of person who lives on minimum wage and still near-worthless. After spending some time working to build up my skills, I'm now happy with my career. I wouldn't be here except for working in situations where I was earning less than minimum wage, often with people giving my low money on the offchance I might not be incompetent. The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage. There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed. It's a ridiculous solution that hurts the people it claims to represent. There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges. The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect.
- zeemonkee 15y ago
  Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". No, but that's how serfdom started - through voluntary servitude. The point isn't to equate 21st century Europe or US with pre-19th century Russia. The point is that serfdom is a form of voluntary servitude which people entered into out of desperation. Likewise, nobody works for free (outside of charitable work) unless they are desperate (or they are rich kids, and don't need to care). Companies exploit this through unpaid internships - assuming they can get away with it. Saying "you're free to walk away" is not a moral argument; if the only way a young person can find work is through doing voluntary servitude then they are stuck in that position until they do so. Minimum wage laws exist for a number of reasons. If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ? The welfare system, i.e. the rest of us. So employers can exploit the system to boost their profits. Second, how does it fail to protect people ? Since when did a living wage for a day's work become a controversial issue ?
  - allenp 15y ago
    "Since when did a living wage for a day's work become a controversial issue ?" You're joking right? Have you seen any of the immigration reform/debate over the last 5 years in the US? One of the primary arguments is over the availability of labor so cheap that not even prisoners will take the jobs.
    - zeemonkee 15y ago
      That's my point - why is it a controversial issue ? How did we go so low ?
    - irishstu 15y ago
      It's creeping in slowly here in Ireland. That's why I spoke up.
  - 15y ago
j1o1h1n 15y ago
The point of a sword tended to be involved in the process, money being less of a thing in the middle ages. Anyway, your analogy will seem more believable we start to see the children of interns forced to work for the companies that their parent work for, interns being paid with tickets only redeemable at the company store, having to ask permission to marry, only being allowed to marry other employees, not being allowed to move off the company campus, etc... lots of a way to go on the road to serfdom.
jcromartie 15y ago
I think there's even more to the parallel: many unpaid interns are kids coming from expensive schools with high levels of student debt.
- zeemonkee 15y ago
  There's something going on here. I don't know about the US, but in the UK social mobility is actually worse than in the 1950s: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555697/UK-one-of-worst-countries-for-social-mobility.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555697/UK-one-of-wor... So, you have a pattern where: - More people are going into higher education - We are in the middle of a deep recession - As a consequence of these factors, there is less public money per student, so students have to pay more - As another consequence, a degree is worth less than in previous decades - Employers see a college/university degree as a requirement, even for jobs that don't really need them - Unpaid internships are therefore seen as a differentiating factor when hiring graduates So, in order to climb that greasy pole, you need a) the money to get a degree and b) the money to work unpaid while you gain experience. In the past, you had the option of starting work as a teenager and working your way up, or being one of the few to go to university and having your costs paid, with a good chance of a higher paid job at the end of it. In this brave new world, these doors have been firmly closed to kids from poor families. Of course it benefits the rich kids and I wonder, half-jokingly, if this isn't an intended consequence of the richer Boomers ensuring an easier ride for their progeny without competition from the hoi polloi. In any case, I fear for the future of a country where advancement depends on connections and family money rather than ability.
  - pessimizer 15y ago
    Review of a good primetime documentary about class mobility in Britain, including unpaid intern stuff: "Who Gets The Best Jobs? Review: Bank of Mum & Dad" http://channelhopping.onthebox.com/2011/02/02/who-gets-the-best-jobs-review/ http://channelhopping.onthebox.com/2011/02/02/who-gets-the-b... Some of the fallout: "Calvin Klein’s PR firm Modus admits on national TV: '20 of our 70 staff are unpaid interns'" http://graduatefog.co.uk/2011/1230/calvin-klein-uniqlo-sienna-miller-modus-publicity-unpaid-internship-pr/ http://graduatefog.co.uk/2011/1230/calvin-klein-uniqlo-sienn... Terrible youtube version starts at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNRP8xc5aFA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNRP8xc5aFA
smokeyj 15y ago
If an internship is serfdom then college must be slavery. Intern: skills + experience = $0 College: no skills + no experience = student loan

irishstu 15y ago

I did raise the point about discrimination at the end but it's easy to miss in the wall of text. I fully agree with Intern Aware http://www.internaware.org/ http://www.internaware.org/ on the issue of discrimination

zeemonkee 15y ago
Sorry, thanks for pointing it out. Good article that raises the issues with this appalling practice.

Retric 15y ago

Your ignoring the use of collage students as interns. At many schools it's possible to get collage credit for internships. Also many companies use interns as a recruiting tool they might not get any net value from interns but they get to evaluate recruits for longer periods of time, which is not worth paying 7.25$ an hour for ~3 months. Anyway, legally you are required to pay interns that create net value for your company.

cturner 15y ago

There's a temptation in politics to see patterns and then fit language to it that kind of fits. It's important not to do this, because it ruins the sense of scale. For example, when someone describes a politician they don't like as a "fascist" it's disrespectful to the memory of people who are squashed under tanks and who are taken in the night by state agents, raped and murdered. Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship. When I was young I worked in a computer assembly shop for basically no money. In the course of this work I plugged a power cable into a motherboard and fried it. I probably rubbed customers up the wrong way, and certainly did dumb things. My labour was worth less than nothing, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to be allowed near the place or customers. As I became valuable I struck a private agreement with the owner and spent a summer working full-time, for which I was paid one gravis ultrasound ACE. I think I ended up better on the deal than the owner, but it was a close-run thing. Another time I was contracted to do a job for an oil company. It took me a month to do something that would now take me a day, and the end result was so bad that they got no return on investment of the the AUD 300 they paid me for the job. Note that in the case of the oil company work, I already had most of a computer science degree, and so was more qualified than the average kind of person who lives on minimum wage and still near-worthless. After spending some time working to build up my skills, I'm now happy with my career. I wouldn't be here except for working in situations where I was earning less than minimum wage, often with people giving my low money on the offchance I might not be incompetent. The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage. There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed. It's a ridiculous solution that hurts the people it claims to represent. There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges. The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect.

zeemonkee 15y ago
Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". No, but that's how serfdom started - through voluntary servitude. The point isn't to equate 21st century Europe or US with pre-19th century Russia. The point is that serfdom is a form of voluntary servitude which people entered into out of desperation. Likewise, nobody works for free (outside of charitable work) unless they are desperate (or they are rich kids, and don't need to care). Companies exploit this through unpaid internships - assuming they can get away with it. Saying "you're free to walk away" is not a moral argument; if the only way a young person can find work is through doing voluntary servitude then they are stuck in that position until they do so. Minimum wage laws exist for a number of reasons. If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ? The welfare system, i.e. the rest of us. So employers can exploit the system to boost their profits. Second, how does it fail to protect people ? Since when did a living wage for a day's work become a controversial issue ?
- allenp 15y ago
  "Since when did a living wage for a day's work become a controversial issue ?" You're joking right? Have you seen any of the immigration reform/debate over the last 5 years in the US? One of the primary arguments is over the availability of labor so cheap that not even prisoners will take the jobs.
  - zeemonkee 15y ago
    That's my point - why is it a controversial issue ? How did we go so low ?
  - irishstu 15y ago
    It's creeping in slowly here in Ireland. That's why I spoke up.
- 15y ago

j1o1h1n 15y ago

The point of a sword tended to be involved in the process, money being less of a thing in the middle ages. Anyway, your analogy will seem more believable we start to see the children of interns forced to work for the companies that their parent work for, interns being paid with tickets only redeemable at the company store, having to ask permission to marry, only being allowed to marry other employees, not being allowed to move off the company campus, etc... lots of a way to go on the road to serfdom.

jcromartie 15y ago

I think there's even more to the parallel: many unpaid interns are kids coming from expensive schools with high levels of student debt.

zeemonkee 15y ago
There's something going on here. I don't know about the US, but in the UK social mobility is actually worse than in the 1950s: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555697/UK-one-of-worst-countries-for-social-mobility.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555697/UK-one-of-wor... So, you have a pattern where: - More people are going into higher education - We are in the middle of a deep recession - As a consequence of these factors, there is less public money per student, so students have to pay more - As another consequence, a degree is worth less than in previous decades - Employers see a college/university degree as a requirement, even for jobs that don't really need them - Unpaid internships are therefore seen as a differentiating factor when hiring graduates So, in order to climb that greasy pole, you need a) the money to get a degree and b) the money to work unpaid while you gain experience. In the past, you had the option of starting work as a teenager and working your way up, or being one of the few to go to university and having your costs paid, with a good chance of a higher paid job at the end of it. In this brave new world, these doors have been firmly closed to kids from poor families. Of course it benefits the rich kids and I wonder, half-jokingly, if this isn't an intended consequence of the richer Boomers ensuring an easier ride for their progeny without competition from the hoi polloi. In any case, I fear for the future of a country where advancement depends on connections and family money rather than ability.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  Review of a good primetime documentary about class mobility in Britain, including unpaid intern stuff: "Who Gets The Best Jobs? Review: Bank of Mum & Dad" http://channelhopping.onthebox.com/2011/02/02/who-gets-the-best-jobs-review/ http://channelhopping.onthebox.com/2011/02/02/who-gets-the-b... Some of the fallout: "Calvin Klein’s PR firm Modus admits on national TV: '20 of our 70 staff are unpaid interns'" http://graduatefog.co.uk/2011/1230/calvin-klein-uniqlo-sienna-miller-modus-publicity-unpaid-internship-pr/ http://graduatefog.co.uk/2011/1230/calvin-klein-uniqlo-sienn... Terrible youtube version starts at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNRP8xc5aFA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNRP8xc5aFA

smokeyj 15y ago

If an internship is serfdom then college must be slavery. Intern: skills + experience = $0 College: no skills + no experience = student loan