8 ms·

Unpaid Internships: Bad for Students, Bad for Workers, Bad for Society

80 points by waxymonkeyfrog 14y ago

datr 14y ago
Are internships with The Atlantic paid or unpaid? Edit: According to this article: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/04/06/atlantic-publisher-takes-stand-on-intern-pay-who-will-follow/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/04/06/atlantic-publisher-ta... all atlantic interns are paid.
- evoxed 14y ago
  I have a friend who interned with them. They also give actual offers to distinguished candidates, which though it should be relatively standard is often not the case.
- dummyaccount999 14y ago
  I worked for Atlantic Media (this is a throwaway), and based on my experience there, that organization is harmed just as badly by its low-paid internships as it would be if they did not pay at all. A significant portion of the drudgery is performed by interns, and the company is very reluctant to hire new people. And they get away with it because of the bright-eyed college kids who will do this for low-pay. Few to none of the interns come back for a permanent position. The corporate attitude at Atlantic Media is that people are generally expendable, and that the staff on-hand will pick up the slack when pissed off employees walk out the door. So most of the work there is performed by underpaid interns and underpaid, disgruntled employees.
fidrelity 14y ago
is this really an issue in the tech industry? I'm studying in austria, absolved an internship in germany, got paid quite well and so did all my fellow students (internships all over europe, US, australia).
- _delirium 14y ago
  Mainly an issue outside of tech, I believe. With the kinds of wages that Microsoft/Google/IBM/nVidia/Facebook/Oracle/etc. pay interns, it's going to be pretty difficult to recruit good interns with an offer of $0, unless circumstances are pretty unusual (unusual location, some kind of super-hot niche product, etc.).
- davedx 14y ago
  Here in the Netherlands, from what I gather, it's the norm, yes. My gf did all of her internships for free, and the place I work at now pays something like 200 euros/month to their interns, which comprise almost half of our staff. They do pretty great work, too - definitely comparable with what a full-time employee produces. Comparing it to the one internship I did while at university in the UK, where I worked at UBS for a summer and was paid enough to buy bottles of champagne at a bar on pay day to celebrate and go shopping at Harrods, it seems pretty unfair.
- nickbarnwell 14y ago
  In my experience - no. I have worked at startups ranging in size from 3 to 20 developers and funding from 25k incubator grants to multimillion dollar series A, and never have I gone unpaid. The two YC companies I applied to and received offers for this summer also offered pay, and Google, Microsoft, et al all have very competitive offers.
- hej 14y ago
  400€/month. Paid the rent and some living costs. Non-technical internship. The other place I interviewed at and was named the pay I would have gotten 300€/month or so. (That's in Germany, by the way.) Both was ok for me. I was still a student, so paying a bit less than I needed to survive on that wage alone was ok. It shows appreciation of my work and trust in me.
- Wilya 14y ago
  I guess it's more a question of local tradition than a question of which industry you're in. As far as I can gather, in Sweden unpaid internship are the norm. In France, the situation is a bit more mixed. Some people pay well, others pay the strict legal minimum (0 or 400€, depending on the total duration).
ThomPete 14y ago
I got paid during my internship and when I later started a company we always paid our interns. I think as a general rule internships should be paid simply because if the company can't afford to hire an intern then they shouldn't be having one in the first place. I realize it's a nice way to get some help for your struggling business and if someone really want to get in to a place that isn't looking for interns then it makes some sense.
- davedx 14y ago
  I agree completely. To be honest I don't even understand how it's legal (I'm in the EU). I think through some kind of academia-related loophole.
phillmv 14y ago
Do we have a good economic narrative for unpaid internships outside of naturally abusive talent driven industries (music, film, journalism)? Do internships just fall in this hole where you'd like to have an office wench but can't quite justify it in a budget, or is it entirely a made up social convention where older generations are extracting rents from new graduates? At any rate, the effect seems pretty clear to me: unpaid internships are huge drivers of inequality. They obviously limit opportunities for social mobility towards people that can be subsidized, or otherwise have access to liquidity. There's something really insidious about pushing people away from increasingly wide classes of cushy jobs they're otherwise perfectly capable of performing. Startups: pay your (non technical) interns minimum wage, at least. It makes me kind enraged to see this start to happen in our industry.
- davedx 14y ago
  I hope your last sentence is meant to suggest technical interns should be paid above minimum wage, rather than that only non-techs should be paid fairly?
  - nickbarnwell 14y ago
    As I understand it he's commenting more on the internships discussed in the article, those in the film/music/publishing industries, that typically go unpaid.
  - paulgb 14y ago
    I think that goes without saying; technical interns are in high enough demand that if you're not paying minimum wage they have options elsewhere.
    - Kuiper 14y ago
      Where I am (midwest USA) technical interns are typically paid at least twice minimum wage; offer anything less than 175% minimum wage and engineering students will dismiss you entirely.
- __mark__ 14y ago
paulgb 14y ago
I don't buy the argument that unpaid internships are immoral because they disadvantage the underprivileged. Higher education systematically disadvantages the underprivileged, especially at US tuition rates. Does that make going to Harvard unethical? There is clearly a supply/demand mismatch in some industries, and unpaid internships are a symptom, not the cause. I get defensive when the issue of unpaid internships comes up because I did an unpaid internship in High School, learned a hell of a lot, and was able to use it to gain well-paid internships throughout college.
- j_baker 14y ago
  I'd expect that Harvard has at least some scholarships/grants for underprivileged students. Unpaid internships offer no such niceties.
  - paulgb 14y ago
    That's fair, but it's still far easier to get a brand-name education in the USA if you come from a middle/upper-class background.
- wvenable 14y ago
  Honestly comparing an unpaid internship in High School is no where near the same as requiring 20-somethings in college and university to work for free. I also did the unpaid internship thing in high school (which turned in a paid job) and I did a fully paid internships in University. I could not afford to work for free as an 18 year old on my own. It's amazing that in a country with a minimum wage it's still possible to hire people for a job for free.
  - paulgb 14y ago
    I'm not saying anything about requiring 20-somethings to work for free. I couldn't have afforded to work for free in college either. I agree that it's a different situation. My point is that I was able to make an informed decision to take an unpaid position, and it benefited me. Had it been a paid position, it either wouldn't have been offered (the department didn't have a lot of money) or would have gone to someone else with more experience. So when people advocate for unpaid internships to be banned, I get frustrated, especially when they say it's for the intern's benefit. Don't get me wrong, it absolutely sucks that it's possible (market-wise) to hire university grads for nothing, but banning unpaid internships doesn't solve the underlying market problem. And I'd argue that it doesn't increase social mobility, either, since floor/ceiling prices tend to encourage nepotism.
mindcrime 14y ago
One premise of this article is faulty. They presume that you can only accept an unpaid internship if you're from a wealthy / privileged family or whatever. But that's not true. There's no particular reason you couldn't, say, work an unpaid internship 8 hours during the day, and work a second job at night, busing tables, washing dishes, working as a barista at Starbucks, or whatever. Plenty of people already work 2 jobs to make ends meet, so a college age kid with (hopefully) minimal living expenses could very likely manage this. Note that I'm talking summer internship, when school is out, of course. I'm not proposing one should go to school, work a real job and work an internship. This is also not to refute the idea that unpaid internships may be bad for other reasons... I'm just arguing against the idea that they're bad because they are only available to the children of the privileged.
- Tiktaalik 14y ago
  Carrying on two jobs is technically possible but it would still be remarkably difficult and I think unrealistic to do this. The argument that the system overly benefits the wealthy is still valid.
  - res0nat0r 14y ago
    Realistically many single parents work two or even more jobs to make ends meet.
    - drumdance 14y ago
      That's because the alternative is homelessness. The alternative to an unpaid internship is taking a job you don't like. Not nearly as powerful a motivator.
      - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
        Well no. The alternative to an unpaid internship, for most of the people actually stuck in unpaid internships, is unemployment.
  - 14y ago
mayneack 14y ago
I was an unpaid intern at a lobbying office last summer and will be an unpaid congressional intern this summer (both DC). However, my college has given me a stipend (sort of merit based) so I can end up net positive on the summer. I certainly wouldn't be able to afford this if it weren't for the stipend (though I'd probably do it for less and just break even or slightly negative). The biggest thing that I think is different for my intern experience from what I hear about the horrors about unpaid interns is that I get money like a paid intern, but have the expectations of an unpaid intern. The people I work for aren't paying me, so they can't expect too much labor out of me. As far as they're concerned, their payment is in experience, so I basically got free reign to do (or watch other people do) many things that might not be productive, but I found interesting. The anecdotal evidence of my friends with paid positions had to really earn their pay and don't have anywhere near the freedom that I did. It's plausible that I just found a good internship last summer (no fetching coffee), but I would say that I personally benefited from being paid by my college and not my employer.
gms 14y ago
Organisations have decided that this specific set of internships aren't worth paying a wage for. Workers have decided that they are worth their time, for the experience/foot in the door they gain. If you ban unpaid internships, companies won't offer the positions anymore (as they have decided their value is zero), which means people seeking them won't be able to obtain them. Sounds like everyone would actually be worse-off.
- j_baker 14y ago
  You mean a sizable subset of workers have decided they're worth their time. I think it's worth bringing up Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. If you can't afford to eat or pay rent, the experience you're getting is among the least of your concerns. If your food and rent situation is taken care of beforehand (and it's almost always done so by someone else), then you get to base your decision on whether or not the time is worth the experience.
  - gms 14y ago
    This dilemma applies to everyone. If you can't afford to do what you want, then earn money doing something else until you can. Alternatively, do both at the same time, using your earned money to simultaneously subsidise your time doing the other thing. It's also possible that you decide this unpaid experience is just not worth it after all, in which case you can get a job that actually pays.
- evoxed 14y ago
  I can't speak directly about the tech industry, but this is absolutely not the case in architecture and engineering. Your tasks may not be the most critical part of any project, but they are incredibly time intensive and would otherwise cost the firm a huge chunk of money. CAD monkeys are the quickest example, although physical model builders get quite a share of gruntwork as well. Outsourcing that work costs tens of thousands per project, but a 2nd year masters student will do it for free because it's the only way to get their IDP hours to sit for the licensing exam. There have been many discussions about this between architects and these days there are just some firms that have a reputation for churning through interns for free labor... Banning them is a tense subject for many, but many have taken the stance that after some period of months/years such practices are unethical. I can't recall the AIA's official stance.
gm 14y ago
Who gives a crap? Honestly: If you do not like the idea of being an unpaid intern, then don't be one. What's not a worthwhile opportunity for you might be an opportunity to someone else. Am I missing something? Seems like unpaid internships affect me and my job/economy as much as someone else eating a donut affects my weight.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  Who gives a crap? Honestly: If you do not like the idea of being an unpaid intern, then don't be one. Unpaid internships undermine the entire legal and moral principle that workers are supposed to be paid. There's a reason we have minimum-wage laws, and of course, anti-slavery laws.
  - gm 14y ago
    Bullshit. A requirement of slavery is to both be forced to work and not have a choice of where you work (google it). And don't get me started on moral principles. Moral principles are each person's own. Certainly you do not want to be held to _my_ moral principles, right? Why should anyone else be held to someone else's? If the moral principles are strong enough turn them into law. The only question that is genuine is the law. So if the law allows unpaid internships, why whine about it? For the record, I would not be where I am if I had not had a chance to do for free what I now do for a living. But that's just my experience.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      And if internships had the relevant laws actually enforced, you would have been paid to do what you now do for a living. For God's sake, how could you call yourself a moral person if you take 100% of the product of another person's labor, leaving them nothing to live on?
- drumdance 14y ago
  It's not the idea that offends, it's the practicality. I had to turn down an unpaid internship in my early twenties because I couldn't make ends meet otherwise. I ended up going into a completely different field. I'm happy with my current profession, but I occasionally wonder "what if..."
CPops 14y ago
In most cases, an unpaid internship is probably a bad idea. But individuals should be making that choice based on their unique set of circumstances and goals. Individuals should be free to make a choice whether or not the experience they gain, the connections they make, the resume blurb, and whether getting their foot in the door is worth more to them than their free labor. In most cases its probably a bad idea, but in some cases some people might see the opportunity as worth their effort. IMO, the issue here is that labor laws prevent companies from offering unpaid internships that involve something that a business can actually benefit from or that can conceivably displace a paid employee. Ostensibly created to prevent exploitation, these labor laws actually create exploitation by effectively forcing an unpaid internship to be an exercise in busy work for any company that actually follows the law.
sterling312 14y ago
Feel free to comment, I want to hear what other people think on this issue. I think there is nothing inherently wrong with unpaid internships. If the market price for your work is low enough to only compensate experience gained, that's perfectly fine. What's wrong with the system are more generalize than that, and there are two problems that causes it. I would break it down to A) industrial organizational problem and B) market downturn (and to an extent upturn) + inefficiency and lagging effects. Part A is more about the over abundance of certain firms in the market supply-demand that makes it very difficult to pay interns. Since I've never worked as a unpaid-intern before (it might happen soon though :/), correct me if I'm wrong, but most of them are either in marketing, legal assistant positions, or journalism. Marketing firms that do not offer paid internships are usually small agencies that are barely able to survive on their own; same thing is true with journalism; the whole legal market has wage flooring that artificially reduces the supply of laws and therefore law firms. It seems to me that these industries needs to better allocate and either become more competitive via innovation, and people going into those industry might want to reconsider their path. Part B is more on the fact that labor market is inherently inefficient, and in a recession, it exaggerates the underlining problem in part A. This is why we are starting to see more unpaid internship instead of flat wage cuts.
geebee 14y ago
Unpaid internships seem to be rare for programmers... - Programmers of any sort who can get the job done in demand. There are more people who want to pay them than programmers available. - Even inexperienced programmers add value - sometimes a tremendous amount of value. It's not too hard to find a non-critical, short term project that would still be very useful, and the intern starts adding value on day one. So employers are less likely to "do without" if it turns out they have to pay. - Software interns have a better unpaid internship than the one you're offering - founding their own company. If a recent grad with programming ability is getting outside financial help (the kind that a parent might give to a recent grad doing an unpaid internship in the entertainment industry), that programmer can just try creating an app and seeing how to turn it into something financially viable. They might fail (they probably will fail), but will the experience be worse than a year of not getting paid at a bigco? (It depends, but a lot of companies in high tech would be impressed with someone who took a real crack at creating a financially viable product). I do occasionally see postings for unpaid cs/engineering internships, posted on campus bulletin boards. They are almost never from actual, high tech companies. These postings generally come from industries accustomed to getting the free interns (publishing, fashion, and so forth) - you know "gain valuable industry experience by writing extenstions in python for our CMS). It feels good to see these posts go up later offering a bit of pay (though still generally much lower than the interns could get elsewhere).
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Internships are for people with a knowledge about, but not direct experience in some thing. That can apply as easily to programming as it can journalism.
  - geebee 14y ago
    It can apply to journalism, but as easily as programming? It's hard to say, this is an interesting question. I think it boils down to this: how easily can a person from the outside gain experience in a field? There's a wide spectrum here. In software, it has become (especially in recent years) extremely easy to write and release an application to the world. Web sites, wireless apps, and so forth. So if you're going to work "for free", you really don't need to join a big organization to get that experience. I'm not saying there couldn't be benefits, but you could almost look at a startup as an unpaid internship working for yourself with massive upside. On the other side of the spectrum you might find something like surgery. I heard about a man who knew how perform a procedure on infants, who was later discovered to not possess the right credentials and licensing. He had "learned by doing." I guess you could view much of medical school and residency as a non-paid (or low paid) internship in a field where many people believe it would be unconscionable to sidestep the normal training. How hard is it to just launch your own fashion line, create your own "journalism" experience by starting a blog, and so forth? The world is opening up - certainly it's getting easier and easier to create, market, and distribute without the permission or help of a large organization. I think software is at the forefront, but certainly other fields are opening up as well.
jhspaybar 14y ago
As a Junior who is going to be interning with undisclosed large internet company this summer, I think that much of the problem and reason for unpaid internships is that there are few jobs in the industry of choice for these interns. Being a double Major in Computer Science and Business Economics I can clearly see the economic forces at play(and really anyone should). These unpaid positions are springing up in industries that are often shrinking, or do not require overly talented skill sets to operate in. It's unfortunate for the workers, and I'd like to say they should be standing up and saying "no", but given the realities of their industries it may sadly be in their best interests to work for free. Had they simply looked ahead when enrolling in college, they could have seen that majoring in something like journalism, while enjoyable would lead to brutal competition and low wages. This isn't a situation all interns face, when those in finance, computers, and a few other majors are capable of demanding $25-$35k of compensation for 3 months of a summer internship, it becomes clear this is problem affecting only some industries.
droithomme 14y ago
More interesting than the topic I think is their method of creating three daily articles. Ask for comments, sort the comments into pros and cons, then publish each on subsequent days with minimal commentary, and no pay offered to the people who actually crowdsourced the writing of the article.
fierarul 14y ago
This is odd: just today I've posted our internship projects and they are all for paid positions. And actually nowadays all students are forced by the University to have a short internship and it doesn't have to include a wage! But I've decided to pay the students anyhow for 2 simple reasons: * I want good students to apply. We are a small company. * I want students to care more about the internship than just showing up and do the minimum.
ianthiel 14y ago
Why should students who aren't able to get paid internships be denied the right to have an unpaid internship? I would not be where I am today were it not for unpaid internships. Some people would be helped by mandating all internships be paid, but these are not the people who need the most help. The people who need the most help are the ones that would be cut off from any chance at early work experience by such a system. The idea of everyone having a paid internship is nice, but many places will simply stop offering them if unpaid interns aren't an option. Also, no one is forcing these students to work anywhere. Yes, market forces drive them towards an internship, but there are many internships in the market. If unpaid internships were banned or otherwise made illegal, companies could still bring in students as volunteers, which are unpaid. They would still get the same experience and be in exactly the same position, except now they are no longer eligible for college credit and certain legal protections. How is that a better system? Are there any compelling arguments why unpaid internships should be made illegal? If not illegal, then how should/could they be reformed?

datr 14y ago

Are internships with The Atlantic paid or unpaid? Edit: According to this article: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/04/06/atlantic-publisher-takes-stand-on-intern-pay-who-will-follow/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/04/06/atlantic-publisher-ta... all atlantic interns are paid.

evoxed 14y ago
I have a friend who interned with them. They also give actual offers to distinguished candidates, which though it should be relatively standard is often not the case.
dummyaccount999 14y ago
I worked for Atlantic Media (this is a throwaway), and based on my experience there, that organization is harmed just as badly by its low-paid internships as it would be if they did not pay at all. A significant portion of the drudgery is performed by interns, and the company is very reluctant to hire new people. And they get away with it because of the bright-eyed college kids who will do this for low-pay. Few to none of the interns come back for a permanent position. The corporate attitude at Atlantic Media is that people are generally expendable, and that the staff on-hand will pick up the slack when pissed off employees walk out the door. So most of the work there is performed by underpaid interns and underpaid, disgruntled employees.

fidrelity 14y ago

is this really an issue in the tech industry? I'm studying in austria, absolved an internship in germany, got paid quite well and so did all my fellow students (internships all over europe, US, australia).

_delirium 14y ago
Mainly an issue outside of tech, I believe. With the kinds of wages that Microsoft/Google/IBM/nVidia/Facebook/Oracle/etc. pay interns, it's going to be pretty difficult to recruit good interns with an offer of $0, unless circumstances are pretty unusual (unusual location, some kind of super-hot niche product, etc.).
davedx 14y ago
Here in the Netherlands, from what I gather, it's the norm, yes. My gf did all of her internships for free, and the place I work at now pays something like 200 euros/month to their interns, which comprise almost half of our staff. They do pretty great work, too - definitely comparable with what a full-time employee produces. Comparing it to the one internship I did while at university in the UK, where I worked at UBS for a summer and was paid enough to buy bottles of champagne at a bar on pay day to celebrate and go shopping at Harrods, it seems pretty unfair.
nickbarnwell 14y ago
In my experience - no. I have worked at startups ranging in size from 3 to 20 developers and funding from 25k incubator grants to multimillion dollar series A, and never have I gone unpaid. The two YC companies I applied to and received offers for this summer also offered pay, and Google, Microsoft, et al all have very competitive offers.
hej 14y ago
400€/month. Paid the rent and some living costs. Non-technical internship. The other place I interviewed at and was named the pay I would have gotten 300€/month or so. (That's in Germany, by the way.) Both was ok for me. I was still a student, so paying a bit less than I needed to survive on that wage alone was ok. It shows appreciation of my work and trust in me.
Wilya 14y ago
I guess it's more a question of local tradition than a question of which industry you're in. As far as I can gather, in Sweden unpaid internship are the norm. In France, the situation is a bit more mixed. Some people pay well, others pay the strict legal minimum (0 or 400€, depending on the total duration).

ThomPete 14y ago

I got paid during my internship and when I later started a company we always paid our interns. I think as a general rule internships should be paid simply because if the company can't afford to hire an intern then they shouldn't be having one in the first place. I realize it's a nice way to get some help for your struggling business and if someone really want to get in to a place that isn't looking for interns then it makes some sense.

davedx 14y ago
I agree completely. To be honest I don't even understand how it's legal (I'm in the EU). I think through some kind of academia-related loophole.

phillmv 14y ago

Do we have a good economic narrative for unpaid internships outside of naturally abusive talent driven industries (music, film, journalism)? Do internships just fall in this hole where you'd like to have an office wench but can't quite justify it in a budget, or is it entirely a made up social convention where older generations are extracting rents from new graduates? At any rate, the effect seems pretty clear to me: unpaid internships are huge drivers of inequality. They obviously limit opportunities for social mobility towards people that can be subsidized, or otherwise have access to liquidity. There's something really insidious about pushing people away from increasingly wide classes of cushy jobs they're otherwise perfectly capable of performing. Startups: pay your (non technical) interns minimum wage, at least. It makes me kind enraged to see this start to happen in our industry.

davedx 14y ago
I hope your last sentence is meant to suggest technical interns should be paid above minimum wage, rather than that only non-techs should be paid fairly?
- nickbarnwell 14y ago
  As I understand it he's commenting more on the internships discussed in the article, those in the film/music/publishing industries, that typically go unpaid.
- paulgb 14y ago
  I think that goes without saying; technical interns are in high enough demand that if you're not paying minimum wage they have options elsewhere.
  - Kuiper 14y ago
    Where I am (midwest USA) technical interns are typically paid at least twice minimum wage; offer anything less than 175% minimum wage and engineering students will dismiss you entirely.
__mark__ 14y ago

paulgb 14y ago

I don't buy the argument that unpaid internships are immoral because they disadvantage the underprivileged. Higher education systematically disadvantages the underprivileged, especially at US tuition rates. Does that make going to Harvard unethical? There is clearly a supply/demand mismatch in some industries, and unpaid internships are a symptom, not the cause. I get defensive when the issue of unpaid internships comes up because I did an unpaid internship in High School, learned a hell of a lot, and was able to use it to gain well-paid internships throughout college.

j_baker 14y ago
I'd expect that Harvard has at least some scholarships/grants for underprivileged students. Unpaid internships offer no such niceties.
- paulgb 14y ago
  That's fair, but it's still far easier to get a brand-name education in the USA if you come from a middle/upper-class background.
wvenable 14y ago
Honestly comparing an unpaid internship in High School is no where near the same as requiring 20-somethings in college and university to work for free. I also did the unpaid internship thing in high school (which turned in a paid job) and I did a fully paid internships in University. I could not afford to work for free as an 18 year old on my own. It's amazing that in a country with a minimum wage it's still possible to hire people for a job for free.
- paulgb 14y ago
  I'm not saying anything about requiring 20-somethings to work for free. I couldn't have afforded to work for free in college either. I agree that it's a different situation. My point is that I was able to make an informed decision to take an unpaid position, and it benefited me. Had it been a paid position, it either wouldn't have been offered (the department didn't have a lot of money) or would have gone to someone else with more experience. So when people advocate for unpaid internships to be banned, I get frustrated, especially when they say it's for the intern's benefit. Don't get me wrong, it absolutely sucks that it's possible (market-wise) to hire university grads for nothing, but banning unpaid internships doesn't solve the underlying market problem. And I'd argue that it doesn't increase social mobility, either, since floor/ceiling prices tend to encourage nepotism.

mindcrime 14y ago

One premise of this article is faulty. They presume that you can only accept an unpaid internship if you're from a wealthy / privileged family or whatever. But that's not true. There's no particular reason you couldn't, say, work an unpaid internship 8 hours during the day, and work a second job at night, busing tables, washing dishes, working as a barista at Starbucks, or whatever. Plenty of people already work 2 jobs to make ends meet, so a college age kid with (hopefully) minimal living expenses could very likely manage this. Note that I'm talking summer internship, when school is out, of course. I'm not proposing one should go to school, work a real job and work an internship. This is also not to refute the idea that unpaid internships may be bad for other reasons... I'm just arguing against the idea that they're bad because they are only available to the children of the privileged.

Tiktaalik 14y ago
Carrying on two jobs is technically possible but it would still be remarkably difficult and I think unrealistic to do this. The argument that the system overly benefits the wealthy is still valid.
- res0nat0r 14y ago
  Realistically many single parents work two or even more jobs to make ends meet.
  - drumdance 14y ago
    That's because the alternative is homelessness. The alternative to an unpaid internship is taking a job you don't like. Not nearly as powerful a motivator.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      Well no. The alternative to an unpaid internship, for most of the people actually stuck in unpaid internships, is unemployment.
- 14y ago

mayneack 14y ago

I was an unpaid intern at a lobbying office last summer and will be an unpaid congressional intern this summer (both DC). However, my college has given me a stipend (sort of merit based) so I can end up net positive on the summer. I certainly wouldn't be able to afford this if it weren't for the stipend (though I'd probably do it for less and just break even or slightly negative). The biggest thing that I think is different for my intern experience from what I hear about the horrors about unpaid interns is that I get money like a paid intern, but have the expectations of an unpaid intern. The people I work for aren't paying me, so they can't expect too much labor out of me. As far as they're concerned, their payment is in experience, so I basically got free reign to do (or watch other people do) many things that might not be productive, but I found interesting. The anecdotal evidence of my friends with paid positions had to really earn their pay and don't have anywhere near the freedom that I did. It's plausible that I just found a good internship last summer (no fetching coffee), but I would say that I personally benefited from being paid by my college and not my employer.

gms 14y ago

Organisations have decided that this specific set of internships aren't worth paying a wage for. Workers have decided that they are worth their time, for the experience/foot in the door they gain. If you ban unpaid internships, companies won't offer the positions anymore (as they have decided their value is zero), which means people seeking them won't be able to obtain them. Sounds like everyone would actually be worse-off.

j_baker 14y ago
You mean a sizable subset of workers have decided they're worth their time. I think it's worth bringing up Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. If you can't afford to eat or pay rent, the experience you're getting is among the least of your concerns. If your food and rent situation is taken care of beforehand (and it's almost always done so by someone else), then you get to base your decision on whether or not the time is worth the experience.
- gms 14y ago
  This dilemma applies to everyone. If you can't afford to do what you want, then earn money doing something else until you can. Alternatively, do both at the same time, using your earned money to simultaneously subsidise your time doing the other thing. It's also possible that you decide this unpaid experience is just not worth it after all, in which case you can get a job that actually pays.
evoxed 14y ago
I can't speak directly about the tech industry, but this is absolutely not the case in architecture and engineering. Your tasks may not be the most critical part of any project, but they are incredibly time intensive and would otherwise cost the firm a huge chunk of money. CAD monkeys are the quickest example, although physical model builders get quite a share of gruntwork as well. Outsourcing that work costs tens of thousands per project, but a 2nd year masters student will do it for free because it's the only way to get their IDP hours to sit for the licensing exam. There have been many discussions about this between architects and these days there are just some firms that have a reputation for churning through interns for free labor... Banning them is a tense subject for many, but many have taken the stance that after some period of months/years such practices are unethical. I can't recall the AIA's official stance.

gm 14y ago

Who gives a crap? Honestly: If you do not like the idea of being an unpaid intern, then don't be one. What's not a worthwhile opportunity for you might be an opportunity to someone else. Am I missing something? Seems like unpaid internships affect me and my job/economy as much as someone else eating a donut affects my weight.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Who gives a crap? Honestly: If you do not like the idea of being an unpaid intern, then don't be one. Unpaid internships undermine the entire legal and moral principle that workers are supposed to be paid. There's a reason we have minimum-wage laws, and of course, anti-slavery laws.
- gm 14y ago
  Bullshit. A requirement of slavery is to both be forced to work and not have a choice of where you work (google it). And don't get me started on moral principles. Moral principles are each person's own. Certainly you do not want to be held to _my_ moral principles, right? Why should anyone else be held to someone else's? If the moral principles are strong enough turn them into law. The only question that is genuine is the law. So if the law allows unpaid internships, why whine about it? For the record, I would not be where I am if I had not had a chance to do for free what I now do for a living. But that's just my experience.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    And if internships had the relevant laws actually enforced, you would have been paid to do what you now do for a living. For God's sake, how could you call yourself a moral person if you take 100% of the product of another person's labor, leaving them nothing to live on?
drumdance 14y ago
It's not the idea that offends, it's the practicality. I had to turn down an unpaid internship in my early twenties because I couldn't make ends meet otherwise. I ended up going into a completely different field. I'm happy with my current profession, but I occasionally wonder "what if..."

CPops 14y ago

In most cases, an unpaid internship is probably a bad idea. But individuals should be making that choice based on their unique set of circumstances and goals. Individuals should be free to make a choice whether or not the experience they gain, the connections they make, the resume blurb, and whether getting their foot in the door is worth more to them than their free labor. In most cases its probably a bad idea, but in some cases some people might see the opportunity as worth their effort. IMO, the issue here is that labor laws prevent companies from offering unpaid internships that involve something that a business can actually benefit from or that can conceivably displace a paid employee. Ostensibly created to prevent exploitation, these labor laws actually create exploitation by effectively forcing an unpaid internship to be an exercise in busy work for any company that actually follows the law.

sterling312 14y ago

Feel free to comment, I want to hear what other people think on this issue. I think there is nothing inherently wrong with unpaid internships. If the market price for your work is low enough to only compensate experience gained, that's perfectly fine. What's wrong with the system are more generalize than that, and there are two problems that causes it. I would break it down to A) industrial organizational problem and B) market downturn (and to an extent upturn) + inefficiency and lagging effects. Part A is more about the over abundance of certain firms in the market supply-demand that makes it very difficult to pay interns. Since I've never worked as a unpaid-intern before (it might happen soon though :/), correct me if I'm wrong, but most of them are either in marketing, legal assistant positions, or journalism. Marketing firms that do not offer paid internships are usually small agencies that are barely able to survive on their own; same thing is true with journalism; the whole legal market has wage flooring that artificially reduces the supply of laws and therefore law firms. It seems to me that these industries needs to better allocate and either become more competitive via innovation, and people going into those industry might want to reconsider their path. Part B is more on the fact that labor market is inherently inefficient, and in a recession, it exaggerates the underlining problem in part A. This is why we are starting to see more unpaid internship instead of flat wage cuts.

geebee 14y ago

Unpaid internships seem to be rare for programmers... - Programmers of any sort who can get the job done in demand. There are more people who want to pay them than programmers available. - Even inexperienced programmers add value - sometimes a tremendous amount of value. It's not too hard to find a non-critical, short term project that would still be very useful, and the intern starts adding value on day one. So employers are less likely to "do without" if it turns out they have to pay. - Software interns have a better unpaid internship than the one you're offering - founding their own company. If a recent grad with programming ability is getting outside financial help (the kind that a parent might give to a recent grad doing an unpaid internship in the entertainment industry), that programmer can just try creating an app and seeing how to turn it into something financially viable. They might fail (they probably will fail), but will the experience be worse than a year of not getting paid at a bigco? (It depends, but a lot of companies in high tech would be impressed with someone who took a real crack at creating a financially viable product). I do occasionally see postings for unpaid cs/engineering internships, posted on campus bulletin boards. They are almost never from actual, high tech companies. These postings generally come from industries accustomed to getting the free interns (publishing, fashion, and so forth) - you know "gain valuable industry experience by writing extenstions in python for our CMS). It feels good to see these posts go up later offering a bit of pay (though still generally much lower than the interns could get elsewhere).

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Internships are for people with a knowledge about, but not direct experience in some thing. That can apply as easily to programming as it can journalism.
- geebee 14y ago
  It can apply to journalism, but as easily as programming? It's hard to say, this is an interesting question. I think it boils down to this: how easily can a person from the outside gain experience in a field? There's a wide spectrum here. In software, it has become (especially in recent years) extremely easy to write and release an application to the world. Web sites, wireless apps, and so forth. So if you're going to work "for free", you really don't need to join a big organization to get that experience. I'm not saying there couldn't be benefits, but you could almost look at a startup as an unpaid internship working for yourself with massive upside. On the other side of the spectrum you might find something like surgery. I heard about a man who knew how perform a procedure on infants, who was later discovered to not possess the right credentials and licensing. He had "learned by doing." I guess you could view much of medical school and residency as a non-paid (or low paid) internship in a field where many people believe it would be unconscionable to sidestep the normal training. How hard is it to just launch your own fashion line, create your own "journalism" experience by starting a blog, and so forth? The world is opening up - certainly it's getting easier and easier to create, market, and distribute without the permission or help of a large organization. I think software is at the forefront, but certainly other fields are opening up as well.

jhspaybar 14y ago

As a Junior who is going to be interning with undisclosed large internet company this summer, I think that much of the problem and reason for unpaid internships is that there are few jobs in the industry of choice for these interns. Being a double Major in Computer Science and Business Economics I can clearly see the economic forces at play(and really anyone should). These unpaid positions are springing up in industries that are often shrinking, or do not require overly talented skill sets to operate in. It's unfortunate for the workers, and I'd like to say they should be standing up and saying "no", but given the realities of their industries it may sadly be in their best interests to work for free. Had they simply looked ahead when enrolling in college, they could have seen that majoring in something like journalism, while enjoyable would lead to brutal competition and low wages. This isn't a situation all interns face, when those in finance, computers, and a few other majors are capable of demanding $25-$35k of compensation for 3 months of a summer internship, it becomes clear this is problem affecting only some industries.

droithomme 14y ago

More interesting than the topic I think is their method of creating three daily articles. Ask for comments, sort the comments into pros and cons, then publish each on subsequent days with minimal commentary, and no pay offered to the people who actually crowdsourced the writing of the article.

fierarul 14y ago

This is odd: just today I've posted our internship projects and they are all for paid positions. And actually nowadays all students are forced by the University to have a short internship and it doesn't have to include a wage! But I've decided to pay the students anyhow for 2 simple reasons: * I want good students to apply. We are a small company. * I want students to care more about the internship than just showing up and do the minimum.

ianthiel 14y ago

Why should students who aren't able to get paid internships be denied the right to have an unpaid internship? I would not be where I am today were it not for unpaid internships. Some people would be helped by mandating all internships be paid, but these are not the people who need the most help. The people who need the most help are the ones that would be cut off from any chance at early work experience by such a system. The idea of everyone having a paid internship is nice, but many places will simply stop offering them if unpaid interns aren't an option. Also, no one is forcing these students to work anywhere. Yes, market forces drive them towards an internship, but there are many internships in the market. If unpaid internships were banned or otherwise made illegal, companies could still bring in students as volunteers, which are unpaid. They would still get the same experience and be in exactly the same position, except now they are no longer eligible for college credit and certain legal protections. How is that a better system? Are there any compelling arguments why unpaid internships should be made illegal? If not illegal, then how should/could they be reformed?