'No one should have to work for free': Is this the end of the unpaid internship?

[jakeXT]

When Mikey Franklin, 24, was job-searching this past January, he noticed that almost nobody was looking for full-time employees. What employers wanted instead: unpaid interns. Three years earlier, Franklin had a fulfilling unpaid gig at a left-leaning political action committee, but things were different now. He was married and couldn’t afford to work for free. 

Frustrated, Franklin decided to co-found the Fair Pay Campaign, a grassroots effort that officially launches on Labor Day to “end unpaid internships in America.” The message is simple, he said: “No one should have to work for free to get ahead.”

Franklin is one of a growing number of disgruntled workers who have begun to challenge the fairness — and legality — of the unpaid internship, a fact of life for young Americans hoping to pad their resumes and gain experience. In June, a Federal District Court judge in Manhattan ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated federal and New York minimum wage laws by failing to pay two interns working on the film “Black Swan.”

When the suit was filed two years ago, it was the first of its kind. Now interns have waged more than 20 lawsuits against companies such as the Hearst Corporation, Conde Nast, Atlantic Records, and Gawker Media. (Former interns filed suit in July against NBCUniversal, earlier this year; the company began paying interns.)

http://inplainsight.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/02/20262899-no-one-should-have-to-work-for-free-is-this-the-end-of-the-unpaid-internship?lite

[dkf]

1. If they get paid aren't they plain old employees?

Sounds like they want to do away with "interns".

[Igel]

2. Yup.

And that's the point (#1, at least): somebody could have the jobs that those unpaid interns are stealing--and if it comes down to some wet-behind-the-ears college student lacking experience and somebody with more experience, of course the rich and privileged won't get the gig.

Of course, there's a minor problem with this.

A couple of decades ago there were far fewer "intern" positions, but a lot of students and others got resume credit for "volunteering." Nobody wants to volunteer, and it sounded odd to volunteer at a for-profit establishment. They also needed a program to set up liability insurance and what not. Local volunteer fire departments have "volunteer" positions for kids under 18; the local sheriff's office has a "junior sheriff" program for interns.

Now we have "community service" for the NGOs and "internships" for more formal purposes, but they do the same thing for the kids and the "employers".

Point #2 is that for-profit places tend to be run by the "wealthy" or the "capitalist" or the "bourgoisie" or some other class-loaded term. Nobody should be volunteering to help them. But if you do the same job for the same experience at an NGO then it's okay.

The problem with all this is that it's hard to talk about internships clearly. There are good internships where you rack up experience and recommendations and they're really a help; there are bad ones where you sit and stew, wasting time. There are good internships where they mentor you and train you; and there are bad ones where you're expected to be the office boy. I was a paid intern for DARCOM/DOD decades ago, and learned not so much from actual training on the job but had access to some very nice computing equipment that John, the other intern, and I learned to use. One student of mine had something like three internships over the summer--each short-term or part-time. He's a senior now, hard working, from a not-wealthy family and had nearly no exposure to some jobs. He was curious about some, landed interns, and he'll know what the jobs are like now. Maybe he hated all three. Better to find out now than to study it for two years at college and realize you hate a field. Better to find out what the options are now than to love a field but hate all the jobs you can get with just a bachelor's and no PhD.