by Roger D. Hodge
The most telling characteristics of a society are often those that pass unnoticed. No one pays much attention to interns, for instance, yet the simple fact that at any given time hundreds of thousands of jobs are being performed for little or no pay is surely an important development in our political economy. Perhaps it says something about the value we place on work. According to Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation, the rise of this relatively new employment category, which is taken for granted by everyone from the antiunion governor of Wisconsin to the managers of Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, is a clear indication of the decline of labor rights in the United States.
Definitions of what exactly constitutes an internship vary widely. Are interns trainees, temps, apprentices, servants? Since the rules are vague or at least unenforced, employers simply fill in the blank with whatever tasks need doing, and interns often end up stuffing envelopes, fetching coffee, answering the phone, or collecting the boss’s dry cleaning. Not all their work is trivial, of course, and some internships offer useful training, but it is safe to say that vast numbers of interns are condemned to performing the mundane, vaguely humiliating chores that are the necessary if despised conditions of life in the white-collar world of work to which so many young people aspire. Far from providing an educational benefit or vocational training, internships have simply become, for many businesses, a convenient means of minimizing labor costs.
The College Employment Research Institute estimates that 75 percent of college students do at least one internship before graduation. The summer and part-time jobs that once occupied our otherwise idle youth have gone the way of the typewriter; nowadays, interns are everywhere, in publishing, merchandising, insurance, finance, consulting, law, engineering, and the defense industry. It seems that most large corporations pay their interns, but the number of unpaid jobs in the economy is booming. A recent article in Fortune magazine suggests that working for free might even be the “new normal,” a “wave of the future in human resources.” Based on his reporting, Perlin estimates that one to two million Americans work as interns every year, though he suspects that this number might be on the low end. Most interns are students or recent graduates, and large numbers, perhaps 50 percent overall, work for free. Worse, many actually pay tuition for the privilege of working, as a result of the common misconception on the part of both universities and employers that the bestowal of academic credit somehow nullifies the strictures of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, which prohibits uncompensated labor except under carefully defined circumstances. Academic programs, both undergraduate and graduate, have increasingly adopted the internship as a degree requirement. Such requirements foster an economy of scarcity among the most prestigious internship programs, which like everything else in our capitalist democracy increasingly resemble commodities. Highly coveted internships at places like Vogue magazine have recently been auctioned off for as much as $42,500; Perlin notes the irony that this obscene sum was raised for the benefit of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. Apparently, no one was troubled by the contradiction.
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The most telling characteristics of a society are often those that pass unnoticed. No one pays much attention to interns, for instance, yet the simple fact that at any given time hundreds of thousands of jobs are being performed for little or no pay is surely an important development in our political economy. Perhaps it says something about the value we place on work. According to Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation, the rise of this relatively new employment category, which is taken for granted by everyone from the antiunion governor of Wisconsin to the managers of Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, is a clear indication of the decline of labor rights in the United States.
Definitions of what exactly constitutes an internship vary widely. Are interns trainees, temps, apprentices, servants? Since the rules are vague or at least unenforced, employers simply fill in the blank with whatever tasks need doing, and interns often end up stuffing envelopes, fetching coffee, answering the phone, or collecting the boss’s dry cleaning. Not all their work is trivial, of course, and some internships offer useful training, but it is safe to say that vast numbers of interns are condemned to performing the mundane, vaguely humiliating chores that are the necessary if despised conditions of life in the white-collar world of work to which so many young people aspire. Far from providing an educational benefit or vocational training, internships have simply become, for many businesses, a convenient means of minimizing labor costs. The College Employment Research Institute estimates that 75 percent of college students do at least one internship before graduation. The summer and part-time jobs that once occupied our otherwise idle youth have gone the way of the typewriter; nowadays, interns are everywhere, in publishing, merchandising, insurance, finance, consulting, law, engineering, and the defense industry. It seems that most large corporations pay their interns, but the number of unpaid jobs in the economy is booming. A recent article in Fortune magazine suggests that working for free might even be the “new normal,” a “wave of the future in human resources.” Based on his reporting, Perlin estimates that one to two million Americans work as interns every year, though he suspects that this number might be on the low end. Most interns are students or recent graduates, and large numbers, perhaps 50 percent overall, work for free. Worse, many actually pay tuition for the privilege of working, as a result of the common misconception on the part of both universities and employers that the bestowal of academic credit somehow nullifies the strictures of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, which prohibits uncompensated labor except under carefully defined circumstances. Academic programs, both undergraduate and graduate, have increasingly adopted the internship as a degree requirement. Such requirements foster an economy of scarcity among the most prestigious internship programs, which like everything else in our capitalist democracy increasingly resemble commodities. Highly coveted internships at places like Vogue magazine have recently been auctioned off for as much as $42,500; Perlin notes the irony that this obscene sum was raised for the benefit of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. Apparently, no one was troubled by the contradiction.
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