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

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.

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.

From what I hear unpaid internships are common for law students as well. It would be interesting to do more research on this, but I suspect unpaid internships happen in any field that has a surplus of workers. The tech industry doesn't have this problem so most internships are paid.

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.

"... unpaid internships are huge drivers of inequality."

I believe that they can be, but as someone who actually had an unpaid intern (and who eventually got said intern a job at the company where we were working), let me make a case that they do not have to be exploitative.

I personally enjoy teaching, and have taught at two different universities. In addition to simply being a rewarding thing to do, it is a good way to get even better at whatever you are teaching.

So when I was the production manager in charge of making a bunch of marketing sites for small insurance agencies, I called up one of the local universities. They were quite happy (after some conversations with their faculty) to send me a student who was getting ready to graduate and who was interested in creating content for the web.

I didn't expect the intern to get any actual work done, just to kind of try and work through some of the projects that we were doing. The work that I was giving him was pretty much the same work that the paid staff were getting, and although we actually did end up using elements of his designs he was much slower and had a much smaller skill set than someone I would actually hire.

However, after a semester of working with us, his markup, scripting, and associated skills were a lot better. In addition to his own efforts, I spent time structuring his work assignments in ways that built from one topic to the next, and was available to critique his work in ways that he found useful.

So, this relationship was mutually beneficial: he is more skilled than he was, has at least some work experience to put down (other than food service), he received course credit (IIRC), and got a picture of what the inside of that kind of agency looks like.

For our part, we got a very small amount of marginal work, and for my personal part I improved my own scripting and CSS skills, in addition to simply enjoying working with folks who are learning.

Now, if we were just trying to fill a minimally skilled position with someone who was an employee and skim by calling them an "intern" instead of "an exploited worker", that would be different.

But I believe it is possible (though perhaps not likely) that unpaid, non-exploitative internship relationships can exist.