Over the past few years, unpaid internships have popped up
everywhere, often seemingly replacing what had previously been jobs that adult
people with paid vacations did. Plenty of people have gone into great detail
about how unpaid internships are exploitative and usually
don’t lead to jobs, but let’s say they do. If working for free is a
requirement to get a job that pays, I’ll make the case that that arrangement is
even worse.
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| My compensation is a thing I also have to pay for? Super cool, bro! |
To start, there’s the obviously exploitative nature of the
internship. At its very best, you are learning a skill in much the same way
that an indentured servant in a colonial print shop would. Sure, at the end you
will have the skillset to open your own shop (if you can somehow acquire the capital after not working for so long. Maybe you can borrow $20,000 from your parents?), but in the meantime, your boss
made a bunch of profit having you do a bunch of stuff he either a. should have
been able to pay you at least minimum wage for, or b. couldn’t afford to pay
you minimum wage for because his business model doesn’t bring in enough profit for
the required labor. At worst (and I’ve seen this done many times) someone doesn’t
want to do something in an office or a “start-up,” and so they say “we can just
get an intern for that.” The company fills out some paper work, the intern
packs and sends mailers or orders, and at the end, they both lie to a university
and pretend the kid learned something about marketing.
