Asa college student in the Paleolithic age (late 1980s to early 1990s), I remember how professors and employers touted internships as a good way to gain valuable work experience. I remember being excited at the prospect of learning the ropes at a well- known organization.
How Unpaid Internships Are Classist
However, as early as my sophomore year, I realized that I couldn’t entertain the thought of applying to many internships because they were unpaid. Although a loan taken out by my parents made it possible for me to even set foot in college, they only borrowed enough to cover tuition.
While the college had dorms, I never lived in them because that would have cost us more money. So, I lived at home. I worked several different part-time jobs during my entire college career to pay for books, meals, and entertainment. Going into even more debt to do an unpaid internship didn’t make sense to me or my parents.
And that is the crux of the problem with unpaid internships. While a college education is regarded as an equalizer, unpaid internships shatter that notion. They wind up perpetuating income inequality because lower-income students as well as many BIPOC students can’t take advantage of them. So, who’s most likely to partake in them? You guessed it. Well-to-do white kids.
On one level, having young people do labor for free is exploitative and distasteful. Any work performed by anyone deserves to be compensated fairly. But I notice a double standard in how unpaid internships are regarded in our society as opposed to other kinds of free labor. Rich white kids doing unpaid labor is a “learning experience.” Unpaid labor performed by prisoners, or in the case of my ancestors, the enslaved, is considered lowly and demeaning. “Those” people performing unpaid labor don’t deserve better.
The inequality that unpaid internships reinforce isn’t limited to just the internships themselves. They serve as a financial barrier to upward mobility and future earning power for lower-income students as they provide a rich network of contacts that can be useful to students after they graduate.
In the end, students who can partake in unpaid internships may obtain opportunities throughout their working lives that are closed to more disadvantaged students. In my experience, I know of professional opportunities that weren’t extended to me because I lacked the connections necessary to get ahead by the misfortune of being born Black and working-class.
Some may ask if unpaid internships are even legal. In the United States, they are if they meet certain criteria under the Fair Labor Act. However, because the guidelines for unpaid internships are vague and left open to interpretation, it enables employers to take advantage of students. For instance, in 2013, a district court case against Searchlight Pictures ruled that their unpaid internship program violated federal worker laws as the unpaid interns were not the primary beneficiaries of the internship and were acting as de facto employees.
How Unpaid Internships Create Barriers For Many Students
Additionally, in certain fields, unpaid internships may be required to even get the degree. This partially explains why BIPOC don’t major in certain subjects in large numbers due to their being less likely to have the ability to work for free. For instance, to get a degree in international relations or a similarly named degree, an internship at the United Nations is coveted by students. However, the UN does not pay its interns and its headquarters are in New York City, which is not a cheap city.
So, those who do an internship there must do unpaid labor while figuring out how to eat and obtain a roof over their heads while staying in an expensive city. Is it little wonder that only well-to-do kids that have parents that can cover their bills can take advantage of such an opportunity?
It would have been challenging for me and I was born and raised in New York City. Although I lived at home with my parents, by the time I reached adulthood, they expected me to cover my own expenses. They would have been unable or unwilling to pay for my lunches, cover my transportation costs to commute to and from the UN, nor any other incidental expense I had. Those expenses required me to work to pay for them myself. This likely would have left me little choice but to work at night or on weekends, leaving me no time to socialize as internships at the UN are during business hours on weekdays.
Conclusion
In conclusion, employers have no business offering internships to students unless they can pay them. And universities shouldn’t offer unpaid internships to students unless they can set aside funds for disadvantaged students to use in lieu of the wages they are forsaking by partaking in them. Unpaid internships are classist, and by extension, are racist as well. It’s time they were abolished.
©Vena Moore 2022
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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