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The Death of the Unpaid Internship

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Candles, Jun 17, 2013.

  1. sisterkathlouise

    sisterkathlouise
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    I am currently interning at a smallish social service agency. My internship lasts for two semesters, which means paying for two 6 credit hour classes in exchange for well over 400 hours of work. I have zero chance of being hired at the agency because they've recently had to close one of their locations and lay off 3 employees. When I started, all of the interns who had already been there for a semester complained about the lack of opportunities to learn and practice. All that being said, I've managed to have an incredibly valuable experience.

    I constantly looked for things to do, made opportunities for myself and showed my superiors that I was capable of doing more, and doing it independently. So now I have graduate students shadowing me, my supervisors come to me to ask about area resources, and I know that I will have two great letters of recommendation and a whole agency full of references. I've worked really hard and learned a ton, and I cannot stress enough how important it is to advocate for yourself in an (unpaid) internship position. If you have to intern for your program and you get placed with someone who just wants you to make coffee and answer the phone, demand they give you a valuable experience. You might have to be a pain in the ass in the beginning, but by the end of your internship you'll be doing more valuable work for your supervisors and (theoretically) they'll appreciate that.
     
  2. scotchcrotch

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    As someone who has hired dozens of people, I never understood the relationship companies have with unpaid interns.

    What are you going to do if the unpaid intern decides to skip Friday for a 3 day weekend? Tell them not to work for free the following week? The whole dynamic between employer and employee is based on incentives and productivity.

    Hell, even if you do find some minions to push some paperwork for free, is it worth the time and energy spent?



    From my standpoint, turnover is much more costly and time consuming than paying someone hourly.
     
  3. ssycko

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    The problem is that in the film industry, these internships are sold as "the way" to get contacts to get jobs, and the unpaid interns eat that shit up. There's rarely a chance that they won't show up, because they're worried that if they don't they'll be blacklisted (as if that list actually exists).

    They don't realize that there are better ways of both learning more and getting more, paying jobs.
     
  4. NotaPharmacist

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    I looked up the court decision on the Fox Searchlight because I just wrote about it. The decision on Fox Searchlight was to grant class certification for anyone of the 100 interns who wanted to the two that brought the suit. It's likely that there will be a settlement but it's not guaranteed.

    The problem that is going to occur is that both this and a similar case regarding Hearst Magazines both occurred in the Southern District of New York. Hearst won a victory because the judge in that case stated that there was some "modicum of training," but more importantly that the various magazine interns' duties were too disparate for him to rule on a common legal question. In the Black Swan case, the judge said that the Fox Searchlight experience wasn't anything a paid employee wouldn't come across.

    The biggest standard from NY (but basically the same thing in federal regulations) is this: "The activities of trainees or students do not provide an immediate advantage to the employer. On occasion, operations may actually be impeded." So basically every media outlet that wants to give you "exposure" but generates ad revenue on an article, etc. would struggle to meet that criteria. Same with unpaid sales/marketing internships.

    I cannot imagine anyone who likes capitalism who would enjoy the unpaid internship business model. If success depends on cutting the costs of x number of employees per semester, that's not really going to be a thriving business on a long-term basis. Let alone the fact that it fucks kids who can't afford to live while they're doing unpaid internships, or who are paying double by losing wages AND paying their college for the opportunity to do so for course credit. That's monstrous.
     
  5. Rob4Broncos

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    How timely. Umair Haque retweeted this article about the "prestige economy" of internships. It's very fascinating and equally disheartening. Some highlights:

    Here's the full series of tweets that Sarah Kendzior posted on her blog:

     
  6. The Village Idiot

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    Couldn't agree with this more. I still look at job listings for lawyers in my area, and the amount of 'experience internships' for BARRED attorneys is fucking unbelievable. I get e-mails for contract positions on a monthly basis, with ads for 'training' for software so I can be 'qualified' to review documents in a basement for as little as $20 an hour. While $20 an hour SOUNDS like a lot, when you've dumped over 100K into an education, that's not getting the job done.

    What it comes down to, and if this is too political mods, delete. We (as a society) made a choice starting in 1978 that we would favor the rich in this country. You know, the 'job creators.' Systematically, unions were dismantled, taxes were slashed on the job creators (while steadily rising for the lower and middle class), educational costs have skyrocketed, and wages have been kept low through the illusory promise of the good of labor globilization.

    There are a few studies I've seen out there that suggest that Americans work more hours than most, if not all, Western style democracies, but receive far less. We get fewer vacations, fewer benefits, and have the spectre of joblessness and homelessness hanging above our collective heads on a daily basis.

    More people in America have college degrees than ever before. If education is the answer, I'd hate to see the non-answer.

    Unpaid internships are constantly recommended on job sites. It's absolutely ludicrous to me that in order to even be considered for a job nowadays you have to go an average of $30 K in debt for college, then 'intern' at several jobs for a couple of years just to be considered for an entry level 35K job a year when you're 'educated' and 26 years old.

    While I believe that most Americans are hard workers, I am sure that we are the most gullible. I have no other way to explain the absolute ridiculousness of the modern American Employment Model in the country.

    Apparently, we, the middle and lower class, enjoy making the rich even richer.

    Because otherwise, none of this makes any sense whatsoever.
     
  7. Kampf Trinker

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    Not that this has much to do with my own meandering career pitfalls, but just to elucidate the point Cowbell is making:

    I worked two internships while I was in college. The first was a paid 'management' internship where I worked at most 2 hours of my 9 hour shifts in quality control. It was at a pork processing plant, paid well for a summer job, and reflected little to no value on my resume. The second was an unpaid internship at a company that designs labels for product packaging. My job was to take the template for their company website, for which the html was already written, and fill in all the text, images, and product promotion. It was a bit surreal as this places a great deal of trust in someone who has never worked at the company and isn't even on payroll. Most of my coworkers were agitable, and had no interest in answering the questions of some college student who they only saw as an interruption to their work. I filled out part of the website, but as time went on I needed a summer job that did pay(while I was taking summer classes), and had neither the time nor energy to fuck around in a snobbish work environment that gave me zero compensation. So I left and took on a remodeling job at Wal-mart for the rest of the summer. Since I didn't finish the website and left them hanging in the wind I can't use that internship as a reference, even though that experience is much more desirable to employers than any other job I worked while in college.
    Regarding the stratification you're referring to, I think it also deals with the interviewing process and the propensity of employers to hire the candidates they more easily relate towards. When I applied at Evaluation Solutions the interviewer was a middle class white woman who shared a similar upbringing to my own, as well as my polite mid-western vernacular and the sort of cheesy(not funny) jokes you share when meeting strangers. When I walked out there was a black kid sitting in the waiting room, and I knew in a heartbeat the he wasn't going to get hired and I was. Sure enough I got the phone call 30 minutes later notifying me to start Monday, and when I showed up for work he was no where to be seen. The joke was on me though, because while that job paid well for a recent college grad from a b state school (60k with benefits, pay raises after the first few months and sound advancement opportunities) that place was a fucking nightmare of neurotic psychosis and I promptly quit.
    All internships should be paid to not only level the playing field for kids in poor income brackets, but so those companies can draw on the best candidates available to fill those positions. Corporate America however is cheap and wanton, and if they can get away with not paying interns while losing no perceivable competitive edge you better believe they're going to tighten the purse strings.
     
  8. Aetius

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    That's becuase in several states (including California) by law they have to be.

    The baby boomers would sell their own children's organs if they could find a loophole to allow it.
     
  9. bewildered

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    Reading this reminded me of a conversation I had with my aunt over Christmas. Just a little background: she is 74, married to a retired Exxon executive in Texas (in a place where the economy in general is better than nearly anywhere else in the country right now), and never really had to work much in her life. I suspect that they are quite easily multi-millionaires. They live on a golf course and just do whatever the fuck they want.

    While discussing my inability to find a job here in Hawaii (I mentioned the awful job market and general hesitation of locals to hire me--a whitey affiliated with the military), it all came down to it being my fault for pretty much the above quoted reasons. I was so mad I saw red. I eventually just said Ok and stopped talking. I could tell she didn't mean to make me upset but every single factual point I made, she had a retort, and it was always because of a flaw that I have.
     
  10. Rob4Broncos

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    Sounds familiar.

    Semi-related to this thread, here's the greatest run-on sentence in the history of the English language, once again by Umair Haque. It comes from an article - the URL tag doesn't seem to work with this one: blogs.hbr.org/haque/2013/06/the_great_dereliction.html - that he wrote a few days ago about the failure of today's so-called "leaders." It has nothing to do with internships, but I have no doubt that the two are indirectly related.

    But mostly, I just wanted to share this with you guys, and this seems like the most appropriate thread for doing so.

     
  11. LongVin

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    I used to work for a politician where we were required throughout the year to take interns in from either high school doing their community service time required for high school graduation or from college who wanted experience. In short I found the whole system to be worthless for a few reasons.

    1. We didn't have enough work for them and so the only jobs they got were things we didn't want to do. "We got 500 fliers delivered that need to be put in people's doors? Send the interns out." At one end they didn't get any experience in anything relevant. At the other end is other paid employees would abuse them to just keep them their for their allotted time. Normally, if I had a few in the office and there was no work to do I would tell them to hang out for 30 minutes to an hour and then would just sign off on their papers and send them home. Other employees would decide to "make work" for them. Make work them usually resulted in some asshat taking all the files out of a drawer throw them on the table and telling the interns to "Put it back in the drawer in alphabetical order" I saw that happened numerous times.

    2. Teaching an intern took way too much time and would just slow down the job. For whatever reason the rules we had seriously limited what interns were allowed to do, they could answer phones, but couldn't file complaints(i.e. the only point of answering calls). Basically, they were only allowed to file, get signatures(sometimes), prepare envelopes, or do surveys on the phone. Usually, by the time they are taught how to do this reasonably well their few months with us were up and the whole process started again. So while in theory having someone there helping us was supposed to speed up the job in slowed us down, especially when certain employees decided to assert their power complexes and make the interns redo over all the work to prove a point. Oh, also we couldn't leave an intern alone in the office or at the table. So it essentially handicapped you from doing your job if you had to run out real quick for anything.

    3. Lack of reliability and passing the blame. In general this wasn't a problem. Most people showed up when they were supposed to show up. Occasionally, we had a few people who wouldn't show up when they said they would. Personally, I didn't care, real life happens. Some of the other employees were so anal retentive about it though they would freak out and demand to know where the interns were and try to force them to come. They would threaten the interns with not signing off on their papers and then would blame whoever was officially in charge of those interns, like we are able to force them to do anything.
     
  12. caseykasem

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    I have had three unpaid internships. I recieved college credit for one and law school credit for another. The first one I had was in high school at a sports performance training center in Colorado which also did physical therapy. We worked with USA Rugby, Colorado Rapids, the Denver Broncos, etc. I did it to get some experience and get to know some people in the business, as I wanted to go to physical therapy school. This was a great experience but because of my change in career path has done little to help me but has come up in several interviews, as I was later hired there and worked there throughout college. There were several interns that came and went throughout my time there and they each received college credit. The interns were always a hastle, some even got fired because they were so terrible. Only three interns ever got a job with us and there are very few that I would've liked to hire.

    The next unpaid internship I had was in between my junior and senior years of college. I worked a boutique law firm that my ex-girlfriend's dad helped set me up with. I received college credit, got some experience, and received letters of recommendation for law school. I wasn't particularly close to any professors in college so working for free and recieving credit was worth it just to receive letters of recommendation. It was an easy job, I had a flexible schedule, and I really enjoyed working for them.

    The last unpaid internship I had was last summer while working for a prosecutor's office in my hometown. I took that job beause my grades were not strong enough for a paid internship and generally, unless you are in the top 20% of you class, you will not get a paid internship after your first year of law school, except if you're attending one of the elite law schools. The majority of my class did not have a paid job the summer after first year. It's insane what some people want in order for you to work for free.

    As the village idiot noted, it is crazy how much experience some law firms or jobs require. I know people who are in between their 2nd and 3rd year of law school who have unpaid internships during the day and work at wal mart at night to make ends meet. Although I'm not making the $1,700-$2,000/week that the big firms pay around here, I am fortunate to have the paid internship I do have with the legal division of a large state agency. I have found that outside of the biggest firms in the city, midsize and small firms pay, on average, $12/hr. to their second year interns. The legal industry is fucked up and people are willing to take anything to get experience. Sometimes it's worth it, as it could lead to a good job. However, many times, interns are just part of the machine and a new batch of free labor comes in the next summer and the employer has no intention of hiring any of the interns post-graduation.