02 June 2006 Blog Home : June 2006 : Permalink
In this way, unpaid interns are like illegal immigrants. They create an oversupply of people willing to work for low wages, or in the case of interns, literally nothing. Moreover, a recent survey by Britain's National Union of Journalists found that an influx of unpaid graduates kept wages down and patched up the gaps left by job cuts.
There may be more subtle effects as well. In an information economy, productivity is based on the best people finding the jobs best suited for their talents, and interns interfere with this cultural capitalism. They fly in the face of meritocracy — you must be rich enough to work without pay to get your foot in the door. And they enhance the power of social connections over ability to match people with desirable careers. A 2004 study of business graduates at a large mid-Atlantic university found that the completion of an internship helped people find jobs faster but didn't increase their confidence that those jobs were a good fit.
Although the conclusion makes sense and somewhat undercuts the rest of the moanA 1998 survey of nearly 700 employers by the Institute on Education and the Economy at Columbia University's Teachers College found: "Compared to unpaid internships, paid placements are strongest on all measures of internship quality. The quality measures are also higher for those firms who intend to hire their interns." This shouldn't be too surprising — getting hired and getting paid are what work, in the real world, is all about.
Majikthise now has a follow up post with a series of links mostly rebutting the underlying premises of the editorial. As a free marketeer I have read the lot with amazement.The fact that so many progressive organizations rely on unpaid interns is especially troubling. These organizations should embrace a living wage for interns and entry-level staffers as a matter of principle.
First off, it's hypocritical for progressive groups to preach social change but practice exclusion. Moreover, elitist recruiting strategies are short-sighted if your goal is helping the disadvantaged. What percentage of people who write white papers on the welfare system have ever been on welfare? I'm not saying that you need personal experience in order to write policy. However, fresh ideas and diverse perspectives are the lifeblood of progressive policy and alternative media. So, progressive groups have a strong long-term incentive to recruit from a broad cross-section of society.
It's easy to say that a non-profit can't afford to pay its interns. Money will always be tight, but that fact of life never absolves decision-makers of responsibility for setting priorities. Progressive organizations should embrace living wages for interns and entry-level staff a goal, for their own good.
I agree with the whole of this and I hate the hypocrisy of it; "Progressive" non-profits who offer unpaid internships are in fact exploiting their workers in precisely the way that they get upset about when evil capitalists do the same thing. If anyone wonders why many of the downtrodden seem to prefer "non-progressive" alternatives such as local churches then this could well be why. It is very hard to identify the real problems of the downtrodden if you have never had to struggle.