On my first day as an unpaid campaign intern, I was told, “We could pay you, or we could buy more TV ads, and you’re already here, so we’re going to buy more TV ads.”
While I may have been disappointed by the campaign’s attitude toward its priorities, I understand it. Campaigning is a lot like working for a government agency or non-profit organization: It’s more about ideological commitment than making money.
Campaigns regularly recruit volunteers — who are a substantial source of strength to a campaign as free labor — and rely on the dedication of professional campaign staffers willing to work long hours for low pay. The need of organizations, like political campaigns or charities, to have affordable but reliable employees raises the ethically complicated question of the role of an unpaid intern.
Money used to pay interns doesn’t come out of profits, but it means less money spent reaching voters or providing social services. People volunteer for these organizations all the time out of a sense of social responsibility, rather than out of a wish to help someone else make money. In this context, it’s possible to see interns not as employees, but as scheduled volunteers, donating their time to a cause. While it’s always better for interns to be paid, it’s understandable for some interns not to be.
In a for-profit context, the logic of unpaid internships is flat-out indefensible. Replace “buy more TV ads” with “make more money,” and you get the idea.
When she was acting director of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, Nancy Leppink told the New York Times, “If you’re a for-profit employer … there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law.”
The Labor Department has a six-part test regulating unpaid internships at for-profit companies. Think back to the last unpaid internship experience you heard about. Was the internship “similar to training which would be given in an educational environment?” Did the intern “displace regular employees” or do work companies would otherwise have to pay for? Most importantly: did the employer “derive immediate advantage” from the intern? Unless you answered yes, no and no, that intern should have been paid.
The “educational environment” standard is flawed: internships are supposed to simulate the working world, not the classroom. Employers should give students substantive assignments so that they learn, but regulating an internship’s substantiveness would be difficult. The point is that employers need to be transparent about what interns will spend their days doing, so that interns can take offers based on complete information.
The other two standards are crucially important and should be rigorously enforced by the Labor Department.
Unpaid internships are terrible for the labor market — they allow companies to replace temporary and entry-level workers with students who work for free. It doesn’t take an expert knowledge of economics to realize that this lowers pay for everyone. Given that wages for the bottom 80 percent of earners are at or below 2007 levels, according to the Economic Policy Institute, this is an especially pressing problem.
What’s more, paid internships are likely better than unpaid ones. According to Nathan Parcells, co-founder and chief marketing officer for the internship posting site InternMatch, paid internship positions garner an average of three times as many applicants as unpaid ones. This means employers get a more diverse applicant pool and a better fit. A good internship is a lot like a free sample in a grocery store: It doesn’t cost the company very much, and it lets the intern experience an industry as though it were a snack product.
On an individual level, unpaid internships can both provide real learning experiences and substantially boost resumes. But that’s exactly the problem. According to one study from market research firm Millenial Branding, 90 percent of employers expect college students to have completed at least one internship before graduation. This puts students from low-income backgrounds — who have the financial need to be paid over the summer — at a disadvantage when their resumes lack unpaid internships.
Some internships aren’t just unpaid — they’re also prohibitively expensive. I was lucky that I could pursue an unpaid internship in my chosen field while living at home. But many industries cluster geographically, such as publishing in New York City, film in Los Angeles or government in Washington, D.C. Most students can’t afford to pay rent in expensive cities with $0 income. This limits upward mobility and diversity in many of these fields, while providing comparatively more opportunities for students who can afford to pay their living expenses.
Executives in some industries, such as publishing, argue that tough economic times prevent them from paying their interns. But as long as a company is making a profit, it has enough money to afford paying its interns. It’s time to call unpaid internships at for-profit companies what they are: greedy and exploitative. It’s simply unethical to take a profit without paying all of your employees first; It goes against everything we believe about the value of work.
Some defenders of unpaid internships assert that they’re valid economic transactions, in which interns choose to work for experience and letters of recommendation. But let’s not forget we once allowed individuals to work 14-hour days for very low pay and no benefits. The value of work shouldn’t be determined by supply and demand alone — it ought to have some connection to the actual labor being done.
Fortunately, college grant programs that compensate unpaid interns, such as the University’s LINK program, help equal the internship playing field. President Christina Paxson’s P’19 strategic plan also includes the aim of providing every undergraduate on financial aid with at least one funded internship or research opportunity. But only students in non-profit sectors should need to apply for them. It’s time for the whole private sector, not just high-margin industries such as computer science and finance, to step up.
Duncan Weinstein ’17 would really like to be employed this summer — and paid.
He can be reached at duncan_weinstein@brown.edu.
