Working for Free: Are Unpaid Internships a Form of Exploitation?
By J.p. Lawrence
Four years ago, Kelsey Shell was just another college student with hopes and dreams and a love for photography. So in the springtime of her freshman year, the San Francisco native applied for an unpaid internship at her hometown art gallery.
She got the internship. She didn’t find it interesting.
“It was more of an office than I expected it to be,” Shell said. “In the gallery, I learned how to archive prints and deal with clients and buyers and the commerce end of photography, which does not interest me.”
“But I’ve learned that it doesn’t interest me,” Shell said, noting she learned many lessons she couldn’t learn in a classroom at Bard. “Learning how to print a completely professional archival print that sells for $50,000 is a very different experience than learning how to print in the digital lab at Bard,” she said.
Internships like Shell’s are seen as a way to get valuable experience in the career field the student is interested in, as way to get one’s foot in the door. But throughout the country, a debate is being waged over the very concept of interns: is the experience of dipping one’s toes into the water worth a summer’s worth or more of free labor?
Unpaid Labor
April Kinser runs Bard’s Career Development Office. She sees internships as helping young students, so full of potential and dreams, find their passion by having them actually find out what their dream jobs are like on a day-to-day basis.
“Employers want two to three jobs, internships on your resume,” said Kinser, “Getting a professional experience, whether a job, an internship, or a volunteer opportunity – all of those three could be an asset that could be a really important entry on your resume. And the really important thing is that student has acquired some skills that are relevant to the prospective employer down the line.”
Kinser schedules meetings with students to determine what internships are right for them, and what internships will lead to the jobs they want.
“Part of college is sorting through possibilities,” Kinser said, pointing to a computer with the CDO website loaded onto it, filled with jobs and programs. Some of the more prestigious internships have their applications due as early as November, but most internships are filled out in the spring, and many internships have an open and rolling application process.
For internship critic Ross Perlin, these long lists of “opportunities” are predatory. He says many internships are unpaid, and may in fact skirt minimum wage laws.
“A survey of more than 700 colleges by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 95 percent allowed the posting of unpaid internships in campus career centers and on college Web sites,” Perlin wrote in a New York Times op-ed April 2. “And of those colleges, only 30 percent required that their students obtain academic credit for those unpaid internships; the rest, evidently, were willing to overlook potential violations of labor law.”
The U.S. Department of Labor’s stance on work is workers should be paid, and if an internship doesn’t pass six legal benchmarks, it can’t be unpaid. Among those guidelines are directives that the internship must be for the benefit of the intern, that the employer providing the training must not gain any immediate advantage from the intern, and that the intern does not displace regular paid workers.
States such as California, Oregon and New York have launched investigations into companies on the legality of their interns, and Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times, as well, takes philosophical issue with for-profit companies benefiting from the contributions of free interns, especially when the interns themselves may not in fact be learning anything.
“When the jobs are mostly drudgery,” Greenhouse wrote, “it is clearly illegal not to pay interns."
Unfair playing fields
After sophomore year, Shell loaded up her blue Honda Civic with her record player, her records, her fancier clothing, high heels and two cameras, one medium format and one digital.
Her destination: New York City, where she had received an internship under a fashion photographer. Shell said she had no interest in being a fashion photographer, but she felt the job would teach her to become a better photographer.
As she drove down the Hudson River Valley, she was worried the job would be filled with shallow people, worried she would spend all her money and stay out late all the time.
This wasn’t like her first internship, when she lived at home; now she was across the country. Luckily, she had a wide network of friends in the city, and her bosses were nice, though demanding, and she said she learned a lot about photography and workplace expectations.
The internship, like all of Shell’s internships, was unpaid except for meals. Shell said she was lucky to have a family able to support her. “I wouldn’t necessarily get a paying job that would give me that little foot in the door,” Shell said.
For critics of internships, Shell’s observation has important socioeconomic ramifications. For middle-class students who have to pay for their own tuition or help their family with finances, spending a summer working for free is not as feasible as if would be for a student with deeper pockets; this situation, if extended, favors the already well to do and well connected.
“Many less affluent students say they cannot afford to spend their summers at unpaid internships,” wrote Greenhouse, “and in any case, they often do not have an uncle or family golf buddy who can connect them to a prestigious internship.”
Kinser, on the other hand, says there is little to no difference between unpaid and paid internships, saying the choice is simply one of personal finances.
“I really think that’s a pragmatic decision each student makes,” Kinser said. “Does the student need to make money? Because future employers don’t really weigh in whether it was paid or unpaid.”
While Kinser said students should go after their dream internships, the ones they are passionate about, she added internships usually don’t pay the student the transportation costs, which may be significant if the internship is in another state or country.
“If the family is able to support that, then the student is very lucky and has that as a possibility. But that doesn’t really impact what an employer is looking at,” Kinser said. “You can have a meaningful internship anywhere. You can have it in Red Hook, you can have it in Albany, you can have it in New York City.”
Life lessons and opportunities
After her junior year, Shell loaded up the Honda Civic once more, fuller this time, because she was going further than ever before, all the way to Minnesota, where she had landed a job under a photographer in Minneapolis.
“I didn’t know anybody. In New York, I had tons of friends from Bard, and I’m living with my best friend from home,” Shell said. “So I brought a lot of stuff to keep me entertained: a guitar, a ukulele, a computer, a lot of books, crossword puzzles.”
Shell said she didn’t know what to expect from Middle America, but over her stay there, she said she learned a lot, including how to deal with a boss.
“I definitively realized in the third go around to make a connection with your boss, get to know them, because you’re there to learn from them. I guess until then, I had been nervous about bothering the boss.”
Shell’s experience highlights a problem with Perlin and Greenhouse’s criticism of intern rights: most students accept working for free if it gives them a better chance of getting a job and a better understanding of what they want to do.
In fact, it was at the Minnesota State Fair where Shell decided on what she wanted to do for her senior project, and it was in Minnesota where she found out what she truly wanted to do. ”I got closer and closer to what I wanted to do after school: being, for lack of a better word, a fine art photographer,” Shell said. “That’s what I did in Minnesota, working for one and seeing how that really worked.”
What both critics and advocates of internships can agree on, is what Perlin described as an “uncritical internship fever on college campuses” is not ideal.
“The best you can do is to be informed when you make that decision. Of course what attracts you is the wow factor, but then you have to do your homework, too,” Kinser said, adding that students should do internships because they truly want to experience the job. “You shouldn’t be driven by the resume. The resume reflects what you’ve been driven by.”
“The most important thing is to be true to yourself, and to be honest about what really interests you,” Kinser said. “And our job, as career counselors, is to take that information and help you understand how that translates into a career path.”
Today, Shell is a graduating senior, proud of what she has learned through her internships.
“If I want to go to grad school, or work at another studio, I now have three really strong places that will write me a recommendation. And it’s just good to make connections in the photo world,” Shell said. “Strengthening your interpersonal skills and learning to adapt to a new place – that is experience that any one can benefit from.”