Unpaid Internships: Bad for Students, Bad for Workers, Bad for Society

Do we have a good economic narrative for unpaid internships outside of naturally abusive talent driven industries (music, film, journalism)?

Do internships just fall in this hole where you'd like to have an office wench but can't quite justify it in a budget, or is it entirely a made up social convention where older generations are extracting rents from new graduates?

At any rate, the effect seems pretty clear to me: unpaid internships are huge drivers of inequality. They obviously limit opportunities for social mobility towards people that can be subsidized, or otherwise have access to liquidity. There's something really insidious about pushing people away from increasingly wide classes of cushy jobs they're otherwise perfectly capable of performing.

Startups: pay your (non technical) interns minimum wage, at least. It makes me kind enraged to see this start to happen in our industry.

I don't buy the argument that unpaid internships are immoral because they disadvantage the underprivileged. Higher education systematically disadvantages the underprivileged, especially at US tuition rates. Does that make going to Harvard unethical? There is clearly a supply/demand mismatch in some industries, and unpaid internships are a symptom, not the cause.

I get defensive when the issue of unpaid internships comes up because I did an unpaid internship in High School, learned a hell of a lot, and was able to use it to gain well-paid internships throughout college.

Unpaid internships seem to be rare for programmers...

- Programmers of any sort who can get the job done in demand. There are more people who want to pay them than programmers available.

- Even inexperienced programmers add value - sometimes a tremendous amount of value. It's not too hard to find a non-critical, short term project that would still be very useful, and the intern starts adding value on day one. So employers are less likely to "do without" if it turns out they have to pay.

- Software interns have a better unpaid internship than the one you're offering - founding their own company. If a recent grad with programming ability is getting outside financial help (the kind that a parent might give to a recent grad doing an unpaid internship in the entertainment industry), that programmer can just try creating an app and seeing how to turn it into something financially viable. They might fail (they probably will fail), but will the experience be worse than a year of not getting paid at a bigco? (It depends, but a lot of companies in high tech would be impressed with someone who took a real crack at creating a financially viable product).

I do occasionally see postings for unpaid cs/engineering internships, posted on campus bulletin boards. They are almost never from actual, high tech companies. These postings generally come from industries accustomed to getting the free interns (publishing, fashion, and so forth) - you know "gain valuable industry experience by writing extenstions in python for our CMS). It feels good to see these posts go up later offering a bit of pay (though still generally much lower than the interns could get elsewhere).

Why should students who aren't able to get paid internships be denied the right to have an unpaid internship? I would not be where I am today were it not for unpaid internships.

Some people would be helped by mandating all internships be paid, but these are not the people who need the most help. The people who need the most help are the ones that would be cut off from any chance at early work experience by such a system.

The idea of everyone having a paid internship is nice, but many places will simply stop offering them if unpaid interns aren't an option.

Also, no one is forcing these students to work anywhere. Yes, market forces drive them towards an internship, but there are many internships in the market.

If unpaid internships were banned or otherwise made illegal, companies could still bring in students as volunteers, which are unpaid. They would still get the same experience and be in exactly the same position, except now they are no longer eligible for college credit and certain legal protections. How is that a better system?

Are there any compelling arguments why unpaid internships should be made illegal? If not illegal, then how should/could they be reformed?

I got paid during my internship and when I later started a company we always paid our interns.

I think as a general rule internships should be paid simply because if the company can't afford to hire an intern then they shouldn't be having one in the first place.

I realize it's a nice way to get some help for your struggling business and if someone really want to get in to a place that isn't looking for interns then it makes some sense.

Organisations have decided that this specific set of internships aren't worth paying a wage for. Workers have decided that they are worth their time, for the experience/foot in the door they gain.

If you ban unpaid internships, companies won't offer the positions anymore (as they have decided their value is zero), which means people seeking them won't be able to obtain them.

Sounds like everyone would actually be worse-off.

This is odd: just today I've posted our internship projects and they are all for paid positions.

And actually nowadays all students are forced by the University to have a short internship and it doesn't have to include a wage!

But I've decided to pay the students anyhow for 2 simple reasons:

* I want good students to apply. We are a small company.

* I want students to care more about the internship than just showing up and do the minimum.

Are internships with The Atlantic paid or unpaid?

Edit: According to this article: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/04/06/atlantic-publisher-ta... all atlantic interns are paid.

Feel free to comment, I want to hear what other people think on this issue.

I think there is nothing inherently wrong with unpaid internships. If the market price for your work is low enough to only compensate experience gained, that's perfectly fine. What's wrong with the system are more generalize than that, and there are two problems that causes it. I would break it down to A) industrial organizational problem and B) market downturn (and to an extent upturn) + inefficiency and lagging effects.

Part A is more about the over abundance of certain firms in the market supply-demand that makes it very difficult to pay interns. Since I've never worked as a unpaid-intern before (it might happen soon though :/), correct me if I'm wrong, but most of them are either in marketing, legal assistant positions, or journalism. Marketing firms that do not offer paid internships are usually small agencies that are barely able to survive on their own; same thing is true with journalism; the whole legal market has wage flooring that artificially reduces the supply of laws and therefore law firms. It seems to me that these industries needs to better allocate and either become more competitive via innovation, and people going into those industry might want to reconsider their path.

Part B is more on the fact that labor market is inherently inefficient, and in a recession, it exaggerates the underlining problem in part A. This is why we are starting to see more unpaid internship instead of flat wage cuts.

I was an unpaid intern at a lobbying office last summer and will be an unpaid congressional intern this summer (both DC). However, my college has given me a stipend (sort of merit based) so I can end up net positive on the summer.

I certainly wouldn't be able to afford this if it weren't for the stipend (though I'd probably do it for less and just break even or slightly negative). The biggest thing that I think is different for my intern experience from what I hear about the horrors about unpaid interns is that I get money like a paid intern, but have the expectations of an unpaid intern. The people I work for aren't paying me, so they can't expect too much labor out of me. As far as they're concerned, their payment is in experience, so I basically got free reign to do (or watch other people do) many things that might not be productive, but I found interesting. The anecdotal evidence of my friends with paid positions had to really earn their pay and don't have anywhere near the freedom that I did. It's plausible that I just found a good internship last summer (no fetching coffee), but I would say that I personally benefited from being paid by my college and not my employer.

As a Junior who is going to be interning with undisclosed large internet company this summer, I think that much of the problem and reason for unpaid internships is that there are few jobs in the industry of choice for these interns. Being a double Major in Computer Science and Business Economics I can clearly see the economic forces at play(and really anyone should). These unpaid positions are springing up in industries that are often shrinking, or do not require overly talented skill sets to operate in. It's unfortunate for the workers, and I'd like to say they should be standing up and saying "no", but given the realities of their industries it may sadly be in their best interests to work for free.

Had they simply looked ahead when enrolling in college, they could have seen that majoring in something like journalism, while enjoyable would lead to brutal competition and low wages. This isn't a situation all interns face, when those in finance, computers, and a few other majors are capable of demanding $25-$35k of compensation for 3 months of a summer internship, it becomes clear this is problem affecting only some industries.

is this really an issue in the tech industry? I'm studying in austria, absolved an internship in germany, got paid quite well and so did all my fellow students (internships all over europe, US, australia).

In most cases, an unpaid internship is probably a bad idea. But individuals should be making that choice based on their unique set of circumstances and goals. Individuals should be free to make a choice whether or not the experience they gain, the connections they make, the resume blurb, and whether getting their foot in the door is worth more to them than their free labor. In most cases its probably a bad idea, but in some cases some people might see the opportunity as worth their effort.

IMO, the issue here is that labor laws prevent companies from offering unpaid internships that involve something that a business can actually benefit from or that can conceivably displace a paid employee. Ostensibly created to prevent exploitation, these labor laws actually create exploitation by effectively forcing an unpaid internship to be an exercise in busy work for any company that actually follows the law.

One premise of this article is faulty. They presume that you can only accept an unpaid internship if you're from a wealthy / privileged family or whatever. But that's not true. There's no particular reason you couldn't, say, work an unpaid internship 8 hours during the day, and work a second job at night, busing tables, washing dishes, working as a barista at Starbucks, or whatever. Plenty of people already work 2 jobs to make ends meet, so a college age kid with (hopefully) minimal living expenses could very likely manage this.

Note that I'm talking summer internship, when school is out, of course. I'm not proposing one should go to school, work a real job and work an internship.

This is also not to refute the idea that unpaid internships may be bad for other reasons... I'm just arguing against the idea that they're bad because they are only available to the children of the privileged.

More interesting than the topic I think is their method of creating three daily articles. Ask for comments, sort the comments into pros and cons, then publish each on subsequent days with minimal commentary, and no pay offered to the people who actually crowdsourced the writing of the article.

Who gives a crap? Honestly: If you do not like the idea of being an unpaid intern, then don't be one.

What's not a worthwhile opportunity for you might be an opportunity to someone else.

Am I missing something? Seems like unpaid internships affect me and my job/economy as much as someone else eating a donut affects my weight.