HPRgument Blog — April 4, 2010 1:14 pm

Are Interns SLAVES?

By Max Novendstern

Slaves?

No — that would be a tasteless joke. But they do perform a lot of work for free! As The New York Times explains in a piece that should have been, in retrospect, pretty obvious: Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say

“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with 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,” said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division.

Kathyrn Edwards, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of anew study on internships, told of a female intern who brought a sexual harassment complaint that was dismissed because the intern was not an employee.

“A serious problem surrounding unpaid interns is they are often not considered employees and therefore are not protected by employment discrimination laws,” she said.

I’m divided on this. On the one hand, the unpaid internship is pretty unseemly. You’ve got a system that (a) inflates the premium on pre-job work experience, increasing the opportunity costs for students pursuing other (potentially much more useful) things during their free time; that (b) regressively benefits rich students, or students with access to rich grant programs; and (c) tends to reduce available work for paid workers. The evasion of payment creates an effective subsidy for the inefficient, plantation-like company.

But on the other hand, creative, non-monetary economies are important. Consider, um,practically all of the internet: Wikipedia/Flickr/Blogspot/Twitter/Facebook. These are sites that tap into some mysterious mix of human urges — the need to express oneself, to gain status, to be less lonely — creating free culture and making our world a better place. Not all free labor is slavery; indeed, it’s opposite: it’s liberating.

So the original question begs another one: if interns are slaves, then what about HPR bloggers? If so, is our world better for that?

Photo credit: The Institute of Politics

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Author: Max Novendstern is the Editor in Chief of the Harvard Political Review. Originally from Westchester, NY, Max writes primarily about the American left, U.S. civic culture, and the meaning of social entrepreneurship. Both critically removed and “hyper engaged,” Max’s default mode is diatribe and his poet of choice is Walt Whitman. Before entering Harvard, he spent a year organizing a cooperative of artisans in the highlands of Peru and has since gone on to found an American community engagement and technology company called CommonPlace. Max concentrates in Social Studies and lives, proudly, in Currier House. He aspires to spend his life building “civic institutions” and making lots of mistakes.
  • http://www.hpronline.org Cathy Sun

    I might comment again on this later when it’s not 5am, but you made me think about some things with this post.

    As a higher percentage of people in America go to college and even grad school, the value of simply having a degree is declining. In order to get elite jobs and to differentiate themselves from others who also have degrees, people have to demonstrate not only academic ability but “job experience,” – aka increased and earlier specialization.

    I think in many other countries, college means vocational training. Here at Harvard, we’re busy filling our heads with “discourse” and “objectivity” while others are learning accounting and electrical wiring…and that’s just not enough on a resume anymore. Especially for those not lucky enough to be chosen for consulting, we have to demonstrate that we knew our path from day one and we’ve been pursuing it all along through related job experiences, paid or unpaid. So you’re right – unpaid internships do privilege the wealthy, but it’s just another fact of a competitive economy. I think that while it does suck to perform unpaid labor, the situation exists because students are getting something out of the deal as well and are willing to apply for these internships.

    Would they be better off doing something “creative”? Well, I dont know. There are unpaid internships in screenwriting, advertisement creation, fashion design, and museums too…

  • Jeffrey Kalmus

    Even though the existence of unpaid internships shows students’ lack of power (or, at least, inability to exercise it), I think that the lack of pay reminds the employer that the intern should receive nonmonetary benefits such as interesting projects and “skills” that he or she wouldn’t learn in the classroom–why else would the intern be there? If only there were a less costly reminder.

  • http://www.harvardpoliticalreview.com Alex

    How different is this from minimum-wage laws, which protect the working class at the expense of those even worse off than the working class? Workers whose labor is only worth, let’s say, $3 on the market have no job opportunities at all under federal minimum wage law. The worst off are penalized by minimum-wage laws with fewer employment opportunities.

    The same is probably true here. The intern’s labor is worth only X amount of non-monetary benefits on the market. With the restriction on unpaid internships, for-profit corporations cannot offer this intern employment.

    Also, if a wealthy student takes an unpaid journalism internship instead of competing for a $12,000 internship at JP Morgan (and maybe even paying for interview prep), is that really harming the poor, at the margin?

    The question of legality is obviously separate; the for-profit corporation’s unpaid internship seems to be a way of side-stepping minimum wage laws. If you still believe minimum-wage laws are a good idea, then you probably don’t like that.

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