Unpaid Internships Bridge on Slave Labor

After Craig's piece on youth unemployment this piece in the NYTimes struck me as interesting.

With unemployment on the rise the one thing that is also on the rise is internships for young people seeking experience but not getting paid for it. There is a fine line between unpaid internship and free labor. I'll admit I did unpaid internships while in college full time and working part time and many of the innovative online experiments I run in campaigns I am only able to do with the support of a staff of unpaid internships because campaigns don't want to pay their staff to try new things. So I rely very heavily on interns both for support staff and for new and sometimes crazy ideas.

The difference is that when I was an intern it eventually lead to a full time paid position, and when it comes time to hire staff on campaigns - all of the campaigns I work with offer positions to existing interns before we look outside the campaign. Plus, we ensure that our interns are getting some kind of credit for classes or at the very least it can go on their resume.

According to the piece in the NYTimes

"Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.

Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential future employer."

Campus Progress, Demos, and the Economic Policy Institute had a panel at the end of March to address the problem with unpaid internships. Their email announcing it read:

"Internships, once a rare bonus for students, have become a standard component of a college graduate's resume. Despite their near universality and their necessity for students entering the job market, the majority of internships at non-profits and in government are unpaid, putting many low- and middle-income students at a considerable disadvantage."

The groups have crafted a new legislative proposal to allow for some source of funding for low-income students who are seeking high quality public service internships that are often times unpaid. The proposal Paving the Way through Paid Internships: A Proposal to Expand Educational Opportunities for Low-Income College Students, says, among other things

"Considering the importance of internships when it comes to finding a full-time job after graduation, it is startling to see the large number of internships that go unpaid, tilting the scale in favor of students higher on the economic ladder," said researchers Kathryn Edwards and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, who developed the proposal..."

In an email to supporters, Demos says that internships are a requirement now more than ever with 84% of college students in four-year schools doing at least one of them before they graduate.

"Internships also provide an important foot in the door; 76.3% of employers report internships as the primary factor when deciding whether to hire recent graduates."

This makes it even more troubling for students who have a hard time going to school to begin with. So, basically, we make it hard for students to afford college, but now college isn't enough because.. hell... everyone has a BA now. Everyone was the president of some club or makes decent grades so internships are used to get that extra edge. But if you have to work full or part time and go to school when the hell do you have time for an internship? Its impossible, particularly internships that are a public service internships that aren't available at a distance and most times must be between 9-5.

Demos goes on to say low income students find it even harder to take internships away from home because they have to pay higher cost of housing or would have to leave their part-time jobs for a summer. So internships in the city where they would like to live after graduation are simply beyond their reach.

"With college costs drastically increasing and financial supports decreasing over the past 25 years, it has become more and more difficult for our nation's low-income young adults to access and complete college, perpetuating economic and racial inequalities and threatening our ability to compete with other highly educated nations in the 21st century global economy," said Nancy K. Cauthen, Director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos. "Internships are key to securing meaningful employment, and making them inaccessible to low-income students only further preserves existing inequalities by impeding the ability of these students to obtain a decent job and enter the middle-class. Policymakers need to take action to ensure that all students can access internship experiences. . .

"The cost of completing an unpaid internship is often too high for students without ample family financial resources, but the cost of not completing one can reduce students' future employment opportunities," said Edwards and Hertel-Fernandez. "This inequality ultimately reduces diversity in government hiring, making our democracy less vibrant."

This is a good first start - the Demos proposal and the crackdown on employers exploiting young people. In the end I think this is part of a larger problem with youth unemployment. As Craig said in his piece "One way to assist these young people is by passing legislation with comprehensive youth programs and public works projects included."

Another is to think more about long-term. As I said in a piece that covered the stimulus impacts on youth "this is kind of like putting a tourniquet on to stop the bleeding. You take it off and you're still going to bleed to death. We need an operation that will stop it long-term."