Corby Burger is a junior Prindle intern
from New Albany, Indiana.
As any college student knows too well, cold weather signals the beginning of an annual rat race that infiltrates the university experience – internship application season. Over the next few months students will be scrambling for a summer job, pleading for nepotism from friends and family, searching the web for any morsel of opportunity or cold calling alumni in a last ditch email barrage of desperation, all in an attempt to lockdown the all-important internship offer.
The yearly number of unpaid internships is between 500,000 and one million, and employers across the nation are more than willing to turn a student’s ambition into free labor.
Despite a surge of related lawsuits, this issue is often overshadowed by more politicized issues concerning the American workforce. But when we take a look at the larger ethical implications of unpaid internships it is clear that this concern is critical in understanding what it means to be part of the modern workforce.
The Department of Labor has outlined six criteria that employers must follow in order to bypass the normally non-negotiable minimum wage. These standards were developed in an attempt to rectify some of the mistreatment of interns by making their voluntary internships more educational than exploitable.
The problem is the requirements of these laws and the demands of a summer employer are not always one in the same. Some institutions go to great lengths to insure the rights of their interns are respected, but it’s easy to find horror stories of internships where employers had a very different understanding of the difference between education and labor. The U.S Department of Labor candidly states that institutions cannot gain any “immediate benefit” from the work of an unpaid intern. Some employers interpret this very loosely in assigning mind-numbingly boring tasks or treating unpaid interns like entry-level employees.
Increasingly, internships have become the standard tool in building a resume, with many students sacrificing pay for a more prestigious opportunity. This puts lower-income students at a disadvantage in the job market. Those with dreams of working in non-profit, journalism, politics or research are held back by their inability to take jobs that don’t pay. Countless students do not have the privilege of taking an unpaid internship because they are forced to take a job that can provide them with the financial backing they need to manage the ever-increasing costs of higher education.
No matter how qualified, students who do not come from a wealthy background are often forced to sacrifice aspirations for jobs that pay. Despite the job-market showing signs of improvement, employers are more selective than ever when hiring recent college graduates. Competition is intense and an employer’s obsession with internships can undermine the credentials of low-income students who couldn’t sacrifice three months of potential income for a stanza on their resume.
Are employers using interns as mere means in an attempt to maximize their profits through free labor? Should schools be forced to provide a stipend for summer employment to even the playing field? The solution to this problem isn’t simple by any means, but unpaid internships are undermining traditional notions of what it means to work hard and achieve something for it. Interns deserve real compensation, and should be unsatisfied with vague promises of future employment or the intangibility of a supposedly educational experience.
-This article also appears on The Prindle Post.