For my fellow fourth years reading this column, I think we can all agree on one thing: Finding a job right now sucks.
The economy is failing, companies are laying-off employees left and right, and almost every industry has some sort of a hiring freeze. The Associated Press noted last week that the unemployment rate has risen in all but one of the 372 metropolitan areas tracked by the Labor Department at the start of 2009, and “the nationwide unemployment rate, which stood at 8.1 percent in February, could reach 10 percent by the end of this year.”
All of these factors combined makes finding a job right now seem close to impossible. And yet, I’m told, I should look at internships.
Despite the economy, companies still want interns. Why? Well, because a lot of internships are unpaid. Recently, I was looking at a list of internships and found one that made this fact seem oh-so-glamorous: “No compensation or credit hours will be provided. However, the position offers a resume-building opportunity and a chance to work with experts in the field.”
Isn’t it nice that these employers are giving us something to put down on a resume? Isn’t it nice just to learn? Frankly, I say no. It is possible for employers both to teach and also to properly compensate interns for their work. This “resume-building” culture was built by clever employers, and we have all been suckered into the unfairness. Unpaid internships are inherently unfair because they divide students by their socio-economic status. If you can afford to pay for housing and other living expenses during the summer and work for free, then you will be rewarded. If you cannot afford it, then I guess it is just tough luck.
Many internships, especially the highly desirable ones, are in big cities, like Washington, D.C. or New York City. I, like many students, would have to pay for housing, food, and other expenses that I would not have to pay for if I lived at home.
For students that come from more economically-stable backgrounds, parents will often help out with the expenses. But for students that cannot afford the extra expense, they might be forced to take out a loan or forego the opportunity altogether.
Even if students can stay at home, the money that they could make in the summer often helps to pay for their expenses throughout the school year when they cannot work as much because of classes. I know that studying abroad this past summer really hurt my finances this year, and I can only imagine how hard it will be if I sacrifice a paying job for a “resume-building” opportunity once again this summer.
The fact of the matter is that companies now realize that they do not have to pay for interns. With the current job
market, nothing is more important than an impressive resume, and nothing is more important on a resume than experience. Students need internships to get jobs, and companies prey on this fact to cut costs.
For example, I recently had a phone interview for a summer internship in New York. It was the perfect internship: exciting work experience with a great deal of independence and the chance to live and work in New York City. The company, however, is small, with only three employees in the specific department I was applying to. When I asked how many interns there would be, the interviewer said three. When I asked if it was paid, she said no.
That means that this company gets to double their staff over the summer with essentially no cost. By offering unpaid internships, companies like this one save money. Because students line up for these internships, there is no incentive for companies to start paying interns at all.
The sad thing is that I, and many others, would love this internship. Students want to learn and take initiative in a job and really sink their teeth into an industry. But many students simply cannot afford to work 40 hours a week for three months in one of the most expensive cities in the country without getting paid. That is simply the bottom line.
Unpaid internships during the school year that offer academic credit are the only unpaid internships that are truly doing what all these other internships claim to be doing: They are compensating you with learning. Without pay, the title “intern” is now simply becoming a glorified version of the title “volunteer.”
Now, to be fair, there are scholarships that students can apply for in order to help them pay for housing and other living expenses during an unpaid internship. But those scholarships only put a band-aid on the larger problem of the “unpaid internship.”
The notion of the “unpaid internship” devalues our work and justifies the often less-than-desirable work that interns are forced to do. Since interns are not being paid, they often feel that they cannot complain about taking out the trash or watering the plants everyday. In a similar vein, the importance placed on having internships when finding a job is a joke when a great number of internships revolve heavily around this kind of work.
Our society demands internships in order to find a job but cannot (or will not) properly compensate us for our labor. Students and recent college graduates are part of the work force too, and until companies start to respect us as employees and not just as interns, we will continue to be seen simply as free labor.
Lindsay Huggins’ column appears Thursdays, bi-weekly, in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at l.huggins@cavalierdaily.com.
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