One Big Thing: Pay Your Interns
[Every week, I write Sunday Note, a newsletter that’s about social, digital, life and more. The top item, “One Big Thing,” is about whatever’s on the top of my mind each week. I’ll reproduce that here (it’s just a quarter of the newsletter). Hope you’ll consider subscribing to the email version. Here’s the sign-up info and the archives.]
With Labor Day comes school. That also means a TON of temporary labor pouring into businesses around the country (and the world, really). Chances are, many of you bid farewell to the 2018 summer interns recently, and will be welcoming new ones over the next few weeks.
Pay them. Pay them real money. We’ll all be better off for it.
Many of us, including me, have benefited from taking internships that were unpaid and the opportunities, connections and experience that came with them. I got my start in journalism at 16 by working for zero Fiji dollars at The Fiji Sun, but I could afford to doh that because my dad was India’s ambassador in Suva at the time. Over time, I’ve come to see how unfair that was and the advantage it gave me.
Over the last decade or so, the stark economic inequality of American society has been a slap in the face. Wages are stagnant, the middle class is shrinking, and what’s left of the American social safety net is on the chopping block as we speak. The downstream effect here is that we have generations of young people growing up in a world where the idea of unpaid work is a nonstarter.
There is abundant literature on the subject of unpaid internships, and countries are beginning to make them illegal. I’ll spare you the background, but here’s a good place to start.
For me, the core issue here is socioeconomic diversity. The conversation is changing — for the MUCH better — about representation, diversity, inclusion, and the core issues of how our society works at a very fundamental level. Companies can hire all the Chief Diversity Officers they want (it’s good that they are — it’s some kind of base acknowledgment at least), but diversity at the top starts with diversity at the bottom. To get that, opportunities need to be expanded.
A big part of that is ending the practice of self-selecting people who can afford to not be paid for a few months to work. Put simply, it prices people out of the market based almost solely on their family’s economic situation. This is not a good thing.
So, when you’re interviewing your next crop of interns, think about the kid with two working parents who took out loans to send that child to a good school, and what even $500 per month could do for them. More is always better, but something is something, and it can make all the difference.
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