Overworked and Underpaid
How unpaid internships favor the wealthy and hurt the poor
By Landon Groves
As internship application season draws to a close, students all over the country are gearing up for what could be a huge financial risk. They’re emptying their pockets and sacrificing their time for a shot at meeting people in the industry they hope to make a career in.
In many cases, they’re doing it for free.
Ultimately, it’s the students choice whether or not they want to do an unpaid internship. That’s not the problem. The problem is unpaid internships limit an organization’s hiring pool.
Students who work to support themselves can’t take these internships since they occupy huge chunks of time without compensation. Only offering college credit is even worse, as it forces students to cough up thousands of dollars to their university to work for free.
On top of that, living in many of the places where internships are plentiful is expensive. In 2017, the average summer intern in Los Angeles paid about $9,506 to live comfortably and had to forego around $3,480 in wages, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This brings the grand total cost of the internship to $12,986.
A 2018 survey of students at over 60 colleges and universities conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found 36 percent didn’t have enough food. A similar number was without adequate housing.
These students simply can’t afford to work for free.
Many students shy away from internships altogether faced with these realities. The applicant pool shrinks until all you’re left with is a handful of privileged young people. When it comes time to recruit full-time employees, companies that don’t pay their interns aren’t picking from a pool of best possible talent, but rather from the most privileged people trying to break into their industry. To see this, just look at the disproportionate number of white men in the workforce.
Unpaid internships may look like a mere inconvenience on the surface, but the cumulative result is a lack of racial, gender, economic and geographic diversity in the workplace.
Last summer, I was an unpaid intern at a large regional magazine based in downtown Seattle. I got a small apartment uptown, a low-income bus pass and a part-time job making snacks at a daycare. I knew it would be hard, but the opportunity seemed too good to pass up. I dug into my savings. I was determined to make it work.
Every morning I reported to the magazine’s main office on 5th Avenue. The bus dropped me off on 6th, and I’d walk southeast past the giant, ominous Amazon spheres — a shrine to a man who has more money than stars in our galaxy — into a corner of the office I shared with five other interns. For 20 hours every week, the six of us fact checked the magazine, wrote blog posts, organized calendars, etc. We did it all for the experience — that is to say, we did it all for free.
Two hundred and forty hours went by like this. I devoted huge amounts of my time to the company. In return, I could expect a handful of new professional relationships and a couple nice-looking bylines. By all accounts, I got those things, but at some point along the way I was forced to acknowledge the system I participated in is fundamentally broken.
That point came in August when Vox released a photo of the White House’s intern team. Of 128 interns, all but a handful were white. These interns worked in an office directly overseeing a country where around 40 percent of the population isn’t white. Many saw this as a sign of racism in the administration, and they may have been right. Teen Vogue published an op-ed article by Taylor Crumpton that posited a different theory: The White House interns didn’t lack diversity solely because of some overt bias in the hiring department. They lacked diversity in part because the White House refused to pay them.
The only way I survived that summer was a part-time job and Seattle’s $15 minimum wage. Most places don’t have that luxury. Unpaid internships exist in every city and in every industry.
If you want to have a more diverse workplace, start with the interns. Do the right thing. Pay them for their time.
