Twitter dunks on concept of unpaid internships

There is a flip side to this.

In a free market, wages would be a function of your productivity. The more you add, the more you would typically earn. To the extent any intern actually is productive, sure you'd expect them to get paid whatever their worth is.

But as someone who provided internships in a past life, very often interns ended up requiring quite a bit of my time to teach them and get them to be productive. This is true of a lot of apprenticeships or internships, which is why traditionally, the reward for the intern was often the experience and knowledge they got, and the reward for the person giving the internship was whatever productivity they could get from an intern in return for the time investment and teaching that the intern required.

To the extent that anyone is hiring an intern whose experience and skills already makes them a productive addition out of the box, sure you'd expect that person to get paid whatever their worth is. Which is where I think you come from with your "Shame on the people profiting off unpaid internships." I'd guess that a lot of times, the people aren't profiting as much as you think. But let's say I am wrong about that. ... if an internship is freely transacted (i.e. nobody forced the intern to accept the offer), why would I care much about an arrangement two people freely entered that doesn't involve me?

 

Are you certain of what you are suggesting?

Blacks and hispanics (assuming that is the diversity you are focused on) represent a far smaller percentage of college graduates than their percentage of the overall population (if I care about diversity, I should care about that too, FWIW). Which is the main point I'd make. You are simplifying a societal inequity that has deep roots.

Within that subset, though, in recent years at least, among graduating college seniors, those minority groups have represented a larger percentage of college internships than their actual numbers. The reason has been that a lot of industries and companies have been putting a focus on diversity . Maybe it's different in newsrooms, I don't know. But are you assuming something or are you telling me something that you know?

What you are getting at has much deeper roots than people deciding to do an unpaid internship, which aren't a "concept," as you put it, but a reality. You can't just mandate that people get paid something (regardless of their value), nor can you create money where it doesn't exist, and expect that it won't have unintended consequences. Most newsrooms are struggling places. Mandating that you pay unproductive workers isn't going to magically create diversity. Financial reality still exists.

The lack of a diversity in a lot of industries goes way beyond what you are suggesting. Unpaid internships largely didn't exist until the 1970s, when there was a huge rise in the number of college graduates. As the Federal government got more involved in trying to socially engineer society in the decades afterward, offering subsidized loans (that have now created a student debt crisis -- this is what happens when you try to socially engineer equality; there are often serious pecuniary effects that create bigger problems down the line), they effectively turned a college degree into what a high school degree had been (in practical terms, at least). At the same time, the job market got tougher as the U.S. started to slide (largely for similar reasons), and internships took on more and more importance to introduce raw college graduates with few skills into an increasingly tougher job market.

It's simply supply and demand. When you and your increasingly worthless college degree makes you look like a dime a dozen, and the demand for what you can offer is shrinking, an unpaid internship takes on even more importance in trying to separate yourself from the pack.

Does that create or perpetuate racial disparities? Undoubtedly. A big part of career is simply "who you know" and the person who did a summer internship has a leg up that the person who needed to work a fast food job. To the extent that shuts out racial minorities, it sucks (just as it sucks for MOST non-minorities). But hidden in what you posted (even though you didn't say it) is a suggestion of doing more of the same things that created and exacerbated that problem over the last several decades. When you start subsidizing things, taking away the ability to freely barter (which is all an internship is), trying to regulate behavior, etc., it's a formula for serious unitended and unanticipated consequences.

Even with that, though, because of people's social awareness (which has been people behaving on their own, attitudes changing organically), in recent years the reality has been that minorities who do end up a college path (again, a small percentage relative to their percentage of the total population. ... if you exclude Asians, at least), are not being shut out of internships. They are even slightly overrepresented now, relative to their numbers, BECAUSE people are focused on diversity. Is that not the case in newsrooms, and if so, is it because of your implication that financial hardship stands in their way more than it does for non-minorities?

 

Yes, I am certainly from a different time. I also don't have a newspaper background, FWIW.

I interned at a magazine after college in the early 1990s. It was in NYC. It was less expensive than it is now, but it wasn't easy to make work. I had no money and I needed a job if I wanted to eat. Even with the jobs (yes, plural) I had, I lived like a roach. A commercial space being illegally rented. ... shared by way too many of us, living a bit like we were squatters.

The internship I got was fairly competitive. They were able to pick and choose, and their attitude was that they were doing the interns a favor. They may have been right, given where many of their interns ended up.

When I got the offer, I told them I couldn't work 5 days a week that way. I just couldn't afford it. They told me tough luck and gave the internship to someone else. But I persisted. I talked them into allowing me to do a less stuctured internship. I ended up going in 2 or 3 days a week, and during off hours, and doing some fun things I would have never gotten to touch with the structured internships they provided. I sort of created a role for myself, and luckily they allowed me to do it.

I also had a job editing and laying out textbooks that paid me relatively well, and I convinced my boss to allow me to work around my other hustles. He was cool with it as long as I met my deadlines.

I definitely had to hustle to make it work, and I had to convince people of my value to get them to give me a lot of flexibility.

I am not describing it to suggest that because my experience went a certain way, it's applicable to everyone. I know things are different than they were then, and there are a lot of kids leaving school now with a boatload of debt and who are priced out of a place like NY. And I know that people are sometimes very inflexible, even if they think you are valuable, and so you find yourself SOL. But my attitude (and others like me) at that time wasn't to expect the world to be magically equalized because someone else could afford to do something that we couldn't. We worked within the parameters of our circumstances to try to get to where we wanted to be. As it turned out, my problem wasn't that I couldn't afford what it required to pay some dues. It was that I fell in love with a doomed industy.