"Opportunity to create a commercial webisode series for New York City's most renowned Sports store."
"[Assist] a Brooklyn-based visual artist/art director/blogger/tastemaker with several upcoming projects."
"MODELING AGENCY --You will be required to do hands on work with assisting models and staff with the company."
"Exciting lingerie company...responsibilities include: preparing packages, swatching, various paperwork, organizing design room & samples."
What do these New York City jobs found recently on Craigslist have in common? All are for unpaid summer internships. And all are quite probably illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
It's been over a decade since summer internships became a requisite for the ambitious student's resume, yet they still exist in a shadow space outside of existing legal, economic, and educational categories. Recently, several states and the federal Department of Labor have been investigating their legality. In cases such as the listings above, where people are being asked to do real work contributing to a commercial enterprise, officials are finding that minimum wage laws clearly ought to apply. And the Economic Policy Institute released a report last month arguing that unpaid internships may supplant waged jobs, that they create an unequal playing field by favoring students who can afford to work for free, and that they leave interns legally unprotected from discrimination and harassment.
On the other hand, conservatives and business leaders have argued that internships are mutually beneficial, and that young people have a right to donate their services in a free market. And legions of college students have no doubt made up their minds that, exploited or not, they have no choice but to seize internship opportunities if they hope to ever get good jobs.
Both sides have good points. They're just arguing past each other. Internships are an informal, ad hoc practice that has arisen in a fast-changing economy to fill a real educational need: the gap between what typical liberal arts programs provide in terms of job preparation and what employers are actually looking for. For any ambitious young person today, they are a critical part of personal development and preparation for careers. Internships are not going away any time soon.
What's needed now is to bring them from the shadow into the light. It's time for employers, in cooperation with the government and colleges, to step up and create higher-quality apprenticeships, paid jobs, and co-op programs to replace the ill-defined, unpaid internship.
One way to bring internships into the light is to coordinate them more closely with degree programs. This requires entrepreneurship and creativity on the part of colleges. For example, in the AI Practicum course at the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University of Ohio, multidisciplinary teams of undergraduates work on a "live" interaction design project. Clients, who have included Procter & Gamble, Target, and Bank of America, pay the program for the students' work. Similarly, at Seneca College in Toronto, there's a course where students fix real bugs in Firefox, the open-source browser. When professors are actually supervising and evaluating students doing real-world work, they can ensure that educational goals are being met alongside vocational ones.
A second solution is to tap philanthropic or federal funds to pay interns in the name of expanding opportunity. Public Allies, an Americorps program currently growing nationwide, recruits diverse youth to serve four days a week at nonprofits in their own communities, while participating in one day a week of leadership training. Public Allies' leaders earn monthly stipends of $1,300 to $1,800 and more than 80 percent end up employed in public service. The authors of the EPI study about the dangers of unpaid internships, Kathryn Anne Edwards and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, have proposed expanding the federal work-study program to provide low-income students compensation for interning.
The most difficult option politically, especially in this economic climate, is to push more private companies to obey the law, step up, and pay their interns minimum wage. There's some evidence that paid internships tend to be more valuable experiences for both the employer and the intern, perhaps since the company has some skin in the game. But the core issue is a legal and, indeed, a moral one. Maybe the college intern community just needs its own Lilly Ledbetter: one student willing to risk burning bridges by saying she will no longer fetch coffee and file for free.
Follow Anya Kamenetz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Anya1anya
Gabrielle Grow: An "Apathetic" Generation
The idea of my generation being remembered as apathetic does not sit well with me. Who drew these conclusions about us?
Michael Roth: Now That You've Been Admitted: Choose the Student Culture That Energizes You
It's the evolution of student culture over many years that comes to define the way a college or university feels to the young men and women who spend their transitional years on campus.
Stephanie Pierson and Barbara Harrison: Unpaid Labor: What to Do When No One Has a Clue
One of the disturbing new trends to emerge from this changing economy is the expectation that smart, talented people will happily give away their skills and their best ideas, without charge.
Adele Scheele: The Real College Cheating Scandal
Once you find professors whom you respect, it's up to you to initiate the relationship. The best way is to visit during office hours and talk to them. You are not bothering them. They expect you to visit.
No, they don't. One side is arguing for the "right" of people to "donate" their time and skill. The other side is arguing that people have a right to be paid for the work they do and not to be exploited for profit.
Corporate executives want everything their own way: they want to profit by paying workers as little as possible and demand more money than they're worth. They want their corporations to have the same rights as people in a court of law but don't want to be held criminally accountable when their actions kill their workers or their customers. They want the benefits of a democratic society but refuse to contribute to it in the form of paying taxes.
Most of us (I hope) would be happy to let the "motors of the world" play their little games as long as we can support ourselves and live happy lives. If they could only understand that they could be successful without screwing the rest of us over. But for whatever reason, they just can't. I'm not qualified to say why this is, all I know is that it's the case: there is no amount of money or power that will ever satisfy some people, and unless something stops them, they will work to bleed everyone else dry.
That's the law.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/p/jobs-at-huffingtonpostcom.html
Guess what will disappear?
Internships.
Unpaid internships are a race to the bottom - employers use it to displace paid workers, even skilled ones. This completely violates federal law, and exploits a frightened workforce..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/p/jobs-at-huffingtonpostcom.html
Ridiculous. They're nothing but greedy, self-centered "lowlifes" - knowing full well that for every dollar they don't pay someone at the "bottom", they'll just continue to pad their own bloated pay packages.
It's not surprising that corporate officers now typically have "security" listed as part of their benefits.
"A chief executive officer (CEO) or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer (executive) or administrator in charge of total management of an organization." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_executive_officer
I actually debated whether or not I should put "lowlifes" in quotes - I suppose I should have left them off. Rich businessmen don't really deserve extra key strokes.
In terms of being an unpaid intern - sorry, I'm not wealthy enough to be able to take on such a role.
Note that technical majors are blissfully free from this problem (often making over $15 an hour as summer interns) because they are in demand. Maybe the problem is the surplus of labor, not the working conditions.
The most unfortunate thing, in my opinion, is that it will take a regulatory decision to make the internship practice verboten, not a congressional one. This isn't the kind of thing that should be left to unelected beaurocrats to decide.
So, if you're a for-profit company, you need to pay your employees minimum wage - period.
What spurred the creation of The Eternal Intern blog was principally the frustration many experience, due to the fact that no matter how many internships we complete and how much praise we gain at work, we are still to this day "Eternal Interns", thus: unofficially unemployed.
The fact that 3 Master Degree graduates, with international internship experience, speaking at least 3 languages, open-minded and working in 3 separate industries (and 3 different cities) each face this same "Eternal Intern" problem, is what made me decide to start this blog with 2 friends and tell our story.
What we try to express through "The Eternal Intern" is the reality of being an intern in 3 of the most powerful cities of the world: the good, the bad and the ugly. Some days can be awesome, others can be miserable.
We've done everything "by the book" and yet still find ourselves at this stand-still.
Please check us out! www.the-eternal-intern.blogspot.com
Flora