[Op-Ed] You're All Wrong About Millenials and Internships

[Zaune]

The Daily Dot

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: when people start writing think-pieces about the interns they’re going to have to deal with come summer.

The New York Times kicked off this year’s festivities on Friday with a look at how young people find themselves stuck in a never-ending “cycle” of internships. BuzzFeed’s Doree Shafrir kept the party going with her response on Tuesday (which just so happened to coincide with a Bret Easton Ellis interview at Vice about how terrible young people are these days).

As usual, nobody guiding the conversation seems to have anything resembling a realistic grasp on what it is to be young—you know, “the future”—and trying to enter the job market.

That is not to say there’s no one out there doing good work on the value (and harm) of unpaid and underpaid labor. Cord Jefferson’s Gawker essay “When People Write for Free, Who Pays?” springs immediately to mind, as does Madeleine Schwartz’s Dissent story “Opportunity Costs: The True Price of Internships.” This summer Michelle Chen wrote an excellent story for In These Times, “For Disgruntled Young Workers, Lawsuits May Spark Intern Insurrection.” (One can only hope!) But these are not a part of the mainstream conversation about internships. The conventional wisdom about internships is something like this (straw-man alert):

Look, it sucks that you have to work for no money. But you’re getting great experience, and these are connections you’ll be able to use for the rest of your life.

Not wrong! Or at least, not completely wrong. There are plenty of terrible internships that have no value whatsoever: internships that consist entirely (or almost entirely) of fetching coffee and making copies. But then, not all internships are like that. I’ve had three good ones. I’ve been lucky.

Only my internship at the Nation paid any money at all: $150 a week. When I was writing for HyperVocal, I lived at home and worked in a bar, and when I was writing for the Awl, I made grilled-cheese sandwiches in a food truck. Toward the end of the stint at the Nation, our cohort agitated for a change to the program; now the magazine pays its interns minimum wage and issues unlimited MetroCards.

It took me a year to make reasonable money in my field, but I have no horror stories. Maybe my experience is atypical.

Friday’s New York Times story was about how young people—“millennials”—find themselves moving from internship to internship without ever getting hired anywhere, eternally in search of a salary, of benefits, of health insurance—you know, stability.

The Times quotes kids who are just out of college as well as people closing in on 30; many express a resilience—a sort of grimly determined optimism—that is, in my book, admirable. Others, however, seem a bit delusional, which is what Doree Shafrir seizes upon. “When we get internship applications from people who have had three, four, five, or more internships in our field,” she writes, “with no full-time job on their résumé, it is kinder for us to reject them than perpetuate the hope that they might one day break through.”

Maybe Shafrir is right—maybe those of us who have slogged through three or more internships in our field of choice are wasting our and everybody else’s time, and it’d be better for everyone if we just threw in the towel. Sure. Then again, maybe this completely ignores the endless precarity that has come to define the post–Great Recession economy, especially for young people, and especially for young people in creative industries. Steady, full-time employment is not something anybody can count on anymore, as more and more workers in all kinds of industries cobble together part-time, freelance, and temporary work.

Getting passed from internship to internship, doing good work that 20 years ago someone would have been paid a living wage to do—or even a real salary—isn’t just demoralizing. It’s “good experience.” It builds character. (Seriously!) It rewards persistence and gumption and, indeed, resilience.

It also, however, rewards privilege. Who has the means to persist? Folks who have outside support, whose families are able to help out with rent and with groceries. That’s my story, anyway. I am the beneficiary of two generations of immigration and sacrifice: the heir to a wealth of opportunity that my parents and their parents never had. But just because I have benefited from my privilege and from a year of unpaid and underpaid internships doesn’t mean that it’s right. In fact, I would go so far as to say that not only is the internship system immoral and unjust, it is also—wait for it—killing journalism.

The conjunction of the Internet’s ascendancy and the global economy’s collapse precipitated a paradigm shift in the media industry. Our landscape is still in flux. A number of existential questions remain, the answers to which will determine the future of our trade and the role it plays in this democracy—that is, its status as a powerful and effective Fourth Estate.

However, the longer this industry relies on internships, the more it relies on unpaid or underpaid labor to fill the vacancies left by eliminated entry-level positions, the less and less diverse the pool of applicants for those internships will become. The more homogenous it becomes, the more stagnant it becomes. And in that stagnance is death.

The contraction of the American middle class in this Second Gilded Age of ours has consequences at every level of our society. Journalism is no exception. With all due respect to the New York Times, when the college-educated adults of this country are strapped with $1 trillion in student debt, the next generation’s best and brightest aren’t hopping from internship to internship, carrying dreams of Pulitzer prizes and entrepreneurship with them, but rather slaving away at meaningless jobs just to pay back the bills they incurred to receive the higher education that should really be a right.

In her piece, Shafrir brings up the myth of the “Trophy Kid.” This is the idea that millennials are overly sensitive and entitled because growing up, everyone got a medal for everything. Shafrir quotes Megan McArdle, author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success, who writes that Kids These Days were “brought up to believe that there should be no winners and no losers, no scrubs or MVPs. Everyone, no matter how ineptly they perform, gets a trophy.”

This idea is only remarkable for its stupidity and its persistence. This is not a thing that any young person actually believes. If anything, getting trophies after every T-ball season instilled my peers and me with a (very reasonable) cynicism about the artifice of awards and the stratification they imply. It is not for nothing that this is a generation more aware and realistic about the inequities of capitalism than any other. What do you expect when you give folks a college education and then deny them meaningful work? (Whoops!)

Most people—whether they are millennials or Olds—don’t want to be the next Steve Jobs, despite what anecdotal evidence the New York Times offers. Most of us want jobs that enable us to support ourselves, and maybe, eventually, our families. And we want jobs that make us feel good about ourselves, that enable us to find value and satisfaction in our work. Work—meaningful work—not entitlement; it is a human right.

Then again, this is all entirely speculative, unreported, and unscientific. But so is everything else anybody writes about this generation.

Anyway, here’s a more reasonable solution for fixing internships, journalism, and the economy: Stop shifting the blame to 20-somethings. Ban internships, and forgive student-loan debt.

Only thing I really disagree with is the idea of banning all internships instead of just the unpaid ones only open to graduates. Make arrangements with a local university for some final year students to be sent out for some on-the-job training? Sure thing. Expect a graduate to spend n months or years working forty hours a week for nothing but vague promises of a salary some time in the future? That is not fair, reasonable or even beneficial to the company in the long run. (It's not legal in most civilised countries either, though I dare say enforcement is pretty much non-existent.)

[Broomstick]

When I was working on my degree slightly more than 25 years ago an "internship" was something you did your last year of college, a job you held while finishing up your schooling. It wasn't something you did after college and certainly not for more than a year at most.

Needless to say, that has changed.

[Tribble]

I love how everybody loves to call us Gen Y's the Worst. Generation. Ever. Even if that were true, guess who's responsible for our upbringing? Before previous generations cast stones, they really ought to take a good, long hard look in a mirror.

[NoXion]

If you do work, you should get paid. Unless you're volunteering your spare time and resources for a cause. Anything else is theft of one's labour, surely?

[Tsyroc]

The pharmacy students who work as interns get paid where I work. They used to be paid on the same scale as the pharmacy technicians because they do the same work but in order to be competitive that changed several years ago. They might start off the same as a technician with similar experience but every year they are in pharmacy school bumps up their pay. The last year of school they are usually making significantly more than a technician, but by then they are also doing some supervised clinical rotations with the pharmacists. The hospital had to go with this sort of pay for them because retail pharmacies were paying a lot more money for interns and the wider range of experience available at a hospital had a tough time making up the difference.

The hospital in general, as well as the pharmacy, does make use of volunteers. In the pharmacy it is usual a way for someone to get in the door and helps them get hired later on.

[JME2]

If you do work, you should get paid. Unless you're volunteering your spare time and resources for a cause. Anything else is theft of one's labour, surely?

And yet, so many employers get away with it -- particularly now.

[Grumman]

If you do work, you should get paid. Unless you're volunteering your spare time and resources for a cause. Anything else is theft of one's labour, surely?

I wouldn't go that far. It's very much a bad thing for a for-profit business to operate this way* but it's not theft.

* I saw a good one on another forum where a guy was saying we'd have to sign an NDA to even find out what genre he wanted us to provide free 3d modelling work for.

[The Grim Squeaker]

I've been seeing a lot of articles about this ,
A small question - when Americans use the term internship, they only refer to work in commercial companies (Or NGOs) right?

(I ask, since i'm comparing this mentally to 'internships' in research labs/university labs - where in most cases, there is a big training curve, and the labs really lack money. (And it's expected that the student will be switching labs).

[Broomstick]

A small question - when Americans use the term internship, they only refer to work in commercial companies (Or NGOs) right?

No. It can have other meanings, including the research internships you mention. It can also refer to the post-graduate employment of medical students and can last years for physicians seeking training in a specialty. If you're not sure about what sort of internship is being discussed from context you'll have to ask.

The justification for unpaid internships is that the person is getting valuable training. That can be the case. More and more often, though, it looks like simple exploitation.

[Simon_Jester]

In specialist technical fields, poorly paid internships have, yes, genuinely become part of the price of doing business. They're part of a broader complex of similar jobs (grad students being the most obvious ones in the sciences, so are postdocs in a different way though they're close to the high end of the scale) that keep the modern academic and technical infrastructure running by providing a large pool of hopefully-intelligent, fairly highly trained labor available for low cost.

The reasons are pretty simple and... frustrating but logical. A lot of operations like university research departments and hospitals would have to deal with much higher costs if they paid every specialist employee they need a salary in the upper five or lower six figures... and yet that is the kind of salary it takes to be competitive with the average for people with doctoral degrees. They need cheap specialists, and the only way they can get them is by hiring interns/postdocs/et cetera. Thus, a position in these jobs becomes the "journeyman" phase that people who actually secure the relevant degree must pass through in order to get the desirable jobs in their later years as a recognized 'master' of the profession.

Corporate employers feel the same pressure (experienced specialists are expensive, inexperienced specialists can often be bullied into working for very low wages). But they have fewer excuses. Unlike university researchers or non-profit hospitals, they can't reasonably claim that their 'mission' would be fatally compromised by a moderate increase in their labor costs. And unlike research or medicine, most of these intern-hirers aren't giving their interns practice in fields with a truly high barrier to entry; it becomes a pretext.

[aieeegrunt]

If you do work, you should get paid. Unless you're volunteering your spare time and resources for a cause. Anything else is theft of one's labour, surely?

GLORIOUS CAPITALISM is basically built upon the principal of theft of labour

[JME2]

GLORIOUS CAPITALISM is basically built upon the principal of theft of labour

That basically sums up my last few years of working experience. The asshole I work for is very much a GLORIOUS CAPITALIST.

He as made bullshit excuse after excuse for underpaying me -- and by extension, the rest of his staff. Every single promise of increased pay from either him or his CFO has never been honored.

I know now that this is standard operating procedure. He's had a reputation since the late 1990's for exploiting his workers and taking advantage of them. He doesn't give a shit about ethics or labor laws if he can pocket a shitload of moolah for himself.

And he's gotten away with it -- at least in the time I've been there -- thanks to the Recession. I know many people there are unhappy, but they're too worried about the economy to challenge him, leave, or complain to the labor board.

[Zaune]

In specialist technical fields, poorly paid internships have, yes, genuinely become part of the price of doing business. They're part of a broader complex of similar jobs (grad students being the most obvious ones in the sciences, so are postdocs in a different way though they're close to the high end of the scale) that keep the modern academic and technical infrastructure running by providing a large pool of hopefully-intelligent, fairly highly trained labor available for low cost.

Poorly-paid internships I could live with, within reason. You're still spending as much time learning the job as you are actually doing productive work at that stage and need a bit of extra supervision before you're fully qualified, so that's probably fair enough.

No, it's the completely unpaid ones that I have an issue with. If the interview process is taking forty hours a week for six months to a year, it's time to unleash Time and Motion Analysis consultants on the HR department and tell them to give no quarter.