The End of the Unpaid Internship

[CountDeMoney]

I applied for a full-time paid internship earlier this year in media relations.  That rejection email boomeranged fucking quick.

[Valmy]

yeah great idea. Nothing better for companies, college grads, and the economy in general, than the need to pay regular money for totally clueless employees

Minimum wage is not regular money.

[Valmy]

I applied for a full-time paid internship earlier this year in media relations.  That rejection email boomeranged fucking quick.

Yeah I am going to be lowcrawling and kow-towing trying to get one this fall.

[CountDeMoney]

I applied for a full-time paid internship earlier this year in media relations.  That rejection email boomeranged fucking quick.

Yeah I am going to be lowcrawling and kow-towing trying to get one this fall.

Good luck with that.

I mean, I figured no, I'm not a 22 year old grad with a degree in it, but I wanted to go in that direction professionally, and I thought that the experience I do have in it would've helped.  YOU WANT IT DONE QUICK OR DO YOU WANT IT DONE RIGHT

You'd think in an internship they'd want somebody that can do as much as possible.   Then again, an intern with experience rivaling the actual employees may not go over well.

[garbon]

My point was that there will initially be fewer places to get "experience" so those with experience (family-ins, etc.) will be even a further cut above.

Yeah but the people with those sorts of advantages are going to win anyway.

Yeah but at least the internships gave advantages to another set of people. Now it'd be more explicitly, you come from money or you don't.

[dps]

When my brother had an unpaid internship, he was doing the work a regular employee would have done, but he got college credit for it.

[katmai]

My first job on film was as Office Intern...which they promptly promoted me at end of first week of me busting my ass.

[stjaba]

In college, I worked at the YMCA doing basic customer service type work. One semester, another college student "interned" doing the same exact thing. The only difference was that he didn't get paid and got college credit. Since he went to a private college, he literally was paying thousands of dollars for the experience. It was a crappy job, but at least I got paid.

[Josquius]

What I said on another forum about this-

The trouble with not paying interns is this really discriminates against people from poor backgrounds.

If your parents have the money to support you or you're lucky enough that your family lives in a major city then unpaid internships are no problem. The argument that it is free education for free work is valid. A lot of internships can be offered only because it doesn't cost the employer anything (in terms of monetary outgoings of course, time is another matter).

However for many of us this is not the case. I for one was never able to do an internship during my previous studies as I come from a rural area and my parents really aren't the richest people in the world. An internship was always out of my price range. It is only now, after I've worked for two years and built up some savings that I can afford to start my career.

This isn't to say that those who had a fortunate start in life are somehow automatically worse workers. Nor is it to say that I myself am particularly awesome but hard put-upon and deserving of special treatment, woe is me, etc.... However there is a lot of talent out there amongst people from less advantaged backgrounds.
Offering enough payment for people to be able to rent somewhere cheap and feed themselves should be a minimum with companies above a certain income. It is quite understandable that small companies can't afford this but that they still might be able to offer a valuable internship to somebody who can afford it.


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The only trouble is that I could well imagine the big companies using legal loop holes and the like to say that though yes, the intern is working at our global HQ, they are technically the intern of this little company we sub-contract with hence we don't have to pay them.


My plan for next year is to intern and work on the evenings. I've saved up to be able to do this. Just hope I can still do it, a lto of internships seem to be restricted to current students only. Bloody rich kids.

[Admiral Yi]

If a company can not make an intern work, but can only train them, what's in it for the company?

[DGuller]

If a company can not make an intern work, but can only train them, what's in it for the company?

First dibs on the entry level talent.  A couple of months of internship is more effective than a couple of hours of interviews when it comes to identifying promising candidates.

[Admiral Yi]

First dibs on the entry level talent.  A couple of months of internship is more effective than a couple of hours of interviews when it comes to identifying promising candidates.

A three month long job interview doesn't sound too cost effective to me.

[alfred russel]

I understand where Tyr is coming from, but the flip side is that school, at least in the US, doesn't pay and costs money--effectively a negative salary.

In my experience, people right out of school are basically useless for a period of time. Most professional jobs use an apprentice model and a college degree is just a prerequisite. I don't know how to implement this in a practical way, but it seems if you want to help younger people from poor backgrounds, a better solution than banning unpaid internships is to extend college funding mechanisms to the period.

[Valmy]

First dibs on the entry level talent.  A couple of months of internship is more effective than a couple of hours of interviews when it comes to identifying promising candidates.

A three month long job interview doesn't sound too cost effective to me.

Well that is how we do it in engineering.

[DGuller]

First dibs on the entry level talent.  A couple of months of internship is more effective than a couple of hours of interviews when it comes to identifying promising candidates.

A three month long job interview doesn't sound too cost effective to me.

Given the cost of firing someone in a company with a very active HR department, it's not that expensive either.  And, in any case, it's also competition against other companies.  If the other companies offer internships and you don't, then you get to pick through the leftovers that the other company didn't want.