Unpaid internships are intended to provide valuable experience and contacts to young workers, while lowering costs and risks to organizations. But are they fair?
Clashing armies of Twitter users have been fiercely debating the question in recent days. One side of the argument has emphasized that sacrifice can lead to success, and the other pointing out that not everyone even has the option to work without pay. The debate coalesced around Thursday tweets from a podcast host and vlogger known professionally as Adam22. Adam22 produces content focused largely on rappers with young fanbases, likely making the ensuing debate particularly relevant to many of his more than 400,000 followers.
https://twitter.com/adam22/status/1014995171862122496
shockingly, if you want a really cool job, you might have to do it for free for a while.
— adam22 (@adam22) July 6, 2018
According to the Guardian, about half of the 1.5 million internships available in America each year were unpaid as of 2016. Unpaid internships are also fairly common internationally. Some agreed that taking unpaid internships could be an important path to success for the truly committed.
This thread really demonstrates the pretty shitty mentality that a lot of people have. An unpaid internship is an opportunity to network and gain experience. If you can't adjust your life in order to afford to take it, then you probably aren't adaptable enough to be successful.
— WⒶlter (@possibilideez) July 6, 2018
But far more users argued out that for those without external support, taking even a beneficial unpaid position is effectively impossible.
"Shockingly if you want to have a cool job you might have to do it for free for a while" is an idiotic statement. In my case, if I did that job for free I would have ended up homeless in Copenhagen.
— Ana Chernykh (@anna_chernykh) July 7, 2018
https://twitter.com/caitlinmoran/status/1015576471274950657
Further, some pointed out that the external support that allows some to take an unpaid internship is far less likely to be available to marginalized groups. That includes people of color, who generally have less family wealth to draw on; and LGBTQ people, who are more likely to have frayed familial or social connections because of homophobia.
https://twitter.com/kyliesparks/status/1015326974686851072
So, even if an unpaid internship is useful for an individual, many see the system as a whole as putting up barriers to the underprivileged.
https://twitter.com/s_m_i/status/1015333588483489792
Unpaid internships are a way to filter poor people out of the skilled work pool and on some level you know this.
— 🏳️⚧️🧃🔁移動要塞 百合バース・ファイター🍅🦝🏳️⚧️ (@yurimobilefort) July 6, 2018
The only reason I was able to have an unpaid internship is cause my parents paid for my stuff while I did it. Some of my friends weren’t able to do that. It’s an unfair playing field.
— Kate🏳️🌈 (@BradleysAneela) July 6, 2018
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The debate is made more timely by a recent Labor Department change to the legal status of unpaid internships. To be legal, an unpaid internship must benefit the intern more than the company hiring them, as determined by seven factors. Those criteria include training that is “similar to that which would be given in an educational environment,” and that an unpaid intern not displace paid employees.
Some employers don't know they've created illegal #internships while others knowingly commit wage theft. The U.S. Dept of Labor FLSA laws define what makes an internship. Recent updates make it easier to not pay BUT not that easy. These days, interns & witnesses know law.
— LiteFanFun (@LiteFanFun) July 6, 2018
The new standard makes hiring unpaid interns easier by removing a previous rule that interns could provide no “immediate advantage” to the company. But the new rules may also improve the educational quality of unpaid internships, if the standard of school-like education is enforced. The rule change was triggered in large part by a major lawsuit against Fox Searchlight that hinged on its failure to train interns, and a 2010 survey found that most top corporate internships had “no explicit training component.”
Many Twitter users shared anecdotes of exploitation by companies who just wanted free labor.
https://twitter.com/AiasIRL/status/1015515903558025216
https://twitter.com/NovicSara/status/1015624549398917120
Those experiences highlight a flaw in the premise of the entire debate: unpaid internships may not actually help get your career started at all. A three-year survey of graduating college students conducted in 2013 found that students who had taken paid internships were nearly twice as likely to receive a full-time job offer as those who had taken unpaid internships. Unpaid interns had almost no statistical advantage over students who had no internships at all.
The survey also found that students who had taken an unpaid internship were actually paid less on average in their first full-time job than those who had taken no internship at all.
https://twitter.com/SaraGhaleb/status/1015649018318209024
The clearest lessons from the Twitter debate involve how unpaid internships are perceived. Companies should be aware that many smart candidates are likely to be highly skeptical of unpaid internships. Though the practice is somewhat more accepted in certain sectors, including fashion, journalism, and nonprofits, the positions may be genuinely inaccessible to some talented candidates, which could contribute to America’s decreased economic mobility.
