Are Unpaid Internships

by Little Miss Attila on June 21, 2011

. . . a real problem? If so, why?

{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }

richard mcenroe June 21, 2011 at 9:02 pm

The main problem with unpaid internships is that they eliminate the emotional bond that is part of a proper mentoring relationship. Instead, the intern is just basically indentured labor with no obligation on the part of the employer to actually impart any knowledge. So it’s a flawed model for training new workers.

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Darrell June 21, 2011 at 10:53 pm

Workers should be paid.
Remuneration is not an unsubstantial part of the whole work experience.
It’s the point.

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Darrell June 22, 2011 at 4:50 am

Not that there’s anything wrong with pitching in and helping a girl
put up a barn, now and again, or put on a play.

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I R A Darth Aggie June 22, 2011 at 10:02 am

I would hope that said girl would be extremely grateful for the help.

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Little Miss Attila June 22, 2011 at 10:04 am

Hi! How’s everything going in here?

Okay, ‘bye . . .

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Darrell June 23, 2011 at 4:01 am

As long as that wasn’t generated by an automatic response, it’ll do.

Mark L June 22, 2011 at 2:04 pm

In many cases unpaid interships are means of extracting unpaid work from the desperate and gullible. (Not that there is anything wrong with that, necessarily.)

If the work has value, the intern will be paid. My son had a paid internship at Lockheed-Martin during the summers of his Sophomore-Junior and Junior-Senior year, and put together a procedures manual during the first summer and some Matlab math models the second. Those were products that were actually used, and Lockheed-Martin offered him a permanent job after he got his engineering degree. But that’s a little different than getting an unpaid “hospitality industry” internship where you spend the summer cleaning toilets in hotels, and get three credit hours towards graduation.

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Leah June 22, 2011 at 7:17 pm

Well I guess my experience is different, my son had an unpaid internship after his junior year in college. He was very conscientious, they gave him a very nice bonus. Hired him for peanuts after graduation and a year latter raised his salary by 20%.
He’s doing what most of his college friends wouldn’t do – working up from the very bottom. The internship opened the door.

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Mark L June 23, 2011 at 6:59 am

Peanuts + 20% is still peanuts. Okay it is 120% peanuts. Like I said, unpaid interships are means of extracting unpaid work from the desperate and gullible. Not only did your son take an unpaid internship, he was gullible enough to come back and work for next to nothing (peanuts) and then think he got a good deal when they gave him 20% more of next to nothing. But he has the satisfaction of knowing he is working his way up from the very bottom. (Not that there is anything wrong with that, necessarily.)

My sons who were foolish enough to turn down unpaid internships, on the other hand, now have well-paid jobs doing interesting and worthwhile engineering work. Boy, were they silly. They could have taken an unpaid internship, gotten hired by that same company for peanuts, been thrilled that they got 20% more on their inadequate pay, and had the satisfaction of knowing that they were working up from the very bottom. The very bottom. I guess they will never know what they missed. Oh well.

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Little Miss Attila June 23, 2011 at 7:51 am

Come on, Mark–aren’t you being a little nasty, here? If your sons were/are engineers, they were operating in a seller’s market, for crying out loud. It’s a little different for creative people, and for people whose chosen fields are perceived (from the outside) as being “glamour industries.”

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Roxeanne de Luca June 24, 2011 at 7:34 pm

As a former engineer, current non-profit attorney… you go, girl! As Bob Belvedere would say, “dead solid perfect”.

Any engineer who takes an unpaid internship is a bloody fool. Some of that is because engineering weeds out the weak, incompetent, and uninterested. Therefore, there is no need to prove your mettle nor your worth; the degree (or even the two years in school) says it all. I still trumpet my engineering degree because it gets me a lot of respect.

Now, if you’re talking about political work, or lawyering, well, there’s a load of talented people who are passionate about it, and a load of really incompetent people who couldn’t care less. Employers with limited budgets aren’t interested in paying to sort through them, hence, the unpaid internship as a way of proving your worth and your dedication.

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Mark L June 23, 2011 at 12:45 pm

Come on Little Miss Attila–aren’t you being a little nasty here? Your statement implicitly assumes that engineers aren’t creative people.

If there is a seller’s market for engineers there may be a reason for it. However, the principal holds regardless of field — if you provide value for someone you deserve to be paid. I write professionally, but I don’t write for free. And the first time someone tried to sucker me by offering to print something I wrote for “exposure” and “experience” I told them to pound sand. And found another market that did pay.

Same principal applies to unpaid internships. Nothing wrong with letting yourself get suckered if that’s what you want. But don’t tell me what a great thing getting taken is and expect me to agree.

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Little Miss Attila June 23, 2011 at 1:15 pm

Well, as an employer I know that sometimes one can make better use of someone’s talents once they are “on site,” and one has a better idea of what they have to offer–it might not be the thing that’s on his/her resume.

I did try to think of a better word than “creative” that encompassed writing, producing, and performing–all those enterprises that don’t directly involve the hard edge of reason, and yet still require it, yet are much, much harder to measure in terms of the value they bring to an organization.

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Roxeanne de Luca June 24, 2011 at 7:36 pm

(Snort) Um, Mark, I spent the years 2000-2004 in an engineering firm, and I’m here to tell you that they paid me to find creative solutions to problems that arose, but they weren’t paying me to indulge myself, my love for humanity, or my desire to make the world a happier, shinier place. Nor were they even really paying me to be creative; they were paying me to get results.

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