It’s Time to End Unpaid Internships
“I have this giant Excel sheet with 1700 columns that need to be manually updated daily. Seems like a good project for the intern!” This is how interns are assigned work at many companies. They are essentially brought in to do low-value administrative crap that no one else has time or desire to do. (If you’re manually updating a 1700-column spreadsheet, you need to find a more efficient way to work!) While low-value work is something we all must do to move the business forward, it should not be at the core of your company’s internship program. Even more problematic is the continued practice of hiring interns for positions that do not come with compensation. Why should anyone, even a student, work for free in exchange for “experience”?
Internships should be learning experiences designed to expose students to a company’s people, products, and processes. They are intended, ostensibly, to give students a taste of what it’s like to be a part of the workforce. Well, a key part of being in the workforce is being compensated! Labor should always have dignity, which requires a decent wage payment. I am not against volunteerism; that’s great. However, organizations that have resources and ask people to work in real jobs for no money should be ashamed of themselves. Exchanging labor for “experience” only on a resume is the definition of exploitation.
At best, unpaid internships exploit labor. At worst, the practice exacerbates socioeconomic and racial inequities. Unpaid internships are something privileged people can afford. Who else can afford to work for free? Congressional internships are largely unpaid. Most students will find it burdensome to live in DC without getting paid for an entire semester, so these opportunities are out of their reach. Students with access to the resources needed to participate in such programs will have a better chance of securing similar employment opportunities after graduation. In other words, rich kids only (or mostly) need apply. (Things may be changing—as of 2022, White House internships are paid positions, bucking the DC trend of free labor.)
The idea that work experience could have academic merit is laudable. But somewhere along the way, this idea metastasized into the current state where there is little consistency of policy (among both employers and educational institutions) and virtually zero governance. And college credit and intangible work experience and contacts do not pay rent, buy groceries, or put gas in the car. Unpaid internships also make your company look cheap, exploitative, and elitist. This discredits your company and negatively impacts its brand.
The goal of any internship program should be to create a pipeline of talent. To do that, employers need to design better, more equitable, and inclusive labor policies for their interns and co-ops. A way to ensure that your company’s internship program doesn’t damage your employer brand is to pay your interns a decent wage. Full stop. Let’s do away with unpaid internships and consign them to the trash heap of history, where they belong.