During an awkward icebreaker game at the beginning of the semester, someone asked me if I planned to take an internship. I laughed nervously and told her no, considering most of the internships in my field of interest were unpaid.
I was taken aback by her response; she recoiled in horror, as if she were going to catch some sort of unemployment plague, and demanded to know how I expected to get a job in the future. My annoyance bubbled below the surface, but I managed to slather on a tight smile.
I want to know why I am expected to sell myself short because of the precarious title I bare. Not only do I, and many other students, not have the luxury of throwing a whole working summer away, but the idea of selling labour for free because of my status as a student seems ludicrous.
Students should rally together and hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Regardless of the fact that we were raised in this Post-fordist era of experience over compensation, why do students work laboriously to leave empty handed, save for (fingers crossed!) a glowing recommendation? Unpaid internships are not a fair and noble exchange between those in power and students; they are a shady way of extracting cheap or free labor.
When the topic of unpaid internships came up in one of my tutorials last semester, few people recalled good experiences. While some people did mention that completing an unpaid internship for a not-for-profit organization left them with valuable job experience, the overwhelming majority felt like they were being taken advantage of.
The rule of unpaid internships is that interns cannot do the same work as paid employees. Unpaid internship advocates’ solution to potential exploitation of interns is for interns to have a firm awareness of their rights by reading the Employment Standards Act.
Realistically, though, even when interns are equipped with that awareness, they would accept breached rights if it meant keeping their employers happy, and safe-guarding a potential future job.
As one girl in my tutorial put it, “I was so bent on pleasing my boss in order to get a good recommendation, that I never objected to doing the same menial tasks as the secretaries.”
The act itself perpetuates class division. Unpaid internships create a distinction between the privileged who can afford to take them, and the middle class or poorer students who cannot. The privileged are allowed these unpaid “opportunities,” while most students are forced to take jobs outside of their area of interest in order to make money.
This situation begs the question: are those who get unpaid internships really the crème de la crème of intern candidates, or has the competition just been sufficiently thinned out to only include the wealthy? If you ask me, it’s the latter.
Unfortunately, as long as there are students willing to settle for these unpaid internships, the belief that students are okay with this sort of relationship to those in power, and the belief that the wealthy deserve this leg up on the rest of us, will continue to be perpetuated.
Instead of climbing over one another on our race to employment, students should rally together and hold ourselves to a higher standard. I think it’s high time we challenge the status quo. The mindset that perpetuates internships might have had a place in the Feudal era, but not in 2014.
