No child dreams of becoming an intern when he or she grows up. Interns don’t even want to be interns. In fact, the whole point of being an intern is that someday you won’t have to be an intern anymore.

It’s a position that college students and graduates alike reluctantly accept. Interning has its perks: getting experience, connecting with some big names and feeling the atmosphere of a profession. But often, it’s all done for free. The unpaid internship has been around a long time, but now a conversation is brewing concerning its legality.

On one hand, the unpaid internship can be worth it in the right context. But on the other, not paying interns contributes to inequality and is a pretty lousy way to welcome college students to a career field.

Canadian Mags, which covers the Canadian magazine industry, said in a March 26 article that the Toronto Ministry of Labor banned unpaid internships at The Walrus and Toronto Life magazines. Officials from the ministry pointed out that all employees are “covered under the Employment Standards Act and should be paid — it doesn’t matter if you are called an ‘intern’ or not.” The Ministry plans to expand its crackdown to other companies.

On April 4, Condé Nast settled a lawsuit that effectively ended its unpaid internship program after two interns sued the company for violations of New York labor law.

The New York Times reported in a March 9 article that nearly half of all internships in 2013 were unpaid. There are rules in place regarding the legality of unpaid internships, which are often interpreted in several ways. Federal guidelines state that in order for an unpaid internship to be legal, it must be “for the benefit of the intern” and that the employer may not derive an “immediate advantage from the activities of the intern,” which every company looks at differently.

All this recent news regarding internships forecasts a new national debate on whether they have a place in a just society. For businesses, free labor is a huge incentive. Get the ambitious college kid to do some stuff and pay him zero dollars. It doesn’t get any cheaper than that. As college students, we’re OK with that, and we’ve created a market for it.

Most students or graduates with internship experience will rave about it. Many companies offer very insightful programs that provide an unmatched look into an industry and act as a very well-structured bridge into real employment. Internships are a solution to the “experience needed” problem that so many of us face.

But unpaid internships have a problem that makes them unfair. Most students participating in these free-labor programs come from families that can support them when they aren’t generating income.

What’s to be said for our peers that can’t afford to drop everything and work for free? Not every student can afford to work, especially in places like New York City, for no cash. For every well-off student that is fortunate enough to have his or her parents’ support during an internship, there’s another that has to stock shelves or deliver pizzas just so he or she can fill up the gas tank.

As a result, the latter student has a less impressive resume than the former, all because he or she couldn’t afford to work for free.

So what we have is an inherently unfair program that provides various benefits, but only to those who can afford to participate in it. But if unpaid internships are barred, it could also be taking away opportunities for those that can afford it. At that point, young students can only succeed as much as the lowest common denominator. The fairness of the unpaid internship is a fundamentally political debate, and it’s up to us college students to decide if unpaid internships have a place in a just society.

Phil Kramer is a freshman advertising and marketing management major. His column appears weekly. You can reach him at [email protected] and on Twitter at @PhilipWKramer

 

Published on April 7, 2014 at 1:00 am