Simply holler, “Internships are not racist and elitist!” as loud as you can; repeat as necessary until you believe it.
—Jim Frederick, “Internment Camp”
“I enviously saw them toil in their chosen field for no money,” writes Lucy of her college friends, “while I was desperate to get any job I could that would pay my rent and bills, as I was responsible for all of my own costs in college—rent, food, bills, and tuition … [I] needed to work fulltime while attending school and sixty to seventy hours a week in the summer just to pay bills … Of course their connections through the glamorous world of unpaid internships got them much farther than my ‘real job’ did.”
Siyu, still in school, tells his college newspaper a similar story: “While a lot of my friends have taken unpaid internships in the summer to boost their résumés, I can’t afford to do that. With each internship experience of theirs, I notice the increasing gap between them and me. They are able to afford experiences that I cannot at this point, and these experiences definitely serve as bonuses for their future job searches.”
A Master’s student in Oregon sees little chance of working in politics. “My parents and I immigrated to this country fourteen years ago with little but the clothes on our backs,” he wrote to his local public radio station. “Since I entered college as a freshman many years ago, I have found that I do not have the option to work a full or even a part time internship which is unpaid. For years now, I have been restricted to looking for only paid internships in order to contribute my share to the family’s finances. As someone who is very interested in politics and has studied political science, I have found that this means most of the internships in Washington, D.C., for example, or even some internships at the state level, are not ones that I can afford to participate in simply because they are unpaid. This is essentially a kind of economic stagnation: because I cannot afford to take unpaid internships, I have less experience than some of my more well-off friends and because I am less experienced, I am less employable.”
Then there’s Caitlin, who has plans to be a journalist but can’t afford to take on unpaid work—she spends her summers earning money as a lifeguard: “I love hearing about the unpaid internships my friends have taken, and I don’t resent the fact that they’re able to take them, but I definitely recognize the growing gap between me and them with each internship they take.” Or take Rebecca, who had set her sights on an unpaid consulting internship, before her mother was laid off and part of her college scholarship axed by state budget cuts. She had no choice but to take a paying job. As few consulting firms are now taking candidates without “relevant experience” (read: a consulting internship), Rebecca is justifiably worried: a door may have just closed in her face.1
Lucy, Siyu, Caitlin, and Rebecca are not isolated individuals—most young Americans, in most circumstances, cannot afford to work for free or less than minimum wage for any appreciable period of time. It’s not by any means true that all interns are rich—many, if not most, are making a serious sacrifice to take on unpaid work temporarily, when there’s no other option. However, there is another sizeable, as yet invisible group: the non-interns. It’s impossible to estimate how often a young person’s career ambitions are blocked by the financial hardship of an internship. “You can be whatever what you want when you grow up” is a childhood fairy tale for all but a few. Everyone, at some point, gets a mental map to the realm of the possible, in terms of work and career—everyone gradually internalizes the fact that some professions are for the children of the well-to-do. It’s a conclusion drawn by observing who’s involved, where the jobs are located, what the pay is like, and what the other barriers to entry are. “People reshape their ambitions to fit the situation at any given time,” says Anya Kamenetz, mentioning a friend who toiled as a factchecker without pay, hoping to break into journalism. When financial reality forced him to throw in the towel, he found work at a library and gradually convinced himself into a new career.
Still intimately linked to four-year schools and well-to-do segments of society, internships are often a pipe dream for the 70 percent of young Americans who don’t graduate from college. For this group, any career path that mandates internships is effectively off limits. High school internships, still relatively unusual, are concentrated at wealthier, typically private schools. In communities where college attendance is rare, internships are not even on the radar; among college dropouts, they are a rarity. The overwhelming percentage of community college students have to work paying jobs alongside their classes, leaving many internships out of reach. Who’s left? Even among college undergraduates, 80 percent of whom work, unpaid or low-paid internships are often a serious stretch—and the ability to undertake them far from a given. Ben Yagoda, a professor of journalism at the University of Delaware, states the case succinctly: “The pressure to complete an internship before graduation backs many low-income students into a corner: they can either take a paying job during the summer to earn money and not go further into debt, or they can take out additional loans to finance a summer internship. Both options hurt them in the long-run, by either limiting their experience and therefore marketability as a job candidate, or by accruing more debt.”2 Rising tuition, the cost of textbooks, student-loan rates, and cynical credit card marketing, Yagoda points out, have all been denounced for their role in holding young people back, but unfair internships have largely escaped scrutiny.
For students already exhausted from the climb, internships are the newest rung on the ladder, the latest lap in the credentialing race, as more and more professions require college degrees, special training certificates, special types of experience, and graduate degrees. The connection between class and educational attainment has solidified in recent years, but at least a massive public and private effort has gone into providing financial aid and establishing government-supported schools and universities. Internships, with only the faintest beginnings of such a broad support network, threaten to erase these achievements, leaving scholarship kids and graduates of state schools and community colleges stranded. Although rigorous calculations are impossible, internships are an increasingly potent factor in the disturbing trend of widening social inequality in America—a process four decades in the making that lines up tellingly with the timeline of the internship explosion.
The argument is straightforward: many internships, especially the small but influential sliver of unpaid and glamorous ones, are the preserve of the upper-middle class and the super-rich. These internships provide the already privileged with a significant head start that pays professional and financial dividends over time, as boosters never tire of repeating. The rich get richer or stay rich, in other words, thanks in part to prized internships, while the poor get poorer because they’re barred from the world of white-collar work, where high salaries are increasingly concentrated. For well-to-do and wealthy families seeking to guarantee their offspring’s future prosperity, internships are a powerful investment vehicle, an instrument of self-preservation in the same category as private tutoring, exclusive schools, and trust funds. Meanwhile, a vast group of low- and middle-income families stretch their finances thin to afford thankless unpaid positions, which are less and less likely to lead to real work, and a forgotten majority can’t afford to play the game at all.
How significantly this process exacerbates efforts to build a more meritocratic society is unknown; with better data collection and a longitudinal economic study, we might have an answer. Besides, it’s probably too early to gauge the deepest effects—the internship explosion has only gone fully mainstream, integrated into every white-collar field, since around the turn of the millennium. If current trends hold, today’s interns will dominate critical professions and hold positions of substantial power in a few decades, even more so than today; today’s non-interns will remain trapped in the basement of American life. By the time a proper accounting is possible, the damage to our meritocratic ideals will have been done.
We know how racist and sexist hiring policies, education practices, and work conditions have long perpetuated significant pay differentials between white men, on the one hand, and women and minorities on the other, only recently beginning to narrow under intense legal and social pressures. We know that workplace practices, from the hiring process to the subtle games of office politics, have drastic impacts on social equality. Despite the battle against pay discrimination, income inequality between social classes continues to increase, with Gini coefficients ballooning around the globe—although still rooted in demographic differences, income inequality today is increasingly bound up with age and educational attainment. And, as a recent government-commissioned report in the U.K. discovered, with internships as well.
Reporting on “fair access to the professions” in the U.K., a team of policy-makers led by Alan Milburn, a former cabinet minister from a working-class background, devoted a chapter to the role of internships. According to the panel’s report, “Internships are accessible only to some when they should be open to all who have aptitude. Currently employers are missing out on talented people—and talented people are missing opportunities to progress. There are negative consequences for social mobility and for fair access to the professions. A radical change is needed.” The authors of the Milburn report make three recommendations: internship recruitment should be made transparent; programs should be run according to a set of humane and common-sense standards (given that “many internships, perhaps the majority, are not run so well”), and industries and employers should work towards “the removal of financial barriers for interns.”3
The Milburn report, however diplomatic and cautious its language at times, galvanized opposition to unfair internships in the U.K.—in particular, it attracted attention for noting that, in several fields, “students are now highly unlikely to be able to progress into the profession without a minimum amount of relevant work experience,” i.e. an internship. For example, Britain’s National Union of Journalists told the panel that “under 10 percent of new entrants came from working-class backgrounds, with just 3 percent coming from homes headed by semi-skilled or unskilled workers.” If the link between internships and social inequality remains only a compelling hypothesis, the connection between internships and access to certain professions is unmistakable.
To an equal, if not greater, extent in the U.S., internships have become a barrier to entry, particularly for professions that have broad and authoritative roles in the wider society, such as entertainment, journalism, and politics. A half-century, or even a few decades ago, people of workingclass backgrounds were at least able to fill the lower and middling ranks of these professions; the face of discrimination was more likely to be genderor race-based. Intense competition to break in, bone-deep funding cuts, and the erosion of a culture of paying for work have altered the landscape, with disturbing consequences. As Daniel Brook notes, “a whole host of middle-class careers that are often enjoyable and fulfilling—teaching, writing, music, art, activism, government service—no longer buy the lives they once did.” We now take it for granted that enjoyable professions need not pay well, or perhaps at all—the satisfaction comes from the work, right? “As a result,” writes Brook acidly, “these fields have been relegated to a mix of moral giants, mental midgets, and trust-fund babies.”4
Imagine if people of wealthy backgrounds were disproportionately represented in accounting or racecar driving. If poor inner-city kids never become star polo players. What’s the worst that could happen? The broader social impact of such skewing is likely to be minimal—some amount of demographic determinism may be inevitable, after all, as people figure out their careers. It might be a loss for polo as a sport, drawing from the limited talent pool of toffs, but policy-makers could keep their distance. Yet with internships the case is often altogether different—income issues aside, many of the professions that they unlock matter deeply to the broader society. Film and television shape our hopes and dreams, our stereotypes, our views of history and the future; journalists are opinion-makers, wielding access to vital information day-in and day-out; politicians are at the helm of our economic and social infrastructure, often responsible for matters of life and death. Even if individual filmmakers, columnists, or mayors don’t impinge on our days, the aggregate effect matters; the overall direction of these professions plays a decisive role in the lives of us all.
It’s easier for a working-class kid to enter the business or military elite, writes anthropologist David Graeber, than to penetrate the cultural elite, heavily concentrated in the internship-crazed professions. “A mechanic from Nebraska knows it is highly unlikely that his son or daughter will ever become an Enron executive. But it is possible,” writes Graeber. “There is virtually no chance, however, that his child, no matter how talented, will ever become an international human-rights lawyer or a drama critic for the New York Times. Here we need to remember not just the changes in higher education but also the role of unpaid, or effectively unpaid, internships … It has become a fact of life in the United States that if one chooses a career for any reason other than the salary, for the first year or two one will not be paid.” Graeber points out that in many professions—charitable work or literary criticism, for instance—“structures of exclusion” have existed for a long time, “but in recent decades fences have become fortresses.” The political implication is a recipe for red-state paranoia: the mechanic from Nebraska comes to resent and mistrust the human rights lawyer more than the Enron executive.5
In a straw poll taken at a summer intern lunch in Washington D.C., writes Laura Vanderkam in USA Today, she found that “more than 60 percent of these mostly unpaid interns had parents earning more than $100,000 a year.” She adds: “Only about 20 percent of all families of college students earn that much.” If interns face daily indignities, as we have documented in previous chapters, many are also fundamentally privileged. For all their abuses and contradictions, internships are often effective at furthering careers, although not always. Indignities and mindless work may or may not be worth enduring. But work that is recognizably work, undertaken without wages in return, is like a virus in the labor force, spreading quickly to other sectors—it should be illegal no matter the net worth of the worker. Not having access to an internship can be the kiss of death if you want to move up in the world.6
Access to an internship involves not only being able to afford it, but also being able to get the position in the first place. If personal connections grease the wheels of the job market, they are the motor powering the trade in internships. Drawing on testimony from across the U.K., the Milburn report confirmed that, despite the rising importance of internships, “by and large, they operate as part of an informal economy in which securing an internship all too often depends on who you know and not on what you know.” Few in the U.S. would disagree—and personal connections are only the tip of the iceberg, when academic programs, internship businesses, “experiential education,” non-profits and even auctioneers are all getting in on the act. An individual on her own may stand little chance.
“It’s almost on an endless basis that people ask me for help with internships,” an executive at a well-known company told me. “I’m bombarded with requests and I tend to say yes. I have found them for a lot of people in my network—friends who have kids … If I got a request from someone I didn’t know, to be an intern for me this summer, and it wasn’t coming through a friend or a network, I’d probably turn it down.” In any case, she adds, an internship is “a definite easier ask” for parents (as opposed to a job), “and it’s easier for me to say yes, all I need to do is find a desk, a computer and a phone and that person is on board. I don’t need to make the case that I need to bring another salary in my P and L [Profit and Loss Statement].” She considers it an “informal favor,” “helping people whom I know get access to this experience”—“I’m not going through any corporate channels to do it.” The quality of interns obtained this way has been “diverse,” as she politely phrases it. They were not top-flight talents that she would trust with core functions: “We had a report, and someone stapled everything upside down for me.”
The circle of favors, moreover, is always expanding. “We do work with a Catholic school around the corner,” the executive told me, “because some things that we do for our clients involve curriculum, and we’re always looking for a school to test a curriculum. The nuns called us up and said we’ve tested your curriculum, we’ve been happy to do it. As a favor for us, will you bring in our kids as interns?” Then there’s the senior executive at the firm with strong ties to his ethnic roots: “Every summer he comes to me with kids from his homeland who want internships. Every year it’s so hard to refuse him, we just try to find a space for these kids to sit.”
Until this year, the executive usually employed three or four interns in her office each summer; they would work regular hours “at the basic jobs of the industry” without pay and without academic credit. However, the old policy was dropped recently when the firm’s practices came under scrutiny: “In the past, we had unpaid internships and this year we did change that,” an HR executive at the firm told me. “The reason why we changed to a paid internship is not that we’ve had any difficulty in finding candidates. To the contrary, we have lots and lots of interest in unpaid internships and always have. But there has been particularly this year a sharp increase in media attention and Department of Labor attention to whether or not unpaid internships are truly legal.” The gentlest and most generalized reminder, in other words, was sufficient to make plain the risks that the company was taking—and the interns were worth keeping.
As far as she always knew, added the executive, internships were “one of those gray, gray areas under the law,” but it’s “better to stick with the letter of the law than to push the boundaries,” especially given the recent legal clarifications. Reform of the firm’s internship practices—paying minimum wage is also likely to lead to increased HR involvement with the interns—was a way for the executive to make her mark as a prudent manager, as she’s new to the company. With between twenty-five and thirty summer interns across the entire firm, the move from unpaid to minimum wage will hardly have a traumatic effect on the bottom line. Although this step is something the company should be proud of, the executive’s caution in wanting to remain anonymous is understandable. “Not that I think anybody from the Department of Labor is going to be reading your book and trying to identify companies that might have been in violation in the past,” she said to me, “but I don’t want to take any chances, if you can understand what I mean.”
“We have this advisory board, very high wealth individuals, heads of hedge funds and whatnot,” says “Tom,” describing a well-known poverty alleviation nonprofit founded by a Nobel Prize winner. “They send their nephew in and so we have no choice but to take him.” One summer, he adds, an individual office had six full-time staff, five graduate student interns, and four to five “nephews or nieces of important people” interns. “It happens to us all the time,” says Tom. “Who are these kids? They’re totally ineffective, they take up space, I have to redo their work products—but at the same time, you have to smile and say, ‘Great, thank you so much.’ It’s like babysitting, we have to keep them happy. I get frustrated—I just want somebody who does their job.” The nonprofit gets ten to fifteen résumés a day, he says—“People will do anything for us, they love our founder. People want to be inspired, especially our generation.” But inspiration is for the well connected. Tom says that he has developed a new theory about the NGO world while working there: “I think nonprofit work is for the rich.”
Nonprofit work, fashion, film, the arts: perhaps more than ever before, the rich are working—and dominating particular industries. This is where “the rock-star jobs” and the glamor internships are—the more glamor is perceived, the more vital the connections are and the less likely it is that pay will ever enter the equation. Yet rich kids aren’t the only ones who want the dream careers: according to a national survey conducted a few years back, one out of eighteen college freshmen expected to become an actor, musician, or artist. “The policy at almost all the auction houses, museums, the whole art world, is that internships are unpaid,” “John,” an art history major, told me matter-of-factly. At the auction house where he interned, many interns who had previously received (meager) pay had just lost it, and a new rotation of interns (there are five rotations each year) had been added, “mostly because they had experienced a whole bunch of layoffs and just needed manpower.” During John’s academicyear stint, he edited an entire catalogue for his department, which he called a positive experience overall, although admittedly in a very particular work environment: “Almost everyone I was working with was privileged in some sort of manner. And one of the other interns I was working with was literally royalty. The amount of work that she was ready to do was next to nothing. Her father is a customer.”
Elite auction houses, fancy galleries and prestigious museums are already closely associated with wealthy elites, who steer and support them: perhaps some skewing in their workforces is not surprising; in any case, they represent a fairly small niche. But a wide range of lesser-known careers now emanate at least a local glamor, from book publishing to public relations, from sports management to graphic design, and even some areas of the law. “I noticed that summer I interned with the judge that all the interns were rich kids: all the interns were driving Lexuses, Mercedes, like all leather, fully loaded cars,” a young lawyer told me of her internship on the Ninth Circuit Court. “I realized that the only way people in law school can work for judges is by being from wealthy backgrounds. By working with a judge, you get to network with that judge and other judges, and you just get an insight into the process that no one else does. We got to see why they picked applicants to interview for a clerkship. We got to know the reputations of judges—what do they want, what do they not want. Clerkships are so hard to get that any little bit helps.”
In small professional worlds like animation, theater, and photography, between the overproduction of the relevant academic degrees and the high demand to break in, conditions continue to worsen significantly for interns. Floods of family-supported interns have brought the bargaining power of young professionals in these fields, minuscule to begin with, close to zero. “These internship opportunities no one would be able to accept if they didn’t have the money to support themselves while learning about their craft,” says “Sandy,” referring to the twelve- and sometimes fifteen-hour days she’s spent on the dream of becoming a stage manager, every hour well below minimum wage. Interning and apprenticing at four theaters across the country (in Maine, New Jersey, Florida, and California), three of them unionized, Sandy has never been able to earn more than $150 per week, though sometimes housing and food have been covered. Nor has she ever been able to take on other jobs simultaneously. With three college internships under her belt, Sandy is more than five years into the intern trap, with no end in sight—she’s still in the game thanks to family support.
Considerable online controversies have recently broken out around the extent of the unreasonable demands now made even by the most famous and flourishing employers. A recent case in point: the studio of photojournalist James Nachtwey posted an intern-seeking ad, looking for candidates with an impressive range of specialized skills for a minimum of three months of unpaid work. The backlash was intense for Nachtwey, perhaps particularly so because he is a photographer considered to be at the apex of his profession, with prestigious, six-figure monetary awards to his name—especially well known for creating work in war zones or during epidemics that makes transparent appeals for social justice. “It is insulting, and frankly should be illegal in that it discriminates on the basis of class,” wrote one commenter on Jamie’s List, a website for professional photographers. Another called such unpaid internship postings “especially shameful when they’re attached to individuals—such as Nachtwey—and institutions that claim to be working in the interest of social justice.” Everyone understands that the next generation of Nachtweys is not to be found among the Third World victims he photographs. A welleducated elite from well-to-do backgrounds will stand behind the camera.7
“Because cultural work is prominently featured in popular discourse, especially in visual images, and associated with trendsetters, beautiful people, hipness and cool,” writes Gina Neff, unpaid internships, freelance arrangements, and other forms of precarious “entrepreneurial labor” become “a model for how workers in other industries should also behave under flexible employment conditions.” And perhaps the ultimate model of this type—where everyone is now a free agent, where projects coalesce and dissolve without cease, where a few hits subsidize a heap of failures—is the entertainment industry: the vast penumbra of brand-name studios, production companies, television networks, record labels, and so on that stretches over the endless offices of Hollywood, Burbank, and Manhattan. What happens when glamor internships—and the resulting socioeconomic skew in the workforce—become part and parcel of an industry that employs millions, is heavily unionized, and exerts enormous influence around the world?
It’s no secret that the world of entertainment, particularly film and television, is an unlikely cocktail of highly skilled, unionized professionals mixed in with the wealthy and well connected, basking and dabbling in the scene. What effect does it have when only the well off can afford the internships necessary to become producers, directors, or screenwriters? These figures wield a massive influence; the nature of their background matters. The personal socioeconomic background of studio heads, filmmakers and television producers is manifestly influential in the projects they pursue and the way they pursue them. The “new Hollywood” of the 1970s, ushered in by ethnic, working-class directors like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, championed realistic, countercultural work over vapid, feel-good musicals. Since then, a concerted effort around increasing Hollywood’s ethnic and racial diversity has left questions of class behind. What might we expect of a grown-up “intern generation” defining taste in film and television a few decades hence? On a guess, a homogenization of taste, a preference for the lavish over the shoestring, plot settings endlessly recurring in southern California suburbs and New York City, upper-middle or upper-class heroes and heroines, unrealistic and unrepresentative portrayals of American life, and a lack of pointed social commentary. In short, we’re already halfway there.
Indeed, to some extent, the idea that you need to pay your dues and work your way up is already deeply rooted in the entertainment business, with foundational myths like Steven Spielberg’s “unofficial, on-the-fly internship,” seven days a week unpaid at Universal Studios. According to a Vanity Fair profile, the young Spielberg simply “showed up on the lot wearing a suit, his dad’s briefcase in hand” and “settled into an empty office … making himself known to the cinematographers and directors.” George Lucas’ internship at Warner Brothers landed him on the set of a musical directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who mentored the young USC graduate.8
“In this industry, if you aren’t willing to debase yourself for free, you’re in trouble, because someone else will,” according to Matt Singer, who has written on his multiple internships in the film business. “A bad internship is a slippery slope of degradation and exploitation. When I quit several months later,” Singer writes of a film-editing internship, “I hadn’t edited a single piece of film, but I had spent an afternoon visiting every Vitamin Shoppe in midtown on a futile quest for a discontinued flavor of Power-Bar.” At another internship, Singer writes, “I spent an entire week ineptly assembling a large tape cabinet” and was then “scolded for my lack of carpentry skills”; at a third, he was “a pro bono valet to a producer who would not make eye contact with me, and who routinely demanded I pour her soda into a mug so that she needn’t sip it from the can.”
“Tyler,” an eight-time intern and now an independent comedy writer, saw internships as the only way into entertainment: he was a suburban kid from Long Island, without family or friends to plug him into the scene. “I really was convinced,” he says, “that having more than a half dozen internships on my résumé before I graduated college was going to seal the deal wherever I went, but it wasn’t the case.” No deals were sealed, no offers were made, and he looks back with some amazement on it all. “Everybody was gunning for a job—it was near impossible,” says Tyler, but people would keep hoping against hope and making more and more sacrifices. There’s the illusory sense that one more internship, or one more month on a job, might put you over the top. Interns, like actors, are betting on a long shot, waiting to be discovered.
Almost all of his intern colleagues had parental support behind them—more than that, says Tyler, “especially at the bigger places, so much of it is based on nepotism.” Particularly “over the springs and summers, the interns were so often comprised of nephews or nieces or cousins of higher-ups.” He stayed afloat thanks to paying jobs on the side, finding temp work, tutoring, squeezing oranges at a downtown juice bar. It hardly mattered to Tyler as long as the work supported his interning habit.
In the world of TV—Tyler had successive unpaid gigs at Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live—interns give the big-shots “the ability or the opportunity to be lazy, and feel better about themselves, by dumping tasks on kids who are just trying to figure things out.” Still, there was no other way, he reasoned—and a twenty-year-old doesn’t have the time, not to mention the clout, to change the whole system. At Conan, he was answering phone calls, running errands, and delivering mail. The hierarchy was strict and beyond question: “The writers were treated like kings and we weren’t allowed to talk to them without being spoken to.” At SNL, the atmosphere was better, or at least someone as experienced and driven as Tyler was able to make the best of it: “I forced my way into sitting in on writers’ meetings, seeing scripts that were going to be tossed, or sketches that were going to be canned, just taking in as much as possible, even if it was somewhat under the radar.”
At SNL, errands and menial work were nonetheless always the norm. “I had to take a car to New Jersey to pick up a sumo wrestler’s outfit, and I was just like, what am I doing? What, this is really teaching me a lot about comedy writing and television production?” Worse for his morale was an errand he was given during a major blizzard, when he had to deliver a script to a writer’s home on a Saturday night. “I was freezing, there were piles and piles of snow, and I had this wet envelope, and all I wanted to do was get to a place that’s warm and maybe use the bathroom.” After arriving at the writer’s apartment building in Chelsea, he trudged up four or five flights of stairs, “so exhausted, a wet mess,” and rang the bell, only to have the voice of the invisible writer dismiss him summarily: “Throw it in front of my door. Have a nice day.” “That was definitely a degrading and infuriating moment,” says Tyler. Yet these opportunities are desperately in demand.
“So many of them are executive referrals,” admits “Laura” of her interns—she is a television executive at a major studio, running one of the most formal internship programs in the industry. Diversity is “absolutely” a problem in television, she says, and internships exacerbate it. A decade ago, she says, connections were everything; interning was so informal that the studio’s legal, safety, and labor relations staff didn’t even know about it—“Then I think there was an incident where somebody [an intern] got hurt,” says the executive, “and it was like, ‘What do we do? What intern? Why didn’t you tell us you had an intern? You can’t be doing that.’ ” Now the studio advertises with local colleges, sometimes receiving up to fifty applications for one spot; and there are typically thirty interns per semester, a third of them working in corporate (paid $10 an hour, supervised by HR) and the other two-thirds on individual shows (unpaid, unsupervised, required to receive academic credit). “We have to check the paperwork,” says Laura, in regard to students receiving credit—the studio has no other responsibilities in this respect. “Especially with the economy the way it is, and here where we’ve had a reduction in workforce, [the interns] fill a very important need,” the executive adds—they cover phones, alphabetize files, make deliveries, and sometimes do the work of coordinators as well, handling budgets and call sheets. “When we have a lot of people on vacation or who are out sick, we deploy the interns,” she says. With the recent layoff of multiple production assistants, interns filled the breach.
Without money or connections behind you, it’s a serious uphill battle, says “Sally,” who calls herself “one of the fortunate ones who rose from intern to PA [production assistant]”. “I’ve seen a lot of people that came here [to LA] that couldn’t get a job, or couldn’t afford to work for free, so they went back to Utah, or Colorado, or wherever they’re from. You have to be able to sacrifice, take a risk, live in a studio, or live with six people. If you don’t know anyone, then you’ve got to hustle.” Sally knows what she’s talking about—having grown up in a poor, single-parent family and working multiple internships during college, just barely scraping by.
In many cases, the thankless unpaid labor doesn’t necessarily end even after a string of internships. “Working for free as a PA is something you need to do—a lot of them work for free, or they work for mileage or they work for food,” says Sally, adding that “mileage” in Hollywood often does not include commuting, only driving on the job in one’s own car. Indeed, conditions for PAs are not unlike those faced by interns, although the former are generally in their mid- or late-twenties, already college graduates, sometimes with substantial work experience. Long-time showbiz journalist David Robb writes that you can recognize PAs because “they wear earpieces on the set so they can be yelled at from afar—and they all have stories of abuse.” They are “the lowest-paid workers on the set—if paid at all—and the only ones without a union, the only ones no union even wants to bother with. In Hollywood’s caste system, they are the untouchables.” Robb cites a Craigslist ad, representative of the vital, highly skilled labor that companies are trying to scoop up for free: “Looking for experienced production assistant for upcoming featurelength film shoot in Missouri. Great for your résumé! We are looking for those who feel comfortable with/and have: Camera/equipment knowledge; camera set up, working closely with DP; lighting set up; transporting equipment and heavy lifting. Compensation: no pay.” Increasingly, such ads also use the word “production intern” or “intern PA,” in an attempt to skirt the law.9
Sally at least may have finally broken through; she’s just started a production company of her own. Now that the tiny start-up is just moving out of stealth mode, says Sally with a laugh, she’s planning to go back to her old campus and get some interns.
“Jim” considered himself lucky—at least he had an internship. The summer after his sophomore year, already feeling “behind the eightball” in the internship arms race, Jim marshaled college connections to score an unpaid, full-time position at NBC in New York. But there was a last-minute catch—a friend from school, who had promised Jim a place to sleep for the summer, backed out of the arrangement. Jim spent the rest of the summer effectively homeless, crashing on more than twenty different couches in the tri-state area and exhausting his extended network. “It was harder to get people to commit for the weekends—I’d usually end up traveling really far,” remembers Jim, who hefted his duffel bag everywhere the entire summer and bought six-packs of Brooklyn Pennant Ale to thank his hosts. It was his first time ever in New York.
“It definitely hurt my confidence, in terms of who I am as a person,” says Jim, who grew up in a small town and is the youngest son of two public interest lawyers. “I went back home and my dad is angry, he’s in tears, insecure that he can’t provide a place to live for his son, to try to further his career. That was tough, to see that.” Jim learned that General Electric, NBC’s parent company, with its market capitalization over $160 billion, declines to pay minimum wage to many of its youngest workers; that only the well off and well connected can land a prestigious internship and afford to take it. Three years later, Jim says he figured out “the whole getting-a-job thing is completely bogus in the upper crust of society.” Still, he’s not sure how he could have done anything differently: “I don’t know how anyone ever explains multiple summers with huge divots in your résumé. What, you worked at Walmart? A gas station? It’s a joke.” For the vast majority of students who are not top of their class or graduating from top-tier schools, he says, internships are one of the few ways to distinguish yourself: “Unless you have 4.0 or 3.9 [GPA], who are you? The kids at our school that did jobs that are meaningless in terms of learning or progressing your career were just laughed at.”
There is an increasingly stark divide between interns who coast along with the help of their parents and interns like Jim, possibly a much larger group—crashing on couches, taking out loans, working serious side-jobs that pay, even going on food stamps. These ways of coping with internship pressures do allow the less well heeled to play, for a time, and perhaps even win the internship game—but rarely can they go as far, or hold out as long, as the kids with parental backing and open checkbooks. Intern Bridge, in cooperation with Phil Gardner, alleges that unpaid internships in most fields “skew towards low-income families,” indicating just how much of a sacrifice many interns and their families are making.
According to Intern Bridge reports, some three-quarters of students report that they need a paying job in order to work an unpaid internship. Even full-time “jobs on the side” are not uncommon: in two cases I have come across, unpaid interns at ABC and MTV worked as full-time bartenders, from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., to support themselves—one still had to take out extra student loans to cover academic credit costs. The New York Times described Susan Lim, an undergraduate taking an unpaid internship doing public policy research, as working eighty-nine hours a week one summer, and well aware of the gulf between her and her wealthier fellow interns: “I have to do the same things they do plus more to get to the same place.” Phil Gardner sees the negative academic effects of students’ piling on both unpaid internships and paid work: “In that scenario, something’s got to give. And I tell you what, it’s more likely to be my class than the workplaces—because they need the income and they need the credential of the internship to get where they want to go, and the hell with the classes they’re taking.”10
One in nine Americans, to give the most conservative estimate, now rely on food stamps, meeting the income requirements of the federal relief program—and evidence is mounting that many of the new recipients (over 500,000) are in their twenties and have some college education, according to the Department of Agriculture. Anecdotally, it appears that more than a few of them are interns. In one case, an unpaid, full-time intern at a literary magazine had to go on food stamps and Medicaid a year after graduating with honors from a renowned college; in another, a directing intern at a theater, receiving an “exceptionally modest” stipend, relied on food stamps to get by. The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith, dramatizes the real-life story of Chris Gardner, who was forced to live on the streets, homeless with his young son, during a sixmonth unpaid internship as a stockbroker at Dean Witter. If such stories are relatively rare, they nonetheless make a point: internships leave us vulnerable, allowing no room for error, and forcing some, in extremis, onto the mercies of the welfare state.
Few of the teenagers and twenty-somethings from Jim’s small town take on internships, he says, lacking the connections to beat the competition and the wherewithal and the mentality to live in a big, expensive city. And even though he pulled it off, Jim found himself a second-class citizen, barely able to keep up. Because of the low-quality “journal entries” he submitted, he didn’t even earn the dubious 0.0 credit offered by his college, which NBC required: “I’m miserable because I have to work for free, and I’m having to then write journal entries about it just so that my college can vet me for the company, so I just sent crap over.”
That was Jim’s first and last summer in journalism—after graduating, he found work at a tech company. He’s one of many middle-class kids from small-town America effectively shut out by a journalism profession that now asks its entrants to work for free and earn expensive graduate school credentials—all for an uncertain future. In print journalism, paying your dues used to mean a few low-paid years at a small-town newspaper; now it just as often entails an expensive graduate degree and unpaid stints. A significant percentage of the editorial staff at any given newspaper, magazine, news radio or television station got started this way, although the chances of any given intern converting to regular employment remain abysmally low. “It certainly weeds out a certain percentage of people who would be interested in it,” says Ryan Krogh of Outside magazine, where eight of the twelve editors began as Outside interns, including those at the top of the masthead. At Harper’s, nine of eighteen editors are reported to have started there as interns.
“Every single person on the editorial staff did one internship somewhere,” says Anya Kamenetz of Fast Company, the business magazine where she works and where interns have outnumbered staff writers since the recession. Historically, in part because of strong unions, newspaper interns were once more likely to be paid than their counterparts in television—this is no longer the case. The New Media platforms replacing failing and struggling newspapers are even less likely to offer fair compensation for work. “I have a friend who has a small gossip website,” one disillusioned Hollywood intern told me, “and he was able to get six summer interns responsible for updating digital content, tweeting, and updating their Facebook status updates.”
As in other fields, the growth of credentialing in journalism has fed directly into the rise of internships—many “j schools” now require fulltime internships during the degree, charging substantial tuition and providing relatively little support in return. “Unpaid internships are discriminatory,” says Howard Schneider, a former editor of Newsday (which uses unpaid interns) and now the dean of the journalism school at SUNY–Stony Brook. “You are basically eliminating students who can’t afford to do these.” Schneider is one of the few at least asking the right questions: “At what point are we just feeding this beast that continues to use these students as surrogates? At what point do we wind up helping these news organizations defer ever deciding to hire anybody?”
“Sarah,” like many of her 150 classmates at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, already had a magazine internship under her belt when her junior year rolled around—the usual semester for required fulltime internships, many of them outside Illinois. “A huge ripoff,” says Sarah, “I had to pay almost regular tuition to have a full-time internship,” primarily fact-checking for a small monthly. Northwestern provided two brief internship check-ins and helped some of the students secure their positions. This is the same program in which MaryBeth Lipp, another Medill student, “felt vulnerable, fearful, disrespected, alone, and powerless” when sexual harassment began a few weeks into her internship, as described in Chapter 4.
Sarah ended up doing five internships in journalism, she told me, before realizing that she had to switch fields to find paying work. She blames herself for not realizing that simply having had internships in journalism put her in too broad a category to land most journalism jobs: specialization starts early. The last journalism stint—a year after she had graduated from college—involved moving back to Chicago, on an editor’s insistence that the internship was a temporary measure while he arranged a full-time position. Then “about a month into it,” Sarah told me, “he got fired/resigned, and then I was stuck at this internship with no prospect of a real job there … So I was like, well shit, back to square one. What can I do? So I looked for internships again”—only this time in the world of environmental non-profits. Four months later, an internship became a full-time position, thanks in part to deft maneuvering on Sarah’s part: “It was my first salaried job ever, two years after graduating. That was a big deal for me: I’m getting benefits, I’m going to have health insurance!”
The same struggle that kept Sarah out of journalism is something she also recently witnessed in her new field, while speaking on a panel about international nonprofit work: “The room was full of people with Master’s degrees, some people with ten years of experience, and they were all unemployed … There was seriously a desperate vibe in the room. And the panelists, including myself, kept encouraging people to get an internship: ‘Why don’t you just pack your bags and volunteer at an organization you really love?’ Some of these people got really frustrated and they raised their hands and they were like, ‘Look I don’t know what your situation is, but I could never pack my bags and leave. I just could not afford it. Do you have any more practical advice?’ ” “It’s pretty brutal,” she adds, for “people who are knee-deep in student loans from getting their Master’s and can’t get a job” to have no option but unpaid work.
Sarah saw these effects on the field she left behind: “Journalism is not diverse—in the newsroom there are a lot of men, a lot of white men. I personally found it unfair that a lot of my classmates were able to take these unpaid internships in New York or D.C. at all these really prestigious publications—they all offer unpaid internships: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal. I know that some of these kids’ parents were helping them with the cost of living. I can’t even consider that as an option; it wouldn’t work; I couldn’t do that. Meanwhile their résumés look really prestigious.” The annual Newsroom Census of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), which has tracked diversity in journalism since 1978, confirms what Sarah saw firsthand—despite some improvement, minorities still represent only 13 percent of the workforce (although they constitute more than a third of the U.S. population).
“Isabel,” who completed two unpaid public radio internships, sees broad ramifications for a profession whose members increasingly hail from upper-middle-class and upper-class backgrounds: “Almost everyone I knew doing internships were white upper-middle-class people who went to private universities. It narrows the voices of who we hear, it narrows the kind of news that we hear. Obviously you can have people from an upper-middle-class background who interview poor people, but they’re not going to cover it in the same way and there’s not going to be as rich a dialogue … That’s something I’ve felt in general that public radio does lack, it tends to cover upper-middle-class issues.” Adelle Waldman echoed this view in her New Republic article “Intern or Die”: “when news is delivered by people who harbor such similar ambitions and come from such similar backgrounds, people who have spent their summers in the same cities and have worked at the same types of organizations … they are likely to keep spotting and writing about the same types of issues—and keep missing different ones.”11
The same principle is coming to apply in many of the glamorous and creative fields where internships are ascendant: public interest lawyers drawn to the same kinds of cases, artists influenced more by aesthetic rather than political or class considerations, politicians sharing the same tired perspectives on how to defeat poverty. Politics in particular should give us pause for thought, although we have already examined the frightening internship hierarchy of Washington in Chapter 6. Where does that wise injunction “follow the money” lead us in the world of unpaid political internships? What are the consequences of relying on the voluntarism of the well-to-do, rather than a professional system of payment for work, open to all who are qualified?
First and foremost, a system of unpaid or underpaid internships is inherently limiting: any field in which it takes hold is trading away access to the best, most diverse talent for short-term, small-time savings. Instead of bemoaning the fact that many of the best and brightest now choose the private sector over public service, and attributing it all to high salaries and dazzling opportunities, we should ask a more basic question: is it even possible for a poor kid to break into politics anymore, at least without a serious champion, an enlightened university, or a dedicated nonprofit plucking her out of the crowd?
In a fascinating case study, the New York Times analyzed the nearly 1,500 interns who have worked unpaid at City Hall under New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a fierce critic of nepotism. According to a mayoral spokesman, one in five interns was directly recommended by someone in the administration. Sometimes still in middle school, the children, grandchildren, and stepchildren of prominent political, business, and media figures all figured prominently (from the progeny of Goldman Sachs, CBS, and Blackstone Group executives to the scions of well-connected wordsmiths Tim Russert, Neil Simon, and Robert Caro).12
A truly representative politics is almost beyond our comprehension: a politics in which people of different professional backgrounds all took part, for instance, instead of the current tyranny of lawyers. Or a politics that included some leaders who had not graduated from the usual fouryear colleges, to take another example. Internships are now another hoop to jump through for this homogenous mass of leaders, who have largely lapped up the same experiences and the same perspectives already. A stale, elitist politics is practically inevitable under such circumstances. A political system built on free, well-connected labor is a shaky edifice, an even more dire playground for the rich than Hollywood—at worst, the system becomes a tool of their interests, tinkered with or maintained at their beck and call; at best, it is a well-intentioned club of those born luckily to wealth, struggling to overcome the narrow viewpoints of their own class.
Kunda Musambacine was born in Zambia, attended school in England, and moved to the U.S. at age sixteen, thinking he wanted to be an artist. He took a marketing job, in deference to his family’s encouragement to be more practical, but was laid off as the dotcom world went up in flames. As the next bubble began to form in real estate, Musambacine found work in construction, mostly as a carpenter, before he decided to complete his Bachelor’s degree. “Internships were not part of my vocabulary at that time,” says Musambacine, who considered becoming a teacher. Now internships are what he lives and breathes.
From a small, anonymous office in downtown Oakland, Musambacine is working to bridge the internship divide for minorities. He is a manager for INROADS, a St. Louis–based nonprofit which recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary and is dedicated to placing minority college students in high-powered corporate internships. With approximately 100 employees in twelve different offices around North America, INROADS has arranged over 26,000 internships at hundreds of blue-chip companies since its founding. “Our goal is that at the end of their college career that student actually gets a position with the company,” says Michelle Neal, regional director for the Pacific Northwest—and the organization claims a 50 percent success rate, operating “one person at a time, trying to change the landscape.”
Musambacine and the other managers in Oakland work with local employers such as healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente, Google, Target, IBM, and Traveler’s Insurance, helping them fill internship slots with top-flight African American, Hispanic, and Native American college students. INROADS actively recruits students across the country through minority student business clubs, career centers, and campus events, at four-year colleges only; there are some 10–15,000 applicants annually, around 15–20 percent of whom will ultimately make the cut. Those selected are actively mentored by INROADS staff before they start work, provided with mock interviews, helped with their résumés, evaluated, and trained in skills like “impression management.” Students and companies have the final say concerning placements, but INROADS does the matchmaking—on average, the organization sustains itself by charging companies $4,000 per intern. For companies, INROADS is a diversity pipeline.
All INROADS interns are paid, usually between $15 and $20 per hour, and the students are expected to complete at least two summers with the same firm. “We require the company not only to have a supervisor, but to have a mentor for that student,” says Neal. “What we try to do with an internship is to make these students ready not just for an entry-level position but for something higher … The company is saying, ‘We are investing in you to move you on a fast track of management.’ ” Nowadays, INROADS often finds its internship placements through its own alumni, who’ve been climbing the corporate hierarchy ever since Father Frank C. Carr was inspired by Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to found the organization. “He realized that minorities did not have the same footing as their white counterparts,” says Neal, “and that these talented students may have done well in school, but once they got into the real world, they didn’t necessarily have the foundation to help them progress in the corporate world.” At its height a decade ago, the program had 6,000 interns in a single year, but “the economy has had a big influence,” according to Neal—the annual number is now a third of that.
“INROADS got her out of her shell, polished her up, and got her prepared for the corporate world,” Neal says, citing a young woman who immigrated from Mexico at age thirteen, barely able to speak English, graduated high school near the top of her class, and is now a rising star in the field of healthcare. “It’s changing, but it’s not something most minorities know is a step you need to take,” says Neal. “Internships are something that minorities have not had ingrained in them. I think it’s very much an expectation in the white upper-middle class … but for a minority student, it’s almost vital for them to be competitive,” in particular to counter advantages such as nepotism and personal connections. At the same time, Neal admits that the program includes the “relatively privileged,” and Musambacine says that the socioeconomic profile of INROADS students is “more middle class” than when the program began.
INROADS is not alone—a small group of other organizations, mostly focused on fast-tracking minority students into positions of corporate leadership, have also chosen internships as their weapon of choice. Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) focuses on helping minorities break into Wall Street; the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities works on placing Latino students in paid government internships; Management Leadership for Tomorrow takes a broad approach to training “the next generation of African American, Hispanic, and Native American leaders.” Tellingly, all these organizations have focused on internships as a crucial bottleneck; leveraging the diversity commitments of Fortune 500 companies, they have managed to spread the internship wealth a little further. The number of interns who benefit is tiny in the scheme of things, but at least the model focuses on well-paid, actively mentored internships and galvanizing employer interest—though it remains to be seen if such enthusiasm would extend beyond elite minority recruitment.
As an intern for the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, Emanuel Pleitez helped create Latinos on the Fast Track (LOFT), another program along these lines, supporting internships for students who had already received scholarship money from the foundation. “If you fund organizations that have reach into communities that are underrepresented,” he points out, “then you’re helping to level the playing field. If you’re just making paid internships, the same networks will find those paid internships. You’re just paying the interns that have an in.” In other words, pay is secondary to access in the grand scheme of things—a point that is reasonable enough for short-term internship stints and is supported by the fact that high-income students are heavily represented in paid internships. Pleitez sees minority families as being relatively more skeptical about the value of working for free, particularly post-graduation. “At the end of the day,” he says, “the parents will be supportive of their kids, but they’re not exposed to the possibilities. They just look at their balance sheet every month and say, ‘Hey, can you help out with this or that?’ ”
Pleitez himself, having gathered the importance of internships early on, gradually convinced his family that there might come a period when he wouldn’t be able to contribute his share to the family finances. For one of his internships, at a nonprofit community organization near his university, Pleitez was also able to use funds from the Federal Work-Study Program, which gives schools substantial latitude in supporting the work of students on financial aid. (Essentially, the federal program pays most of the student’s wage, while the community organization contributes a small portion and is able to say it has “paid internships.”) “Someone from my background,” Pleitez sums up, “would be willing do an internship if they’re told in advance that they’re going to have to prepare for this, and they’re at least given housing and food.”
How long could these interns hold out—for two or three years and through a variety of career possibilities, like some serial interns? Are middle-class minorities more deserving than non-minority workingclass students? Are those not enrolled in four-year colleges simply beyond help? Do we always want more internships, regardless of their fairness and quality, as long as they provide nebulous “opportunities”? Affirmative action–style internship organizations raise as many questions as they answer. Their approach is understandably pragmatic, accepting internships as an established force, a lever to move the world. For any one of us, an internship, if we can secure it and afford it, may well be the way to launch a career—perhaps stultifying, but necessary. Yet internships are spreading faster than we can reform then, and “internships for all” cannot save the day—just as “college for all” has not.
So what about everybody else? What happens to the non-interns? Some will succeed anyway, of course, but many more will languish in an underworld of menial, low-wage work, trapped under a new glass ceiling or spirited away from particular professions. Internships are dividing us.