Unpaid internships? File under 'hypocrisy'
Unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, it's difficult to justify this exploitation of young people.
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When I was a college student, a summer internship at a big-city newspaper seemed just the thing to boost my nascent journalism career. But instead, I spent the summers as a big-city doorman, filling in for the regulars while they were on vacation. The reason was simple: Being a doorman paid a lot more, and I needed the money for tuition.
A generation later, for a student in my shoes, the situation is quite a bit worse. Nowadays many internships don't pay anything at all, yet landing an internship has come to seem almost essential. The National Assn. of Colleges and Employers says that in 2008, about half of graduating students had held internships. The same organization found, in a 2009 survey, that "more than three-quarters of responding employers said they prefer candidates with the kind of relevant work experience gained through an internship."
I will leave aside the debate over whether minimum-wage and other labor laws safeguard workers, promote unemployment or both. Nor will I plunge into the age-old question of when it's morally permissible to violate the law. What I'm interested in here is hypocrisy.
The reality is that unpaid internships are a great way of giving the children of affluence a leg up in life. If they really do help young people get permanent jobs in desirable fields, then the current internship system has the effect, however unintended, of reserving this advantage mainly for well-to-do families — families that happen to be disproportionately white. (Unpaid internships are No.105 on blogger Christian Lander's hilarious list of "stuff white people like.")
Unpaid internships? File under 'hypocrisy' - latimes.com
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