Internships

I penned a post critiquing Anya Kamenetz's op-ed against internships yesterday and sparked some interesting debate, so let's continue this a bit. A couple points seem worth extending:

• You can't "make" internships paid positions. You can outlaw internships, which will transform some fraction of them into jobs and do away with the rest. You'll also find it tricky to distinguish between volunteering (can I "volunteer" with The American Prospect for a summer?) and the now-outlawed category of unpaid internships. My guess is neither Kamenetz nor my readers want The Nation to stop providing internships, they just want law firms to pay their interns. Problem is, you can disentangle the two. That there already exist some paid internships simply proves that institutions who value the work and can afford the expense are paying.

• There's some belief that the primary worth of internships is through unpaid labor to employers. I'm skeptical. It's rather inefficient to be cycling through series of young laborers, retraining new sets with every season. Hiring one person who can become experienced and proficient at the work and remain for a sustained period of time is likely a better deal.

As it is, I'd guess the main benefits of internships are 1) for employers to discover new talent and 2) for interns to discover if they like the profession/workplace. But they can only serve that function when many different applicants can occupy short-term positions, which is not a particularly efficient way to manage paid spots. Force employers to pay interns and most of them will simply cease hiring interns, particularly for those internships which fulfill the try-before-you-buy function I'm identifying. This is a long way of saying internships exist because they are unpaid. Otherwise they'd be a massively inefficient allocation of resources, and the spots would dry up. The American Prospect, which has four new interns starting tomorrow, simply couldn't afford to pay them. We're not even hiring a new writing fellow this year. Would it really be a better outcome if these kids couldn't try out magazine work?

• Internships are massively class-biased. The answer, however, isn't to kill internships, but to make interning financially feasible down the income ladder. Many colleges already do this, allowing students to apply for grants and stipends. Liberals should want to extend these opportunities to try more vocations and find a fulfilling workplace, not limit them. And since when are we against new and exciting subsidy programs!?

It's also worth noting that internships aren't necessarily making various jobs more class-biased than they already are. Everything in our society is class-biased, and given that colleges tend to subsidize internships for their low-income students, the real choke point is in getting to college, not in the DNC's summer interns program. But that shouldn't distract from the above graf. If the problem is internships, kill them off. But if the problem is their financial burden for the poor, fix that. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater and such.

• Haven't internships always been around? They were just called apprenticeships before.

• Kamenetz's argument that internships will fundamentally reorient the worker-employer relationship by making the worker overly grateful and less sympathetic to unions is literally one of the oddest arguments I've ever heard. Low wage workers have always been the most fertile ground for unions, while high wage workers have seen little need for further bargaining power. Interns, in any case, aren't future low wage workers. There's a reason SEIU is worried about Wal-Mart rather than Goldman-Sachs.

• For more, read Andrew Samwick and, particularly, Wil Wilkinson, whose rebuttal to her first paragraph is one of the funnier rejoinders I've read recently.