The Value of Unpaid Internships: A Debate

Who profits from unpaid labor? The Editor and the intern go head to head about Ross Perlin's Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (Verso, 2011).

By Emily Witt, reporter for the New York Observer (and former OA intern)

Marc Smirnoff's response appears below Ms. Witt's article.

Those who can, do; those who can’t, intern.

This, at least, is how I saw it when, in September 2004, I moved to Arkansas from New York City to intern at The Oxford American—I saw it as a sort of failure.

“I applied for an internship at The Oxford American in Little Rock, Arkansas,” I wrote to a friend at the time. “I’m not sure I would be furthering anything to just leave New York for an unpaid internship in bumblefuck.”

My friend wrote back: “What is The Oxford American?”

I was a year out of college, twenty-three years old, and I felt an acute sense of failure and uncertainty. I had no idea what to do with my newly acquired education. I was lonelier than I had ever been before or since. I had moved to New York from Providence after graduation because some friends of my deceased grandparents had a place I could squat in for the summer. At first, I got a job as a permalancing copywriter at an advertising agency, but six months in I was laid off, mostly because my disgust for tricking people into buying things was overly palpable.

After that I did anything that came up: I wrote articles for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle; I temped in the structured finance departments of corporate law firms collating what I now recognize as tranches of mortgage-backed securities; I hostessed at the pizza restaurant below my apartment and wrote capsule restaurant reviews for New York Magazine. For a year, I refused to do an unpaid internship: The only work I did unpaid was to produce a one-act play I wrote that had miraculously been accepted into a summer festival at a theater in SoHo—my first affirmation as a writer. This is not to say I was financially independent of my parents. They were covering my student loans, my health insurance, any trips to visit them, and financially fatal stupidities: stepping on my eyeglasses, say, or parking my brother’s car in a tow zone.

I lived in a closet-sized room in Brooklyn on Flatbush Avenue that I rented for only $575 a month. Soot accumulated on the windowsills. The rumbling of trucks and buses outside was so loud that I had to go to the back of the apartment to hear people on the phone. I was sleeping on a Japanese futon. I had two roommates. One worked for Michael Moore and was never around. The other had recently moved out of our apartment to live with his girlfriend, installing as his replacement a hypochondriac who slept in a hospital bed brought over from his childhood bedroom in Queens. The hypochondriac supposedly had a node on his vocal chord that would flare up and prevent him from speaking, and tendonitis that demanded he type with his toes. He was always in the apartment, cooking hard-boiled eggs and “working on his book.” He aspired to be a humor writer.

It was around the time when the hypochondriac first asked me on a date, and when my boss at the pizza restaurant told me my wardrobe—the wardrobe of a person who could not afford to buy any clothes—looked “sloppy” and suggested I try to “do something” with my hair, that I applied for the job in Arkansas. At the time, The Oxford American had been resuscitated from dormancy once again and had recently relocated to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, some thirty miles outside of Little Rock. Once I received word from The OA’s editor that the internship was open to me, I called Dave Ramsey (former editorial assistant and frequent contributor to The OA). Dave was my first editor at our college newspaper and the first person to encourage me to write. I had read The OA since Dave had described it in college as the place he most wanted to work. He had successfully accomplished this, and then The OA closed. But, with entrepreneurial zeal, he still regularly attempted to recruit people to move to Little Rock. Wherever Dave was would be projects, and fun, and energy. I would have some encouragement for a change.

Things fell into place: My cousin started college that year and wasn’t allowed to have a car so she lent me her white 1997 Honda Civic. My indulgent parents agreed to support me for the length of the internship, reasoning that they were supporting me in New York anyway and Arkansas was significantly cheaper. Dave found me a room living with two women whose lives he described as “Sex and the City of the Ozarks.” The rent for a room in their house was $200 a month, and they had cats. I love cats.

I packed the Civic, waved goodbye to the hypochondriac roommate (who, after a final attempt to inform me we were soulmates—“we are both unhappy,” he said—suddenly suffered a terrible vocal-chord-node flare-up), and departed for Arkansas.

I spent that night in a motel room in Knoxville, Tennessee, one of a cluster of motels surrounding an exit called “Strawberry Plains” (nothing of the sort in sight). The motels formed a bleak bouquet of square streetlights and neon signs, interlocking driveways and chain-link fences, set against the ever-present soundtrack of Interstate 40. I went for a swim, the only person paddling around in the motel’s dimly lit, kidney-shaped pool, and I fell asleep in a bed that was big enough to lie horizontally or vertically in. I felt like the only person in the world, that feeling that only a twenty-four-hour period between homes, and between lives, can give. When I shut my eyes I could still see Mack trucks out of my peripheral vision, spraying the windshield with rainwater as I passed them. I had left New York City. I was free.

The thesis of Perlin’s book is that an entire generation has come to accept, without question, that they must subsidize their own entry into the workplace, either through parental assistance (as I did) or by sufferance to their own finances (as my fellow intern Lawrence did, selling vegetables at the farmer’s market all weekend along with other odd jobs).

Perlin thinks this is a travesty. “Stop thinking your labor is, was, or will be worthless,” he pleads. Perlin issues a call to parents as well, urging them not to support a culture of false expectations and exploitation. “Well-intentioned, jittery parents should not lend blind support, moral or financial, to anything labeled an ‘internship,’ that magic word which suspends judgment,” he lectures. My parents saw I was unhappy, wanted to help, and figured that it might make things better to have the opportunity to do something I was properly interested in, for a publication whose mission I admired enough to initially justify working for free.

“You can make it without an internship,” he insists.

He’s right, of course. Many adults make brilliant careers for themselves without ever having had an internship. Furthermore, most internships are designed to benefit employers more than their ostensible employees: Starting in the 1980s, according to Perlin, corporate cost-cutting made the entry-level employee an optional expense. Did it bother me that The Oxford American had budgeted for a receptionist but not for the editorial-assistant jobs that we willingly filled for free? Yes. Is being a struggling literary magazine an excuse for not paying employees who legally should at least be paid minimum wage? No, that should be a non-negotiable operating expense. Would I ever have made an issue of that? Well, I did in a way—I got what I wanted from the experience, and then I protested with my feet (Lawrence, who is a much less petulant and an all around much better and funnier and less materialistic human being than I am, as well as a few years older than me, stayed on and got a real job at the magazine).

Perlin gives a somewhat unnecessarily comprehensive history of the internships and apprenticeships that date back to medieval times, then makes a very strong case that not only is an unpaid internship a moral disgrace, but it also violates The Fair Labor Standards Act. As an alternative, he offers up the trade-apprenticeship system, which in comparison to most white-collar internships appears luxurious, with paid training periods and benefits. He explains how internships exclude the voices and viewpoints of the less privileged from sectors where unpaid internships are the norm. He cites a statistic that found that seventy-seven percent of unpaid interns are women (in my own current workplace that proportion is ninety percent). He outlines some of the most egregious examples of exploitation: flipping burgers or cleaning toilets in near-indentured servitude as an “intern” for Disney World; the unpaid internships on Capitol Hill reserved for the privileged and well-connected; the extortionate practice of charging students tuition to receive academic credit for free work; internships in all sorts of industries where the interns are sexually harassed or forced to do humiliating jobs, but where they are denied the legal recourse of paid employees.

As a call to arms to put fair-labor practices in action in white-collar jobs—that we need to stop thinking about books like The Jungle as the standard for horrible labor practices and replace it with the “intern” at Disney World—the book effectively highlights a lot of problems in the working world of today. In Perlin’s hands, “don’t work for free” becomes this generation’s “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

The tide of consciousness does seem to be turning, as public opinion has started to sour on the empty promises of the internship (and like most college-educated people my age, I’ve done several and most of them were essentially worthless). In 2010, The Atlantic retroactively paid its interns, both out of a fear of legal retaliation and a sudden awareness of how avoiding the minimum wage and accepting free labor injected hypocrisy into its own liberal principles.

But then Perlin runs into the inexorable problem—sure we can all refuse internships, but at some point we look at the people who did them and they have the jobs we want. The trick would be to show that internships actually offer no hope (many of them don’t) but for those few internships that do, how can one react against them?

“Twists and turns are expected—no road through life is straight, no career path is normal—but not the distorted logic of work without reward, of needing to work for free to have a career,” he writes. “Exploration should not be confused with self-indulgent indecisiveness. If you hadn’t interned, what could you have done? What happens to all the lost time?”

It’s nice to think that I would have spent that time doing something better; writing the great American novel, or pitching stories to every major magazine in the country, but the line between exploration and indecisiveness is rarely so clear-cut. I know myself and I know how little I was able to accomplish while working several jobs, all of them mostly temporary. Only a lucky few are afforded a decisive personality, one without “self-indulgent” waffling, mistakes, and missed opportunities. Like most mortals, I thrive with a little structure. The road-tripping and camp-counseling and waitressing can’t go on forever. At some point, one wants something that looks like a job, and the way in is often an unpaid internship.

Today I revel in the luxury of paid employment: the biweekly paychecks deposited to my bank account, the automatic withholding of taxes, the certainty of a fixed address, the health insurance, even the routine of my alarm clock and daily commute, the florescent lights over my cubicle, my desk phone, my business cards—all the usual symbols of drudgery. Those who can’t do, intern; but it’s also true—and we have Perlin to thank for helping us understand this, even if he himself doesn’t seem to have fully grasped its implications and contradictions—that an internship gives one both an appreciation for the importance of proficiency in the many banal and thankless aspects of work, and the confidence to insist that such commitment deserves to be rewarded in kind. 

—Emily Witt

May I review Intern Nation by Ross Perlin without reading it? Perhaps that would not be fair, but life’s too precious for charging into something one knows one is going to loathe. A compromise: I’ll review the arguments that Emily Witt, in her neighboring article, claims to be from Ross Perlin’s book and pen.

Perlin’s monumental flaw is that he seems to regard all internship programs as the same. What are his arguments for thinking that an internship at Disney World scrubbing toilets conveys equal value as a summer at The Oxford American sharpening prose? I’d stake my life, and Perlin’s, on there being real distinctions between the two.

But, yes, OA interns are unpaid. This sad truth is a reflection of a fiscal reality, not a dream come true. There are many reasons why I wish the magazine weren’t poor and one is that I’d like to be able to pay interns. The interns we get to work with, and guide, often come across as the smartest and most engaged do-gooders you could hope to meet.*

Not only do our interns donate their labor, but the labor donated is both essential and tricky to master. Sure, they do some scrub work like mailing packages (scrub work requires no special training; I’m assuming Disney’s toilets are just like yours and mine). But mainly we rely on them to: fact-check, generate content, read manuscripts, work with authors, think like editors so they can propose edits and ideas, find and acquire art, find and acquire songs, show self-management and leadership, write headlines, write online reviews, and so on. OA interns usually don’t come to us with these skills ready to go. So we train them, elevate their game. With that training, and with continuing guidance, there’s often no limit to the best of our interns.

If publishing interns elsewhere don’t get as much hands-on action as they do here (and are instead stuffed into safe corners far from the battleground of putting together a magazine), I’m guessing that’s  because training them is time-consuming, if not arduous. The paid employees at The OA take the valuable time to train interns seriously and carefully. Because of that, we are brash enough to think that we are giving something of value, not just taking. Yet Perlin regards internships as a mere ruse for getting free labor out of people. One could just as fairly say that, for interns, internships are a ruse for getting free instruction out of people.

Not a few OA interns have told me they learned more from an OA internship than they did in college. We can agree that the instruction received at college is not given out freely and, to boot, is very, very expensive. That’s why I half-joke that we could even defend forcing interns to pay us.

Still, should interns be paid?

Yes and no. Some companies can afford to pay them, some can’t. Which leads me to a code of conduct that’s pleasingly transparent: Those companies that can afford to pay interns (like Disney or Time Warner or whomever) should pay interns. Conversely, Perlin should not threaten a small company’s programs with erasure just because the greedy, shiftless big companies are gouging their interns. Go after the big, greedy companies, Mr. Perlin. And allow that small is not the same as big; that poor is not the same as rich.

Ms. Witt’s own view on whether interns should be paid is also flawed. “Did it bother me that The Oxford American had budgeted for a receptionist but not for the editorial-assistant jobs that we willingly filled for free? Yes.”

Ms. Witt should not so easily ignore the market-desirable skills that a receptionist, whether college-educated or not, comes to the table with. Many receptionists are only taught systems or house rules by their employers, not skills (which they’ve picked up elsewhere, often at their own expense). Also, unlike interns, who learn skills and attitudes that can assist them in moving up mastheads, receptionists often have little room for advancement. Apples and oranges, anyone?

It is true that unpaid OA interns do the work at times of an editorial assistant (who often does the work, at times, of an intern, of an associate editor, or managing editor, or chief editor—and vice versa). But it is not true that all OA interns are uniformly qualified to succeed or even be hired as editorial assistants. It is my memory (and to judge from the résumé she describes in the piece) that Ms. Witt, at the start of 2004, simply did not have the experience or skill set (or the refinement thereof) to be an OA editorial assistant. If we had been hiring, we would have opted for somebody with more experience. I say this from having seen the résumés that barrage us when we advertise for editorial positions.

Let’s also factor in that our budget does not permit us to have as many editorial assistants as interns. (As far as I can recollect, there’s rarely been a period in our existence when interns haven’t far outnumbered them.) So even Ms. Witt’s simple math of interns = editorial assistants does not pan out.

Ms. Witt can argue that she did have the skills of an editorial assistant in 2004 and only lacked proof of those skills. That is also possible. At the time, though, she still would not have been hired to be a paid employee without more proof. Her OA internship either fleshed-out and deepened her skills or proved she had them to begin with.

The chief beauty of an internship is that it allows inexperienced young people to work with poor but worthy operations that could not otherwise afford them. (I’ll leave it to the rich companies to defend their own practices, the cheap, lousy, gouging bastards.) Then, once an intern’s inexperience changes to experience, all sorts of possibilities might open up, including, as in the instance of Ms. Witt’s colleague Lawrence, a paying job.

Ms. Witt continues, “Is being a struggling literary magazine an excuse for not paying employees who legally should at least be paid minimum wage? No, that should be a non-negotiable operating expense.” You can always spot people who never had to worry about budgets: They think money grows on the wings of storks.

Any number of histories (such as the stupendous The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History) would spell out to Ms. Witt and Perlin what would happen if the editors at struggling publishing concerns had to “legally” pay interns as a “non-negotiable operating expense”: They would find a way to operate without interns and do all the work themselves.

Does Perlin ignore such inevitable consequences in his book? Is he truly that dense or slanted? I don’t know, but in her essay Ms. Witt seems to think the result of ending unpaid internships would be that all interns would suddenly have paying jobs.

Wanna bet? (I’ve got five hundred thousand Monopoly dollars that say she’s wrong.)

This Perlin/Witt notion to end internships may be well-intended but it is so sweeping and thoughtless as to be destructive to well-intended people and programs.

Unpaid internships at struggling literary magazines are immoral, Ms. Witt almost seems to be arguing, but I’m sure glad I got one before I began advocating the destruction of them because without my unpaid internship I may have been stalled in my dreams.

Ms. Witt tells us that Perlin “outlines” some egregious examples of exploitation, including some “internships in all sorts of industries where the interns are sexually harassed….” Such “outlines” would be more helpful if the book offered stats to support them (did it?); quantifiable trends are truer, sometimes, than lonely anecdotes. In any event, the proof already exists that ours is an imperfect world, inhabited by both bad bosses and bad employees. With enough digging, Perlin could probably share plenty of anecdotes of interns stealing, lying, sexually harassing—and worse. (Maybe we should just ban work. And volunteerism.) These “outlines,” and the act of endorsing them, constitute fear-mongering. Nobody in his or her right mind is in favor of bosses—or employees—harassing or humiliating or hurting or stealing from anyone and there are laws already banning such behavior.

The most poignant Perlin insight, as revealed by Ms. Witt, is this one: “He explains how internships exclude the voices and viewpoints of the less privileged from sectors where unpaid internships are the norm.” In other words, poor people (a lot of whom are minorities) can’t afford to do unpaid internships. In my experience, that’s accurate, and I’m sorry for it. But I still don’t think we should kill a thing simply because it’s flawed, otherwise we’ll have to be killing a lot of things.

Finally, on a personal note, I want to emphasize how much I enjoyed Ms. Witt’s writing even in those instances where I disagreed with her arguments. The truest but hardest artistic accomplishment for a writer is to develop a distinctive voice—but that’s what she has done. (And like the sharpest writers, Ms. Witt makes it look easy.)

My vague memory of the clips she sent as part of her intern application is that they did not indicate or prove that such a voice was inevitable. I’m not being unduly hard on Ms. Witt; voicelessness is the absolute norm for twenty-three-year-olds. (Which is why I rolled my eyes when she said that she could have been sending out pitches to “every major magazine in the country” instead of interning. Sending out pitches to major magazines is not the same as writing for major magazines.) What is not the norm is her growth. Though I did not initially perceive overwhelming writing talent, I did perceive acute intelligence and drive. Sometimes that’s enough to begin a successful publishing or writing career.

Ms. Witt says that she has returned to New York and now has a “job that I would have died to have gotten at twenty-three but maybe was not quite ready for.” Maybe? Not quite? I’ll hazard that the Emily Witt of twenty-three was simply not ready for a variety of appointments, including an Oxford American editorial-assistant position (let alone this New York gig of which she speaks). But she was ready for our intern program and that’s what she got. (For the record, at age twenty-three, I still wasn’t ready to cross the street by myself.)

Internships are not just about the Boss Man, but the Worker Bees themselves (my gut tells me I am finally using language that Mr. Perlin would approve of). In many ways, internships offer more equality between boss and worker, more exchange, than meet the eyes of some. For the purposes of my argument, I feel I must add that, to me, the Ms. Witt of twenty-three did not make for an ideal Worker Bee.** She had brains and gobs of potential and a rich interior life (that was easy to sense), but she also had one or two striking weaknesses. Today, she admits that her younger self had “no loyalty to the magazine.” I eventually saw that lack of loyalty for myself—but not at first. That is lucky for her because if she had informed me of her “no loyalty” policy during our interview, or if I had been keen enough to perceive it, she would not have been accepted into the program. I love The OA and its ambitions too much to be at peace with welcoming—and working with—cynics. I would have said, “Life’s too short, and you are too young, for selling yourself, or others, so short. Love what you do, or at least with whom you do it, or there will be toilets to scrub, if only in your mind. Find a place or job, Emily Witt, that will bring out your loyalty. You owe that to yourself—and you owe that to others.”

That is a sermon I would still preach to Ms. Witt.

At no charge.

NOTES

* The character of one’s colleagues is a publishing trade secret but I’ll spill the beans: The profoundest benefit of working in the arts (if I may be so grand) is that it attracts highly creative and intelligent do-gooders whose career- and life-passions go far beyond making money or screwing people.

** By the way, my rebuttal is not an ambush. After reading her piece, I wrote an e-mail to Ms. Witt saying, among other things, “I think we should run a PRO and CON argument on the value of internships. Rather than critiquing the book, I would critique yr article. In a nutshell my assessment will be that your arguments have glamorous strengths and glamorous failings...including an ethical failing or two—much, in short, like what you think about our internship program…. 

This could be huge fun. But it would take some courage from you to allow me my engagement—just as running your piece might, arguably, take some courage from me.”

She wrote back saying, among other things, “No offense taken in the least (indeed, I am woefully familiar with such criticism of my 23-year-old self and think it’s all very well-founded—I’ve learned some lessons!). I think this is an excellent idea as long as you know that a) I love you guys b) I was under some time constraints when I wrote it so I didn’t do my usual sleeping on it first before going over a final draft (I didn’t want to miss a deadline for a first assignment!). Which is only to say that I might not be the most adamant defender of some arguments I made that I would have modified anyway through a self-edit (and presumably your criticisms), but I think this is a great idea.”

I am impressed by the warmth and maturity of her stance. And while it is possible that some of the points I made might have influenced Ms. Witt to change some of her views, we OA editors thought the spectacle of a debate of these points in print (rather than a private exchange between editor and author) would be of interest to readers.

We’re grateful that Ms. Witt agreed.

—Marc Smirnoff

Readers: We wanna hear your thoughts! Please weigh in below with your comments!

Art credit in order of appearance: “They All Agreed, This Ends Here” by David Lyle, courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery, New York.