Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy
Ross Perlin
Verso; $22.95
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“Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy,” Ross Perlin (Verso; $22.95)
Each summer, the city in which I live and work — Washington, D.C. — becomes inundated with thousands, tens of thousands, of fresh-faced, new-suited, big-dreaming, world-saving, pitcher-draining interns. Within a few weeks, the town’s average age plummets three decades, and everything changes.
The interns bring with them all manner of hassles. But these are alleviated by the situation’s inherent comedy: gangs of 20-somethings stumbling through a novel city, drinking and carousing and creating friendships, too self-important during office hours, too unrestrained during happy hours, trying to make it all work.
For Ross Perlin, this scenario is not comic but tragic. He argues in “Intern Nation” that the “cumulative social impact” of the intern hordes in Washington and around the nation and the world is “enormous and troubling.” For the intern is merely a burnished donor of cheap labor on whom corporations and nonprofits have come to rely. He has “no workplace protections and no standing in courts of law.” He has no health care. He often earns no pay whatsoever for his work. He distorts the labor market. And he may retire from his temporary position in no better shape — and often worse off, having lost thousands of dollars to travel to and live in an expensive city — than when he entered it.
Perlin estimates that every year in the U.S., between 1 million and 2 million undergraduates accept internships, a figure that does not include students from community colleges and graduate programs, nor those who have finished their educations. While the information about intern compensation is shaky, the best available data suggest that half of American interns are unpaid or paid less than minimum wage.
This is all a relatively recent development. In the 1970s, introduce yourself as an intern and you were widely assumed to be a doctor-in-training. Not so today, when an intern can be doing just about anything. The term itself, “intern,” does have a certain definite coloring, however: While it denotes nothing, it connotes much. The adjectives tumble down: naïve, ingratiating, fumbling, anonymous. And plentiful. Employers know there are always more interns to be had.
But for many of these inexperienced young people, “intern” summons other descriptors reinforced by the colleges they attend: smart, ambitious, talented, useful, connected. All good things. Employers have a feel for this hype and know how to exploit it. Some admitted to Perlin “switching from advertising ‘summer jobs’ to offering ‘internships’ as a way to boost interest,” while others “confessed that ‘internship’ was simply a buzzword they latched on to, looking for free, temporary help around the office.”
And employers have been able to sustain their intern addiction by trumpeting the importance of “internship experience” in their hiring processes. Among those surveyed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, Perlin writes, “76.3 percent reported that relevant work experience was the critical factor in making hires.”
But it was not private companies that ignited the internship rocket. It was the government. Washington, the epicenter from which today’s intern waves emanate, has always been so. First on the scene in 1935 was the National Institute of Public Affairs, which brought to the capital city 35 recent college graduates — a “carefully chosen” bunch — to receive a year’s training in public administration. Eleven years later, Congress’ Legislative Reorganization Act bestowed upon lawmakers large staffs of policy advisers and governmental gurus, and those staffers required assistance of their own — some bodies to make and take the phone calls and proofread the memos and do scheduling and fetch coffee. Then, in 1974, the Congressional Reorganization Act passed and created the maze of subcommittees we know today; those committees and their various cogs and wheels required interns.
Private companies caught on, and the number of internships has grown exponentially ever since. But the government, responsible for regulating labor, was first to the free-labor intern buffet.
Employers, though, are not alone in their mischief. Universities, too, have benefited from the outbreak of internship fever. At many schools, a student can earn academic credit by interning — he might, for example, earn credit toward a communications degree by working at a local PR firm. Perlin points out that colleges have a plain incentive to promote these sorts of unpaid, for-credit internships: The college pockets the student’s tuition dollars (all those extra credits must be paid for, even when earned off-campus) without having to provide him any services. In effect, then, pupils who opt for such internships pay to work for free. Universities often do not monitor and do not care about the work their student-interns do. Stuffing envelopes, licking envelopes, addressing and stamping and mailing envelopes — such unedifying tasks have become respectable components of earning a bachelor’s degree.
But do the interns not benefit? Might they not gain valuable knowledge from their workplace experiences? Perhaps occasionally, Perlin argues, but not usually. He writes that an internship is not an inherently valuable thing, that its “power is largely negative — it seems risky not to have done one.”
The intern knows this negative power, but he also thinks he knows something more positive: that in return for time spent interning, he will accrue hefty recompense. He will “gain experience.” He will “make connections.” He will polish his résumé and pocket a glowing recommendation. He might even believe that his Pinocchio internship, at its terminus, will be magically transformed: “Someday,” he tells himself, “this will be a real job!” The data disprove his desires. Most interns eventually get jobs, but they are frequently not the jobs for which they have spent months and years auditioning. Get these young people a copy of “Intern Nation,” and quick.
Liam Julian is a Bernard Lee Schwartz policy fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.