You understand neither volunteer status nor unpaid internships. An unpaid internship is a position of some authority that resides within the hierarchy of the corporate structure. Internships have always been on the career path to greater responsibility. An intern is assumed to have the necessary specialized skills to perform an aspect of the job and the internship is seen as a low-pressure environment to refine one's specialized skills in order to improve their value. It's only since 2008 that the former (low) paid internships have become unpaid internships; as with low-paid internships, the unpaid internship comes with the implicit guarantee that any paid position for which the intern is qualified will be offered to the intern first and foremost. A volunteer position is a position of no authority in which the volunteer is assumed to have a specialized skillset outside of the primary goal of the volunteer position. No career advancement is offered or implied and the volunteer labor of the intern is presumed to be secondary or tertiary to the principle labors and responsibilities of the volunteer. Further, the volunteer offers her services out of altruism, not self-interest; there is no quid pro quo assumed between the volunteer and the organization she volunteers for. Call up your local political party. Tell them you want to volunteer. They'll sit you at a phone and have you make calls. Or instead, tell them you want an internship. They might ask for a resume. If they like it, they might bring you in for an interview. They might have you compete for your unpaid position amongst other unpaid, qualified candidates. Should you get the job, you'll be in charge of the very same phone bank, getting the exact same money. But at the end of the campaign, your performance as a political operative will have either endeared or alienated people you are working for. Meanwhile, the volunteers will go back to their day jobs. Interns can be fired. Interns can be held responsible. Interns are subject to (some) labor laws. Interns are judged as employees, albeit cheap ones. Volunteers? Volunteers answer phones and canvass neighborhoods. Got a buddy. He's now an executive at Disney. I'm not. The difference? He could afford to spend three years as an unpaid intern.
Thank you for the comprehensive overview. Clearly the intern has a more serious and responsible role. No question that having wealth is advantageous when competing for jobs or anything else. Providing salary to interns would encourage less affluent applicants, but it would also make the positions more attractive to everyone, increasing competition. The article gives the impression that it is wrong to not pay interns. Perhaps this is largely a perception of hypocrisy among candidates who talk a lot about how others should pay workers.
You have this exactly backwards. The social trend being protested is "removing salary from interns would discourage less affluent applicants, but it would also make the positions more clearly intended for the social elite." Give the phrase "rise in unpaid internships" a google. Then do an image search on "unpaid internship graph." The simple fact is that paid internships are extraordinarily rare these days whereas previously they were common. It's also a fact that the positions being held by the unpaid were formerly held by the paid. Within my own industry, I've worked with unpaid editors, unpaid script supervisors, unpaid dialog editors... I've never worked with an unpaid PA, though, 'cuz nobody does your scutwork for free. Kathleen Kennedy is worth looking up. Pay careful attention to this passage: Not mentioned in there is the fact that she spent several months hanging out in front of the office, begging for work every day. Nor the fact that eventually they let her in to make coffee. Nor the fact that she didn't get paid well into the production of Raiders. Not to diminish Kathleen Kennedy's skills in any way, but the fact of the matter is, if she hadn't hung out with no income for months, she never would have become Kathleen Kennedy. Success is being in the right place at the right time. The way things used to work, you could earn a pittance so that you could spend a long time at the right place. The way things work now, youth are led to believe that hanging out in the right place is reward enough for spending an impossibly long time there. My buddy? Well, for starters, he comes from old money. And his wife worked, so there was that. But three years of 80 hour weeks (for free) nearly destroyed his marriage, resurrected a drug addiction and annihilated his health. Meanwhile, that's six man-years of income out of the labor pool. It is wrong to not pay interns. When a job that is typically remunerated is offered to someone in exchange for prestige and the promise of advancement, taxes aren't paid. Livings aren't supported. And opportunities for equally (or better) qualified individuals who do not have the luxury of a rich uncle or forbearing parents dissolve in the wake of employee abuse. This is how gilded ages start.Providing salary to interns would encourage less affluent applicants, but it would also make the positions more attractive to everyone, increasing competition.
During the production of 1941 (1979), while working for screenwriter John Milius, Kennedy came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. Spielberg hired Kennedy as his secretary, but both she and he reported that she was a terrible typist who was kept on only because of her good production ideas.
Thanks for the background and reading suggestions. I have Middle East 101 queued up next. Working for an extended time without salary to gain skills with some hope of long-term gainful employment is not a brand new idea, but things are certainly different in our times.
And I'm a big fan of apprenticeships. I'm Union - there are still classifications with journeyman attached to them. But implicit in the apprentice-master relationship is on-the-JOB training - in other words, you are recognized as having less skill than the master, you are accorded less responsibility than the master, and you receive wages commensurate with your abilities. But those wages aren't zero. Apprenticeships are a way to make a living while you learn a trade. The entire core of this kerfuffle is that the whole "make a living" portion of the program has been externalized. Apprenticeship is gone. Mentorship is gone. What's left is youth predation - because all the promises of advancement rarely materialize. http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/NACE_Internships_Jobs_2013.JPG
In the old days, the apprentice would pay a fee to the master, and "In theory no wage had to be paid to an apprentice since the technical training was provided in return for the labour given. However, it was usual to pay small sums to apprentices, sometimes with which to buy, or instead of, new clothes." Labor is a complex arena, and I am no expert, so I appreciate your insights. I find that the binary categorization of such a variety of interactions as "paid/unpaid" with "unpaid=bad" is an overly simplistic way of rendering judgment. NACE, the source of the data behind that chart, repudiated the conclusions made in the article, describing it as "misapplication" of their survey results.
In the old days the apprentice also got room and board. "Wage" meant something else. I grabbed that graph off the Internet flippantly. However, considering the data it was drawn from, those are interns that were also earning college credit. I have friends that have burned through six of those peeps. This is the sort of economy that allows a couple of Youtube producers with truly marginal earnings access to a student pool that pays over $20k a year in tuition... for free. As an education it's definitely beneficial and as interns they're damn handy but there is a value proposition in there in place of wages. The unpaid internships highlighted in the article would not be covered under this arrangement.