- But on a basic level, this mindset encourages working people not to demand compensation, even as they are tailoring their entire lives to a vision of themselves as good employees. If workers do not see themselves as workers, they cannot ask for workers’ rights.
I was an unpaid intern for a month and eventually was "hired", doing exactly the same job but actually getting paid. I did not understand the law or my rights, nor did I really care as I needed experience to become marketable. I know that working for free is wrong. My experience has left me with a permanent feeling of irrelevance and disposability. It is almost two years later and I am working salaried at another company, but I still feel this way. My entry into the professional workforce was possible because I allowed myself to be mistreated. Unless major changes are made to how our system works, I know that my continued employment is dependent on the same types of individuals who mistreated me in the past. On a side note: I am male and the feminist ranting injected into the article felt forced and was both offensive to my situation and distracting to the subject matter. The author should stick to the topic on hand and not try to pull in another topic they are currently crusading for.
This article laments the deplorable circumstances of the intern, yet I see no evidence that the author spoke with a single intern to find out what those circumstances might be like. Juilin, you say you needed experience to become marketable. Working for free for a month led to a paid position. From what you said, it looks like things worked out well. It is as if you "paid" a month of salary to get the experience you needed to qualify for a paid position. You didn't work for nothing. Now you have a salaried position. Every month someone is buying your time, effort, and talent. Why do you have a "feeling of irrelevance and disposability"? Thanks if you can help me understand internships from an intern's point of view, something this article failed to do.
It wasn't "ranting". The housewives analogy was quite striking, and if most interns are female it's empirically justified to look at through a feminist lens.