Weighing In: Are Interns Slaves?

In dueling editorials, two sets of Crimson editors opined today on the federal crack-down on unpaid internships. I’m with the pro-payment crowd, but I think that both the sides made the same conceptual error by assuming that this is a straightforward case of equality versus opportunity.
The majority view was that, even though stricter regulation “might result in fewer internship opportunities, this cost is worth the elimination of discrimination” against interns who can’t afford to work for free. The dissenters, meanwhile, insisted that the Labor Department’s move “would even the playing field, but it would do so by reducing opportunity for all.”
I appreciate the temptation to chalk up differences of opinion to ideological disagreement (you like opportunity, I like equality), but I think this is a case where the real disagreement is over facts. The pro-payment Crimson editors started to get at this when they wrote that “the number of opportunities for internships might not decrease as much as would be presumed.” They pointed out, for instance, that Atlantic Media has already magically discovered that it can pay its interns after all. But they don’t really elaborate on the reason why this would be so. What’s going on here?
The reality, I believe, is that many firms that don’t currently pay their interns can afford to. (Obviously many non-profits are excepted from that generalization, but probably not all.) So why wouldn’t they pay? For one thing, they don’t have to because there’s such a glut of talented, eager, well-credentialed, and well-heeled college students. But I also think that part of the reason is that, if you don’t pay interns, you don’t really have to take responsibility for them. That is, I take the opposite view from Jeff Kalmus, who commented on Max’s post, saying that “the lack of pay reminds the employer that the intern should receive nonmonetary benefits such as interesting projects.” On the contrary, I think that when you pay someone, you try to get your money’s worth; and when you don’t, you’re more likely to assign trivial tasks or none at all.
Of course some employers will be virtuous and will think like Jeff. The place I worked at last summer certainly gave me substantive work, even though I wasn’t paid. But we’re talking in broad strokes here. I think that there’s a perverse culture of unpaid internships from which nobody, not the interns and not the employers, benefits. The interns don’t benefit from being made to clean bathrooms, like one intern interviewed for the Times article. And, crucially, employers don’t benefit from that sort of thing either. I think that many firms just crowd up their offices with well-dressed warm bodies, not giving them much to do because what’s the point, they’ll be gone in two months anyway and it’s not like we’re paying them.
If that’s true, requiring that internships either provide meaningful educational experience, or fair pay, will actually benefit both students and employers. It won’t reduce opportunity at the cost of fairness, but increase opportunity for many interns who will now be assigned more substantive work and paid for it to boot.
At the most basic level, all I’m really saying is this: If you want someone to provide the services of an employee, pay them. If you can’t afford to pay them, then you really have no business hiring them at all. Or, feel free to hire them and not pay them, but give them a genuine internship, where they shadow an actual employee and get a lot of hands-on experience. But you just can’t tell me that “opportunity” is so important that we need to be scrubbing toilets and doing coffee runs for free.
Photo credit: Wikipedia.