• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Scribe

Literary genius. Academic prowess

  • In the Press
  • Student Articles
  • Editor Blogs
    • Extended Reality: Applications and Implications
    • An Introduction to Flight
    • A Retrospective on Film
    • Psychology: Controversies and Myths
  • About
    • Alumni
    • Staff
  • Contact

The Book Is on the Table: Your Unpaid Internship May Be Exploiting You

February 24, 2014 by Georgia Soares Leave a Comment

thumbnail2

Internships open doors. They provide connections within companies that would otherwise be much harder to obtain, as well as job experience that can eventually lead to a full-time position. Big cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco are ideal places to get an internship at because of their abundance of companies and organizations. The cost of living, however, can become very burdensome and prevent many from pursuing the summer job of their dreams, especially if internships are unpaid and their parents are unable to help financially.

Unpaid internships have recently become a controversial topic. Last year, a judge in Manhattan ruled in favor of unpaid interns who sued Fox Pictures for violating minimum wage laws, while Condé Nast has decided to cancel its 2014 internship program because of lawsuits against its lack of compensation.

While it is understandable that not all internship programs can pay students well for their work, and that many companies focus more on providing the experience and connections available rather than the wage, minimum pay should be established in accordance with the amount of hours students must work.

Some internship programs abuse student labor because it is cheap, and do not assist student workers even with basic expenses, such as housing and food. Unpaid internships should only be part time, limiting the amount of hours students can work for free, so they can either get another paid job or work for a shorter period of time.

The goal of every internship program should be to immerse students in the industry and connect them with workers who could guide them through career options. Providing this without pay, however, does not suffice because it hampers many students’ ability to participate in such programs.

Thus, these programs would be either catering mostly to students who have the economic advantages of supporting themselves the entire summer without pay, or would put some students through harsh financial difficulties that would not be worth the program’s offers.

Another problem with unpaid internship programs is that it blurs the line for companies to determine what’s acceptable as unpaid work and what isn’t. Because students eagerly search for internships, companies end up taking advantage of the high demand without seriously considering the possibility of student labor exploitation. Unpaid internships are similar to volunteer work, but with the crucial difference that a corporation making profit from unpaid student workers is taking advantage of them.

A valuable internship experience shouldn’t be one in which students struggle to survive through the summer, but one in which they are able to participate in everything the program has to offer without hurting themselves financially in the long run.


Georgia Soares

View all posts

Filed Under: Featured Blogs

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Editor Blogs

  • An Introduction to Flight
  • Extended Reality: Applications and Implications
  • A Retrospective on Film
  • Psychology: Controversies and Myths

Recent Posts

  • The Fundamental Solution of Laplace’s Equation and its Importance in Physics
    Oliver Khan
    September 24, 2023
  • Eyewitness Identification – Part 1
    Kaitlyn Woods
    September 24, 2023
  • Reviewing Altspace VR: One of the First of its Kind
    Shanna Finnigan
    September 24, 2023
  • The Laplace Transform: A More Powerful Extension of the Fourier Transform
    Oliver Khan
    September 24, 2023
  • Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs
    Kaitlyn Woods
    September 24, 2023
  • Samantha Gorman: Creator of The Under Presents
    Shanna Finnigan
    September 23, 2023
  • Finite-Time Lyapunov Exponents: A Tool to Discover Coherent Structures in Turbulent Flows
    Oliver Khan
    September 14, 2023
  • ECT Therapy
    Kaitlyn Woods
    September 14, 2023

Copyright © 2023 · Scribe on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in