Ross Perlin is a young man of many hats. A researcher for the Himalayan Languages Project in southwest China, he has also written numerous articles on topics such as urban social landscapes, political and religious histories, and economic development. His first book, entitled Intern Nation, illustrates how the typical modern-day internship has become the "gateway to the white collar workforce," and how social, political, and economic factors serve to perpetuate unfair and often illegal workplace practices. Recently Ross told us about everything from business ethics to classism to the NYC intern boom to what we can all do to restore the internship's good name.
Why did you decide to write about the plight of interns? I was an unpaid intern myself, doing hundreds of hours of vital work for an organization, unpaid. I realized at the time that it was a rite of passage which much of my generation was going through, a major new type of work that no one had written about or analyzed in any depth.
Your book talks about the seeming incompatibility between business ethics and economic growth. What needs to change in order to make these two things not mutually exclusive? The most profitable and successful companies in the world pay and recruit their interns. I don't see any contradiction between business ethics and economic growth—in fact, I see the utilization of unpaid labor as a very short-term and short-sighted strategy, which negatively impacts economic growth overall because people who aren't being paid also aren't buying things, investing, paying taxes, etc. and because it's an anti-meritocratic way of moving people into careers, harming competitiveness in the long run.
In the chapter entitled “What About Everybody Else?", you write, “If current trends hold, today’s interns will dominate critical professions and hold positions of substantial power in a few decades, even more so than today; today’s non-interns will remain trapped in the basement of American life.” What kind of intern sees power, and what constitutes the non-intern you refer to? Not all ex-interns will dominate their chosen professions, of course, but a substantial number of politicians, journalists, film-makers, TV presenters and so on are now former interns who were able to work unpaid once upon a time. Non-interns, on the other hand, are those who could not do that, for whatever reason, and invisibly dropped out of the running at one point or another-- they may well have good careers and good lives, but they're probably not rising to the top of those fields that effectively mandate internships.
Why isn’t it enough for college students to simply receive college credits for their work? First off, the law says that college credit is not enough to guarantee that an unpaid internship is legal—secondly, college credit is something the student pays for, when it's really the student who should be receiving pay for an internship that involves real work. College credit also varies considerably from institution to institution: in short, it's a poor substitute for dollars and cents.
What did you learn about the intern situation in New York City? NYC is one of the internship capitals of the world, without a doubt. On the one hand, there are things like the i-banking and finance internships, a world unto themselves, but generally pretty well-paid and leading to jobs. On the other hand, the creative industries are rife with unpaid work and illegal situations of all kinds.
You mention that the structure of internships perpetuates systems of institutionalized oppression such as racism, classism, elitism, and sexism. Though it doesn't mean that all interns are rich kids (which is very far from the truth!), the current internship system favors the powerful and their offspring. Okay, so maybe this is true of a lot of things in our society, but in higher education, for example, we at least have public universities, community colleges, financial aid, and so on, whereas there's nothing to support those who can't break into the internship game and want to work in white-collar jobs.
Have “progressive” approaches to education (learning for the sake of learning, philosophizing labor) actually fueled the current internship culture? Progressive approaches to education, especially ideas about experiential education, have definitely fed into the internship phenomenon, sometimes in a positive, idealistic fashion and sometimes as a negative, justifying the use of young people as cheap labor. An unintended consequence of certain theories has been to downplay structured training, allowing firms a way out of that responsibility, and allowing schools to minimize their oversight of for-credit internships. There's nothing wrong with the idea of experiential education in principle, but internships currently represent a poor application.
Based on your research, do you think it’s true that internships are ultimately beneficial for one’s career, or has that cause-effect correlation fallen by the wayside? It's still broadly true for young people that many internships, used strategically, represent a pragmatic approach to entering the current labor market. They are a gateway into many companies and many offices, and it's hard to ignore them. People would not work unpaid to do these things if they had a choice. And internships are also failing a lot of people too, particularly those who are in the most precarious situations to begin with.
What role does nepotism play in the intern-to-employee trajectory? Do most students or graduates need to have connections to begin with in order to get highly regarded internships? There are clearly both merit-based and connections-based internships, but overall nepotism and favoritism in various forms plays far too big a role in the world of internships--it's worse than it is with jobs. For highly regarded internships, these days you usually need either a connection, a fancy school on your resume, or another "ground-level" internship.
What would you say to interns who are getting some perks on the job, but are not actually being compensated monetarily or thoroughly trained? Watch out for the bread and circuses. It's great to get some recognition, to go to a barbecue or score some schwag or whatever, but nothing beats a paycheck or a serious training program.
How are internships harming this new generation of workers? Is it harming the economy in the long-run? Those who get caught in the internship trap or never get where they've been trying to go can end up dispirited, deeper in debt, burnt out, and unsure of how to proceed, left out of the economy and the professional world. More and more of us are living with our parents well into our 20s and deferring the responsibilities of adulthood since we feel we can't afford them. The social consequences of this are significant.
How do you think the internship can be rehabilitated? Building consensus around the Intern Bill of Rights is one way. Everyone with a stake in the internship phenomenon needs to get involved: young people, career changers, parents, schools, employers, the government. If the illegal and unethical situations out there went away or cleaned up their act, that would mean a lot and the word "internship" would regain a more positive connotation.
What can businesses do to keep afloat and adequately appreciate intern labor? Businesses ought to make these calculations before taking on an intern. Most interns doing real work, receiving minimum wage or just above, will be saving a company money compared to the cost of other employees or contracting the work out. The use of interns as a hiring pipeline also saves smart companies a lot of money, decreasing recruiting costs.
Who’s responsible for making change: employers? Politicians? The interns themselves? Everyone with a stake in the current system--and today that's just about all of us.
