Interns lose in crackdown on unpaid labour
The experience is often vital to landing job
I once had to hire some freelancers for one of those ad-filled “special reports” newspapers sometimes run. Sorting through the stack of resumes we kept on file, I soon developed a system. If they had been published anywhere, they went in the A pile. If they had never been published before, they went in the B pile. I always meant to get to the B pile but, well, you know.
I imagine I’m not the only editor who has ever hired this way. Indeed, the paradox will be familiar to most people venturing onto the labour market for the first time: can’t get a job because they don’t have experience, can’t get experience because they don’t have a job. If you’re lucky, an employer will give you that first job despite your lack of experience. But sometimes the only way to break out of that infernal cycle — to jump from the B pile to the A pile — is just to get your hands on some experience, job or no job.
That, in a nutshell, is the case for internships. They’re called “unpaid” but they’re not, really: They pay in experience. The same is true of paid internships: Whatever nominal amount they pay in cash is dwarfed by the experience they provide. No one puts a gun to the head of the people, most of them quite young, who take these positions. They do so because what they get out of it is worth what they put in — worth it to them, that is. They’d obviously prefer to be paid, just as people in paying jobs would always prefer to be paid more. But as that option is currently unavailable, they choose internships.
Interns are more prevalent in some fields than in others; as it happens, journalism is one of them. That’s less because nowadays a lot of media organizations are hard up for cash, I’d venture, than it is because journalism is one of those fields in which the returns on experience are relatively high. Media outlets offer internships because people will take them.
So when inspectors from the Ontario government raided two of the country’s better-known magazines, Toronto Life and The Walrus, finding to their shock that interns were working there — both have employed interns for many years, in a variety of capacities, fact-checking, copy editing, sitting in on editorial meetings, learning about the business, gaining the experience, the credentials and the contacts that will help them get started on their careers — and ordering them to stop, it was not the magazines themselves that were primarily affected. It was the interns.
No one asked them how they felt about it. However eager others may be to assert on their behalf that they are being exploited, the interns themselves appear to believe otherwise. The programs are always oversubscribed, to the tune of 10 applications for every one accepted. The government claims to have been acting “on a complaint,” but it sure didn’t come from the interns. Rather, it appears to have come from somewhere in the NDP-union-activist complex and, with an election coming, that was that.
I’m aware that rules are rules: Under Ontario labour law, unpaid interns are only allowed under certain conditions, notably that their employers must receive little or no benefit from their work. But the law is an ass. Had the interns been less useful to their employers, had they been enrolled in some wan training scheme rather than gaining actual, real-life work experience — the kind that requires actual, real-life work to be performed — they might still be on the job, factchecking, copy editing, sitting in on editorial meetings, learning about the business, gaining the experience, the credentials and the contacts that will help them get started on their careers. But as it is they have to go. Does this make sense to anyone?
Apparently it does. The ban on unpaid work appeals to any number of popular fallacies, all on full emotional display in the letters pages and online: that there is only so much work to go around (“they’re taking jobs from paid workers!”), that the wage a job pays is a reflection of its objective worth (“they’re telling them their work is worthless!”), and most of all, that if you order businesses to hire people at a higher wage, they will.
Because they won’t, and you can’t make them. The response of the magazines in question was not to convert the unpaid internships into full-time, union-scale jobs, with vacation and dental benefits, but to shutter the programs. You are entitled to condemn them as poor corporate citizens if you like, and it will sure feel swell, but all your contempt won’t get those kids back at their desks.
And while you’re feeling outraged that a charitable non-profit like The Walrus should be employing people at no wage, consider who might be next. It might have suited the government to single out a couple of highend publications this time, but there are plenty where that came from: the impeccably left-wing This Magazine, for example, which advertises “unpaid internship placements per threemonth term.” Or why stop at magazines? What about all those volunteers working for charities across the country? Couldn’t that work be done by paid staff?
I’m not saying there are no issues raised by internships. As I’ve written before, it’s legitimate to ask what sort of experience is really on offer. For there to be consent, it must be informed consent; where an employer misrepresents the duties involved, it should be liable. And there’s a second legitimate, if contradictory issue: The people best placed to take advantage of internships are the children of well-to-do parents, who can afford to subsidize their offspring for the duration.
Fine: let’s allocate the funds to make internships accessible to the children of lessprivileged families as well, in the same way that we do more traditional forms of education. After all, why should only the rich kids get to be exploited?