Interns deserve to be paid for their work

The next group of White House interns will be the first of its kind. They aren’t necessarily better than those who passed through the West Wing before them. But they will be the first to get paid for their work.

Unpaid internships first came under serious scrutiny in 2013, when the magazine publisher Conde Nast was sued for paying its interns sums as low as $1 an hour, or $300 for an entire summer. It settled for $5.8 million and now offers full-time, paid internships.

A lot of companies have gotten the message. According to Carlos Mark Vera, executive director of the advocacy group Pay Our Interns, the for-profit sector is where internships are most likely to be paid.

But there still are far too many unpaid internships, which are unfair for several reasons. Students are in more need than ever of money-earning work to help cover rising college costs. Interns often spend too much time on tasks that do not serve to educate them. And unpaid training positions put lower-income students at an inherent disadvantage. Internships look great on a resume and give the student a head start on finding good jobs, but many students can’t afford that sort of prestige; they need paid work to get by. And frankly, all work should be paid, even apprentice work.

Many private colleges also take advantage of the system by having students earn. A forprofit company can avoid paying an intern by offering course credit. This doesn’t reduce the tuition the student pays — the college gets to charge for education that it’s not providing. Everybody wins financially except the people least able to afford it.

The situation is particularly troubling for professions such as

social work and teaching, with students required to work in order to gain certification. This work is generally full-time and lasts for months, yet most of it is unpaid; according to the Council on Social Work Education, only 15% of social work graduate students are paid for their fieldwork; 11% receive government assistance. During this phase, Vera said, students continue paying tuition, but because their full-time work requires certain work hours, they are less able to earn money.

Our society bemoans the shortages of teachers and mental health workers while it puts obstacles in their paths to train for this essential work.

It’s time to end most unpaid internships at government and for-profit employers, with new laws, if necessary. Of the nation’s 3.3 million internships each year, 1 million are unpaid, according to the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That’s actually a reduction from a decade ago, when about half of all internships were unpaid.

Nonprofit organizations are a different matter. They already have the legal right to have people volunteer without pay; the relabeling of volunteer work as internships serves more as an incentive to draw in more workers in exchange for the prestige on their resumes, even when they’re doing tasks like driving people around or answering phones. For many nonprofits that are barely getting by, that might be essential to continuing their operations. But larger operations, with annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars, should be reviewing their policies to help students whose incomes don’t allow them to work for free.

A fund to pay legislative interns would certainly help, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. President Joe Biden should ban all unpaid internships at the federal level, and efforts should be made to do the same at the state level.

Ideally, Congress should pass a law that prohibits unpaid internships by government and for-profit entities, as well as for graduate school apprenticeships that require students to pay their schools instead of being paid by the employers. If work needs to be done, that shouldn’t happen at the expense of these college students.