The Great Debate: The Intern Model

This week two of our own editors tackle the subject of internships. As things are, most internships are unpaid, but do they generally benefit the intern, or the man?

AGAINST – Steven Maclean

The journalism industry perfectly demonstrates the problems with the internship model. Browse any media jobs site for paid positions and the words ‘two years experience’ will soon be familiar. The Catch-22 is obvious, but there is a way out – for some.

To get the two years of work experience needed to land a job at the foot of the ladder, the next Orwells, Pilgers and even Littlejohns must undertake an array of internships – or one very long one – almost all of which are unpaid.

That’s fine, if you have enough money or well-off parents to bankroll you, but if you happen to be a debt-riddled student, it might not be an option. Even for those from ‘comfortable’, generous families, two years’ wage subsidy is an excessive burden likely to fell most at the first hurdle.

It isn’t only journalists who happen to have the wrong parents who suffer the consequences, though. When the selection process is based on ‘who can pay’, rather than ‘who has talent’, the standard of journalism available to us suffers, and we end up with a media representative of only a small section of society whose interests are often at odds with the rest of us. For democracy, this is clearly bad.

The ‘free labour’ available in the form of interns has implications for established hacks, too. Already fighting to keep their heads above water in what has become a highly volatile industry, one journalist’s job can be replaced by three eager would-be writers.

Internships not only offer a backdoor to free labour at odds with minimum wage laws; they perpetuate class elitism in industries already riddled with nepotism and impact on job security.

While the journalism industry exemplifies the problems with the unpaid internship model, they aren’t exclusive to it. Internships are another part of a system which keeps the jobs people aspire to the reserve of the already ‘haves’, impacting directly on social mobility. Let’s make all internships subject to the minimum (or in London living) wage. The 1% already have enough working in their favour.

FOR – Martin Eiermann

A bit of etymology: The modern “intern” came into use in the late 19^th century and originally described young doctors or graduate students who would work under the supervision of fully-trained supervisors. Today, internships are seen are the modern equivalent of Tom Sawyer’s fence painting scheme: A group of people is cleverly tricked into doing work that harms rather than helps them. And they (or rather their parents) are willing to pick up the bill.

That picture is incomplete at best, and seems to suffer from a bit of conceptual confusion. Interns acquire important qualifications. Many jobs (journalism included) require hands-on experience that cannot be learned in the classroom. Every career has to begin somewhere – and in many cases, interning in a professional newsroom might teach an aspiring journalist more about the profession she is about to enter than writing yet another article for yet another student publication. Internships are opportunities. Doing copy-and-paste work for two months is an opportunity gone to waste.

This leaves us in a peculiar bind: In order to make internships useful, they actually have to become more like regular work. Yet the work-like nature is precisely what many critics reject.

One obvious answer: If internships resemble work, interns deserve to be paid. I concede that point. But this brings us back to the example of doctors and graduate students. One reason that internships were warmly welcomed in the 19^th century was the entrance they offered into the world of medicine or academia. Companies, universities and hospitals could not afford hiring more regular staff, and they were also unwilling to hire someone without clear credentials. Internships allowed for a gradual entrance into the professional world. They also brought a great improvement for graduates: Instead of finding themselves thrust into the competition for jobs (but essentially unqualified to compete), they could rely on the internship to prepare themselves more adequately. Rather than putting people off, internships opened the job market to all those who could not have afforded the risk of outright job competition. Rather than perpetuating the nepotism of family connections, they nudged us towards meritocratic assessments. That’s not a bad deal.