A friend of mine has been looking for freelance writing jobs, but has been coming up empty. The only available positions involve hours of copyediting work and no salary. That's right. You work a lot of hours and don't get paid for it. People sign up for these jobs, because they can put the job on their resume and perhaps get a reference when a real job opens up.
The equivalent in academia is adjunct teaching. Excuse me, while I hack up a goober of bile.
Apparently, these unpaid jobs are increasing and may even be illegal.
Rob Farley writes that these unpaid jobs benefit rich, trust fund kids.
Let’s be clear; the unpaid internship effectively excludes a wide
socioeconomic swath from gaining useful experience and making effective
connections in business, government, and NGOs. For example, it was
utterly impossible for me to even consider an unpaid internship as an
undergraduate; paying the bills was difficult even with loans and full
time work. Lots of young people lack significant parental support, and
require minimum payment to have any hope of making ends meet. Moreover,
even for those with support the “payment” for unpaid internships
(connections, experience, and recommendations) often has no lasting
effect on the intern’s job prospects. If you’ve ever wondered why DC
NGOs and journalistic organizations are dominated by Ivy Leaguers, it
ain’t just because they’re smart.
Apt. 11d 
The only available positions involve hours of copyediting work and no salary.
Moral considerations aside, how can you not pay people for copyediting? If I took an unpaid internship to get journalism experience and found myself doing copyediting, I’d replace every “public” with “pubic.”
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Ha! That’s exactly what I accidentally did in my Masters Thesis. It was all about Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the “public realm”. One errant stroke in a spell check did a global replace, and I ended up with Hannah Arendt talking about the “pubic realm.”
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I once watched a co-worker race to stop 500 letters from being mailed because they weren’t supposed to discuss “the pubic school system.”
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I’ve seen a lot of people arguing that it’s reasonable that the non-profits are exempt — why? If unpaid internships are exploitative, why should the tax status of the employer matter?
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I knew I’d be back to comment on this. 🙂 I’m anon for this though.
We have always had interns in my industry, but we also had jobs to move many of them into. It was more a weeding process.
Now, not as much. The quality of the experience remains the same. But getting work is hard. I kind of envy the politico interns who will actually have an industry going forward.
It’s kind of ironic as a “content provider” to discuss interns as exploitation.
In some ways it’s the volunteers who are killing us – the volunteer bloggers, citizen journalists, people who specialize in setting free paywall content, and content farms (revenue share! $15 for 500 words!) who are contributing to my bottom-line inability to pay for content because so much is free.
Advertisers not only have more choice (which pushes rates down) but can market directly via social media & their own websites.
In terms of implementation of internships, I have to say my experiences have been mixed. There are a number of great interns. There are also a lot of kids who are basically the Gen-Y stereotype to a T – “I showed up (48 minutes late); where’s my cookie?” That group actually benefits the most IMO because they are otherwise not hireable.
On my side, I do offer actual training and real clips and experience and references. No fetching coffee. I try to keep hours flexible because most interns are also working a job on the side. But yes, it does disadvantage people who can’t do that. Our internships are 4 months long. It’s a while. The training takes about 3 weeks.
If we didn’t have an intern, we wouldn’t hire. If you want magazines in particular to hire, go subscribe to some – at the full rate, not the 2-for-1 rate – and if you buy something ’cause of an ad, let the advertiser know. I know, I know – it’s a for-profit business so there’s no sympathy. Me too, some days.
There’s no question about your friend’s experience – that’s how it is. I know if I were laid off tomorrow I would likely change careers, and try to make more money in less time so I could do it…for FREE. AUGH.
And MH, the copy editor does not get final signoff. 🙂
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“If unpaid internships are exploitative, why should the tax status of the employer matter?”
For the same reason why monetary donations to a business are treated differently than donations to a 501C3. The newspaper didn’t specify, but I’d presume that it’s not just not-for-profits (i.e. club med) that can take advantage, but charitable organizations (though probably also the political orgs & campaigns, though perhaps for a different reason).
I’m pretty sure that lots of charitable organizations rely heavily on voluntary labor, without any promise of learning or training in return (but, instead for love of country, your fellow man or god). The internship exemption is supposed to be a trade of work for training, and I think that’s what the rules try to enforce.
I know the areas are gray (no way do I think that all business does evil while charities do good), but the exploitation of a law firm getting a voluntary cleaner to sweep the bathrooms isn’t the same as the same thing happening at the unitarian church, no?
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I know the areas are gray (no way do I think that all business does evil while charities do good)…
When the biggest employers in a region are not-for-profit, it gets even grayer.
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bj, the claim isn’t just that they’re different — fine — but that one is exploitative and the other isn’t.
So I would update your analogy and say that it’s like claiming that of course it would be horrible for the law firm to force someone to sweep their floors for free, because that’s exploitative, but we should allow the church a pass on the forced labor because their heart is in the right place.
But I agree that it’s unclear what the DoL is actually saying/changing. The six criteria for allowable unpaid status that they’re apparently going to starting tightening enforcement of sound like every intern I’ve ever encountered, paid or otherwise.
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Could some of this exploiting of free labor be happening because writing is a “dream career” for so many? I surmise that there’s always been a lot of exploitation of underpaid/unpaid workers in glamour careers (see “The Devil Wears Prada”). Do less glamourous careers attract such an easily taken-advantage-of pool of free labor, I wonder?
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http://hunterwalker.tumblr.com/post/502891516/10-ways-to-earn-more-than-you-can-working-at-the%5D
“10 Ways to Earn More than you can at the Columbia Journalism Review”
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