by Sarah Jaffe
Some states, and Washington, DC, have imposed laws protecting interns at least against sexual harassment or discrimination; nevertheless, there is a bitter irony to the fact that interns receive such protections automatically if they are paid, leaving the unpaid even easier to exploit. But perhaps it is understandable that policymakers have not been quick to act in interns’ best interests: after all, many of their offices still run on unpaid internships. The offices of members of Congress and of the UK Parliament are filled with unpaid interns. Access to some of the most powerful people in the world is predicated, then, on free work, meaning that a class divide not only separates well-compensated politicians from their constituents, but a buffer zone of well-off interns stands between those constituents and their issues getting a hearing. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist member of Congress from Queens and the Bronx, took her seat in 2019, she set shockwaves in motion by announcing that she would pay interns $15 an hour—90 percent of House members paid their interns nothing. Ocasio-Cortez pointed out the “rich irony” that people questioned how she would pay for the interns, but would then “grow awfully quiet when called out on their expectation that part-time workers magically invent money to work for free.” In a video message later, she and other progressive lawmakers proclaimed, “Experience doesn’t pay the bills!”27
Nonprofit organizations, filled with the same righteous rhetoric about public service, are also rife with unpaid interns as well as other kinds of volunteer labor. So is Silicon Valley, where public-service language is often used to inflate the moral value of startups, but the accepted motivation for working for less now is that it will pay off later—what sociologist Gina Neff called “venture labor,” a kind of bet placed that hard work now will pay dividends in the future, much like a venture capitalist might pour money into that same startup. Venture laborers see such work as an investment in their future; as Malcolm Harris put it, “human capital is the present value of a person’s future earnings, or a person’s imagined price at sale, if you could buy and sell free laborers—minus upkeep.” In such an environment, the unpaid intern fits right in, hoping that their time, too, will be an investment that pays off. When times were flush, Silicon Valley paid interns and fêted them lavishly, but when the rough times hit, the interns were the first to go.28
The coronavirus pandemic, too, meant that internship programs were slashed, particularly the summer programs that would-be workers at media companies, nonprofits, and congressional offices, among other fields, rely on to get a leg up. A survey of more than four hundred companies found that something like 80 percent of them were changing their programs or cutting them entirely. If internships these days offer “a chance to look at an environment rather than as a chance to learn the job,” what are they worth when one can no longer be in the workplace?29
The real ground zero for unpaid internships—and for the publicity around them, as well as the highest-profile battles for justice—is in the arts and media industries, where competition is fierce and the sheen of glamour hangs around the top jobs, where hope labor has always been the name of the game. The art world is filled with unpaid internships, though in 2019 the Board of Trustees of the Association of Art Museum Directors issued a resolution calling for museums to pay their interns. One study found that 86 percent of UK arts internships were unpaid, and most of them were located in London, where the cost of doing an internship—in terms of expected rent and cost of living—ran at least £1,100 a month.30
Working for free in the rarefied worlds of art and media, surrounded by multimillionaires, is bad enough. But as if to underline the inequality that runs through these industries, the phenomenon of the “internship auction” burst on the scene. The proceeds ostensibly went to charity, and the internships—which ranged from fashion house Versace to a “blogging internship” at the Huffington Post (now HuffPost)—were in notoriously hard-to-crack industries. Beyond the still-rare auction, or the “internpreneurs” making money selling advice to would-be interns, there was also the University of Dreams, a private company that sold internships. At first, as Ross Perlin explained, the companies that received interns ponied up the cash. But after the recession, the University of Dreams realized that getting the interns (or more likely, their well-off parents) to pay was a better business model, as was marketing “destination internships.” “Part of the appeal for young people is precisely that they are treated as customers, at least at first, rather than prospective employees,” Perlin wrote. And who wouldn’t prefer to be a customer, who can ask to speak to a manager if something goes wrong, rather than an eternally meek and grateful intern?31
With such gatekeeping in the way, it’s no wonder that the culture industries, in particular, but also the world of work in general, are increasingly stratified, and that upward mobility has stalled. Research in the United Kingdom found that internships “operate as part of an informal economy in which securing an internship all too often depends on who you know and not on what you know.” Paying interns, the researchers concluded, would help, but on its own would not be enough. And the results of such an economy were stark: in journalism, for example, fewer than 10 percent of new workers came from working-class backgrounds. For people of color, who tend to have less family money to fall back on—median wealth for white households in the United States is around twelve times higher than it is for Black families—the internship is a barrier that keeps too many fields disproportionately white. Such inequality shapes the kinds of stories that get told, the sources reporters find worth interviewing, the subjects they care about. Similar statistics in the culture industries mean that pop culture is increasingly made by and for the middle and upper classes. Some programs exist to recruit interns of more diverse backgrounds—and pay them—but they are a drop in the bucket.32
Internships might be an American innovation, but they have rapidly spread around the world. Chinese law students, like Marcoux in Canada, are mandated to do an internship; meanwhile, interns also work on the assembly lines of China’s factories. Britain thrives on internships, many of which are unpaid, in numbers that have spiked since the 2008 financial crisis. Indeed, the financial crisis was pivotal to the spread of precarious work and internships, and the coronavirus recession may prove to be the same: older workers trying to get back to work after recession-related layoffs in the 2010s found themselves interning—“paid in hugs,” like one forty-seven-year-old profiled by National Public Radio during her internship at the Red Cross—and competing with younger people for a shrinking pool of full-time jobs. A 2016 survey found that less than half of the unpaid interns got job offers, and nearly one-third of the paid interns didn’t, either.33
Not all interns have it as bad as the North Carolina zoo intern killed by an escaped lion, whose family told reporters she died “following her passion” on her fourth unpaid internship. Nevertheless, the interns have begun to rebel. Amalia Illgner, for example, announced, in the pages of The Guardian, that she was suing over her “dream internship” at UK magazine Monocle. She wrote of her 5:30 a.m. morning shifts, and interns dispatched “as human FedEx boxes,” including one sent to Milan to hand-deliver magazines to Monocle’s editor. “So Monocle, since you’re listening, I have taken the first step in legal proceedings to claim my unpaid wages,” Illgner wrote. In another example, Diana Wang sued over what was her seventh unpaid internship, also in journalism, at Harper’s Bazaar, alleging that Hearst (Bazaar’s parent company) had violated federal and state labor laws by having her work for free for up to fifty-five hours a week, including nights until 10 p.m., and shuttle pricey fashions around New York for free.34
The internship lawsuit heard around the world, though, or at least around the media, was the Black Swan case. Eric Glatt was an unpaid intern on the set of Darren Aronofsky’s film, relegated to the accounting department because of his background in finance (Glatt was forty at the time, looking to switch to a second career in film), when he realized that what he was doing wasn’t a learning experie
nce. Instead, he was merely substituting for a worker the production company would otherwise have had to pay. Glatt’s lawsuit was launched in the midst of Occupy Wall Street, where downwardly mobile college graduates made up a large swath of the protesters, and unpaid internships (and student debt) were common complaints. In that political context, in 2013, a judge ruled that Glatt and another intern should have been paid; in 2015, however, an appeals court tossed out the ruling.35
To get ahead of the lawsuits, some media companies began to announce that they’d pay their interns. At other media companies, interns began to organize. The Nation magazine (where I did an internship in 2009) first agreed to pay interns, and then to raise their wage to $15 an hour, after the interns banded together to demand wages. In France, interns struck against labor law reforms and won a modest wage, and protests against precarity in Germany centered on unpaid interns. Yet the unpaid internship persists: in the United States, in 2018, the Trump administration’s Labor Department issued guidelines easing companies’ path to hiring unpaid interns, lowering the bar by which the “primary beneficiary” of an internship could be judged to be the intern, rather than the company receiving the free work.36
And it was in Quebec, where the energy from the movements of 2011 spilled over into a massive student strike in 2012, that the interns really got organized. The announcement in 2012 that the government planned to hike tuition by 75 percent brought university students, already members of student unions, into the streets. They became further radicalized by the government’s attempts to crack down on protest. For months, the streets of Montreal rang with the sound of pots and pans banged with wooden spoons and thousands sported the movement’s symbol, a little red square of felt, the carré rouge (symbolizing being carrément dans le rouge, or “squarely in the red”). After the students succeeded in pushing back their tuition hike, many went on to careers, leaving the movement behind. But another group of students began wondering how to build upon what had been started.37
SWATHED IN COATS, SCARVES, HATS, AND HOODS AGAINST THE QUEBEC cold in the winter of 2019, tens of thousands of interns took to the streets bearing signs in French and English, decrying unpaid internships. “It’s not complicated, all labour deserves a fair wage,” “L’exploitation n’est pas une vocation” (Exploitation is not a vocation), and “Ne soyons pas invisibles, femmes devant!” (No longer invisible, women rise!) were just a few of the signs they bore. One demonstration, titled “J-F better have my money,” for Jean-François Roberge, the minister of education and higher education in Quebec, saw the interns surging down the streets of Montreal; in the smaller city of Gatineau, they marched behind a sign that read, “Pas de salaire, pas de stagiaire” (No salary, no interns). Interns struck as well in Rimouski, Sherbrooke, Saint-Jérôme, and Quebec City.
Camille Marcoux and Chloe Cabral were among the crowds in Montreal, on strike against the internships that were required for their degrees. Their demands were simple: they wanted a wage, and they wanted to be recognized under labor law like any other worker.
The strikes were organized by the Comités unitaires sur le travail étudiant (Student Work Unitary Committees), known by their acronym CUTEs. A network of autonomous student organizations, they aimed to counteract some of the top-down structures of the 2012 student strikes, and therefore applied an explicitly feminist lens to their organizing as well as to their analysis of internships. Inspired by the Wages for Housework movement, they began organizing in 2016 around the idea that school work, too, was a form of reproductive labor. Unpaid internships, then, were a natural target, particularly since they were most common in fields where women predominated. The CUTEs were given a boost by the victory of psychology interns in Quebec in 2016, who won a financial compensation package for their doctorate-level internships, though it came in a lump sum rather than a wage.38
The interns struck first in November 2017; thousands more struck in February 2018, and again for International Women’s Day, as Women’s Strikers organized around the world. Fifty-five thousand interns went on strike in the fall of 2018, and in the spring of 2019, more than thirty-five thousand. The interns in one action gathered to read aloud the letters or emails they’d received from supervisors encouraging them to cross the picket line and report for their unpaid jobs, dramatizing the expectations they faced on the job. And in 2019, they added a new tactic: staging roving picket lines at internship locations, creating an “internship tour” to make sure the companies knew of the interns’ demands. Previously, student strikes had mostly been located at the universities and CEGEPs, where strikers would go from class to class calling their colleagues out to join the action. But the picket lines were “a good way for us to engage with the colleagues in front of the schools,” Marcoux explained, “so the intern didn’t have all the responsibility to explain to all of the colleagues in the school why she was on strike and what the impacts were.” In some of the internship locations—particularly in the schools, where teachers were heavily unionized and preparing for their own negotiations, but also in hospitals and nonprofits—it was a challenge to the waged workers: Which side were they on?39
“It was very visible during all the intern strikes that none of the workplaces, none of the internship workplaces, could afford to lose one intern,” Marcoux continued. “It was a major, major impact.”
Marcoux recalled her first CUTE organizing meeting, which took place in a dark, close basement room. “It was very intimate,” she laughed. There had been one strike already by that time, in 2017, and friends of hers had reached out to her for her labor law knowledge, as some people within the movement were pushing for a more legalistic approach. She wrote an article about the legal implications for the CUTEs magazine, and met more interns, drawing further into the movement. “What was really cool was that at the end of the meeting, we did a dispatch of the tasks and most of the people there had something to do. You felt included, but also it was known that at the next meeting, everybody was going to speak and was going to participate in the meeting because everybody had to do follow-ups. It was very engaging.”
To Marcoux and Cabral, the meetings, led by women, were a different, exciting experience—women were speaking loudly, expressing emotions and frustration, but also in control. “It was women who actually made suggestions to go on strike, who defended the proposition, the motions to go on strike. The people who ran the meetings, took the notes, who really put themselves on the line were women who struggled with internships,” Marcoux said. “We were directly implicated in the cause. We were not speaking for anybody else.”
Everything in their movement, she explained, had to be invented from the ground up. It had never been done before—something like a cross between a traditional workplace strike and a student strike, targeting both the university and the worksite. Interns were often the only ones in their position on the job, as they were surrounded by paid superiors, so striking could be intimidating. And the interns faced possible repercussions not just from their workplaces but also from their universities.
But when the strikers hit the streets, they suddenly became a visible force. People would get involved during the strike days, Marcoux said, and then continue to organize with the CUTEs in the interim periods. And the organizers, used to being compliant, people-pleasing interns, had to get comfortable with suddenly speaking out in front of crowds, with making demands, with raising some hell.
In the autumn of 2018, the interns went on strike for a full week, and the struggle deepened. “A lot of students got very angry with their workplace,” Marcoux said. “Some of them had got expelled from their internship for doing the strike.” As interns saw the consequences of striking, they felt a new fear that hadn’t been there before. At first, Marcoux said, the universities had been unprepared for the strikes. But by 2018 they had strategies for containing the unrest.
Another challenge was that the student strikes in 2012 had been around an issue that affected all students—tuition increases across the province. B
y contrast, the very gendered nature of the unpaid internships meant that only some students had a reason to take risks. The same ideology that the CUTEs criticized, the one that said women’s work should be done for love, not money, was common among some of their colleagues, and students hesitated to get involved if they did not themselves have to do unpaid labor.
Turnover, though, was perhaps the biggest problem for the movement. Marcoux and others graduated and moved into the (paid) workplace, and new students meanwhile came in. But to Marcoux, the CUTEs had given her and others a lens through which to understand all of their work, and she saw potential for the movement to grow beyond interns. “I think a lot of us are actually thinking about our workplace and to start organizing on the same terms and the same perspective as a women’s movement, against free labor,” she said. “We have discussed this between different activists, that the next step is trying to take the same analysis and the same way that we organize and trying to implement that in our different workplaces and keeping in touch so that we can continue to evolve.”
The analysis the interns in the CUTEs brought to their work, in other words, could be applied to much of the work of the laborers of love. They questioned why certain jobs were well paid while others were undervalued, and they challenged the rules of behavior that taught young workers, most of them women, to be meek and retiring and always ready to serve. They also challenged the definition of what was work and what was not, and the gendered distinctions of whose work mattered, in a way that inspired them to keep going, keep questioning. Marcoux and some of the other interns launched an online magazine, Ouvrage, to continue the political debate they had begun in the CUTEs and to lay groundwork for further organizing.