“This truly is the ultimate internship opportunity for any college or graduate student looking to get their foot in the door,” the ad proclaimed. For more than what many colleges cost in annual tuition, the highest bidder receives “tremendous opportunities to make invaluable connections.”
One would suspect that a college student who can pay $22,000 to work 25 hours a week for free in one of the most expensive cities in the world needs little help making connections. But that misconstrues the goal of unpaid internships: transforming personal wealth into professional credentials. For students seeking jobs at certain policy organizations, the way to get one’s foot in the door is to walk the streets paved in gold. In the post-employment economy, jobs are privileges, and the privileged have jobs.
Unpaid and ”pay to play” internships have long dominated policy fields, but the $22,000 asking price signified a barrier to entry so galling the UN issued a statement in response. “Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted charitybuzz.com,” a UN representative wrote to Inner City Press, who reported on the case.
When the story broke on Wednesday, I contacted CharityBuzz, who confirmed the auction’s existence and said they would speak to their “contact at the UN” for details. The Robert F. Kennedy Center continues to list the auction under the tagline “Spend six weeks as a United Nations intern with Bruce Knotts and the UN Committee on Human Rights” while the UN continues to deny it without offering details. It is difficult to tell what is going on. Whatever the end game, someone is willing to drop $22,000 to play it.
Barriers to entry
UN internships may not be up for auction, but they are, in essence, for sale. The United Nations does not pay its interns, making it very difficult for someone who is not independently wealthy to take an internship. The only thing that distinguishes the alleged auction from the UN’s normal practice is that the unspoken class discrimination is made blatant.
“Given the high cost of living in key UN cities, such as New York and Geneva, undertaking a UN internship is an experience that few can afford, especially those from the very developing countries the organization strives to serve,” wrote the group UnPaid Is Unfair in a 2012 petition calling on the United Nations to stop using free labor.
Their call went unheeded. The United Nations’ website includes a form for calculating the personal expenses an intern incurs – expenses the UN conservatively estimates at $2500 per month, not counting travel to New York City or health insurance. The intern is forbidden from taking other paid work during their two-month term, and they not allowed to apply for jobs at the UN for six months following the internship. “A possible source of employment would be the United Nations Volunteers Program,” the UN website suggests. This program pays no salary.
“For an organization that prides itself on inclusion, diversity, and equality, the UN’s refusal to compensate its interns has created a system that counters those very ideals,” writes former UN intern Matt Hamilton, noting that only 5% of UN interns come from the least developed countries. Young people who care about international justice – including those who witness firsthand its erosion in poor, repressive states – cannot afford to work jobs structured on noblesse oblige.
The United Nations is far from the only organization refusing to pay its interns. Most human rights, policy and development organizations pay interns nothing, but will not hire someone for a job if they lack the kind of experience an internship provides. Privilege is recast as perseverance. The end result hurts individuals struggling in the labor market but also restructures the market itself.
Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience”. The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity – and quality – in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.
Worst of all, unpaid internships in policy and human rights send the message that fighting poverty, inequality, and other issues of injustice is something that only rich people should do. Qualities that should be encouraged in society– like empathy and the willingness to stand up for others – are devalued when ordinary people are told that they literally cannot afford to care.
“I think right-wing populists hate the ‘liberal elite’ more than economic elites because they've grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn't just for the money -- the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity, “ notes David Graeber, an anthropologist whose ideas helped shape the Occupy movement. “All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army.”
Fair and just
On the day the story of the alleged $22,000 UN internship broke, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman assured us that our world is fair and just. After proclaiming that the world is “tailored for the self-motivated” and the “boundaries are all gone”, he argued, “We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not. This is not going away, so we better think how we help every citizen benefit from it.”
While perhaps an argument unto itself on the erosion of meritocracy – some were fooled into thinking it was created by the parody Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator— Friedman’s column sheds light on how the wealthy tend to believe our economy works.
Friedman encourages young people to “invest in themselves”, seemingly unaware of how literal an investment this is nowadays, and how few young people have the resources to do so. He praises hard work, but he does not acknowledge the dreams deferred – the young people who would give anything for the chance to work hard and succeed, but cannot afford the cost of entry; the young people who gave everything, and are left jobless and in debt.
What happens to the American Dream deferred? The UN internship auction – whatever it may actually entail – is in the end a good thing, because it made plain a system of privilege and bias few want to acknowledge. Economic discrimination is often not visible. Nor are the people it leaves behind.
What a relief it would be if every unpaid internship was an auction – if instead of a vague line about how the intern must “cover their own costs”, the organization would tally up those costs and see who is able to pay them. The rest of us could watch, from the sidelines, as bias long denied plays out in public, as wealth morphs into merit before our eyes. Let them do their bidding in the open, and show us what it costs to succeed.
--Originally published May 4, 2013
Survival is not an aspiration
On June 12, 2013, Low Pay Is Not Okay, a group fighting to raise wages for fast food workers, released a video criticizing a budgeting guide created by McDonald's. The guide showed that McDonald's workers cannot survive on a McDonald's salary. Aside from including dubious figures - $20 a month for health care, $0 for heating - the guide left out essentials like child care, food, and clothing. Low Pay Is Not Okay noted that even by McDonald's' own calculations, workers would need at least $15 per hour to make ends meet. The video went viral, and the guide was widely criticized.
But some argued that the guide was reasonable. "When I lived in St. Louis, my roommate and I each paid $425 per month [in rent]," wrote the Washington Post's Timothy B. Lee, ignoring that St. Louis fast food workers are on strike because they cannot afford to live on their current wages. He praised the guide for "offering practical advice on how to live on a modest income", a sentiment echoed by Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, who deemed it "an extremely conventional collection of good financial advice".
Defenders of the McDonald's budget use the same word to describe it: realistic. (Both Drum and Lee use this term.) The logic is that if people can literally survive on minimum wage - that is, not drop dead -
then their wages are justified. Ignored in the plea for realism is the day-to-day reality of McDonald's workers - not whether they can live, but how. In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration.
"Worrying about the future is the hardest part, because at $7.25, I don't have a future," wrote Stephanie Sanders, a McDonald's worker, in an essay for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Like many fast food workers, Sanders is an adult who never thought she would end up in the food service industry. While the unemployment rate in America has remained largely steady in 2013, the underemployment rate has soared, and Sanders, a former saleswoman, has found herself trapped. Her temporary job has become a permanent sentence.
As economic analyst Robert Reich observes, "Being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn't." For the last decade, the American media have railed against the "obesity crisis", blaming fast food outlets for poor public health. That the people who prepare this food lack the money to eat, or feed their children - "We all worry about going hungry or ending up homeless," writes Sanders – attracts far less outrage.
Journalist Mark Oppenheimer calls the elite Americans obsessed with local and organic food "the new Puritans" - and like the old Puritans, they tend to have a Calvinist take on those less fortunate. "Most of the middle-class 'liberal' parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society," he writes. The plight of the McDonald's worker, like McDonald's itself, is seen as outside their purview.
The myth of upward mobility
This lapse in priorities - in which things we buy are thought to be morally superior to people who sell them - parallels a change in the American perception of employment and social status. Jobs are no longer jobs but symbolic positions, indicative of where you come from and determinative of where you go.
The McDonald's worker, the argument goes, deserves what she gets because she is a McDonald's worker. The professional, it is said, deserves her success because she is a professional. But over the last decade, the barriers to entry for white-collar professions have dramatically increased while the pathways out of poverty have eroded. The job you work increasingly reflects the money you already had.
Upward mobility was once the hallmark of the American dream. Downward wages have made that dream unachievable for Americans born poor. One McDonald's worker, Devonte Yates, is struggling to complete an Associate's Degree in criminal justice - the path to a stable life through education so often recommended. But Yates can barely buy food on McDonald's wages, much less pay his tuition.
Education is a luxury the minimum wage worker cannot afford. This message is passed on to their children. "My son is about to graduate from kindergarten, and I don't even have enough money to get his cap and gown, and that's only $20," says McDonald's worker Carman Iverson.
While many service workers live in poverty, well-off and well-educated professional workers increasingly find themselves working for poverty wages or for nothing at all. The Atlantic is one of many media outlets who covered the plight of the underpaid McDonald's worker - while simultaneously refusing to pay many of their own writers. Young Americans seeking full-time employment tend to find their options limited to two paths: one of low-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of poverty; another of high-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of wealth. America is not only a nation of temporary employees - the Walmart worker on a fixed-day contract, the immigrant struggling for a day's pay in a makeshift "temp town" - but of temporary jobs: intern , adjunct , fellow.
Like their counterparts in the service industry, these short-term prestige positions frequently offer no benefits, no health care, and in the case of the intern, no salary. They require that you have the money to move to switch jobs year after year – impossible for many, but easy for those with cash to spare. In the end, college graduates who trained for white-collar professions often cannot afford to take them, and end up, instead, working at a place like McDonald's.
Post-recession America runs on a contingency economy based on prestige and privation. The great commonality is that few are paid enough to live instead of simply survive.
Poverty is lost potential
On July 20, 2013, the journalist Helen Thomas died at age 92. Thomas was a seminal Washington reporter who covered every president since John F. Kennedy, but she came from humble means. Her father, an immigrant from Lebanon, was illiterate, but he encouraged her to get an education. She earned a BA in English from Wayne State University in her native Detroit. She moved to Washington DC and worked as a waitress - one could once afford to live in DC on a waitress's salary - and then got a clerical job at the Washington Daily News, which led to a job with United Press Service.
Helen Thomas worked her way up from the bottom. She did not buy her opportunities, because exorbitant journalism schools and unpaid internships did not exist. Her time in the service industry was not perceived as indicative of her abilities or her future path.
Today, a reporter of Thomas's modest background is out of luck. Journalist David Dennis argues that requiring unpaid internships shuts out voices from poor communities by denying those who hail from them the ability to work: "Opinions or perspectives reflecting my own come few and far between. How many journalists can say they have firsthand knowledge of the mentality of someone from the inner-city? Many of these voices have been muted just because they simply can't navigate the landscape of privilege that most modern journalism encourages."
Mistaking wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time. By treating poverty as inevitable for parts of the population, and giving impoverished workers no means to rise out of it, America deprives not only them but society as a whole. Talented and hard-working people are denied the ability to contribute, and society is denied the benefits of their gifts. Poverty is not a character flaw. Poverty is not emblematic of intelligence. Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices.
Working at McDonald's is not indicative of all a person can accomplish, nor should it be a sentence to limited opportunity. The service industry is increasingly where Americans end up, as pre-recession jobs are replaced with part-time, poverty-wage work. If temporary jobs are a permanent problem, we need to improve their conditions - along with those of the white-collar jobs to which many aspire but cannot afford to take.
--Originally published July 22, 2013
Zero opportunity employers
On September 1, 2013, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an 83-year-old adjunct professor at Duquesne University, died in abject poverty. Professor Vojtko taught French at Duquesne for twenty-five years. She received up to $3,500 per course and made an annual salary of less than $10,000. This is standard pay for adjuncts, who comprise 76 per cent of the teaching workforce of tertiary institutions in the United States (tenure and tenure track professors make up a mere 24 per cent) and receive an average $2,700 per course.
Like most adjuncts, Professor Vojtko received no health care or benefits. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she could not pay her bills. She took a second job in a fast food restaurant and slept in her office until the university threw her out. In the spring of 2013, Duquesne fired her for no longer being "effective".
Living in poverty, dying of cancer, Professor Vojtko never missed a day of class. Vojtko’s story is unique neither to adjuncts, who shared their own stories of privation on Twitter under the #IAmMargaretMary hashtag, nor to other American workers. In the post-employment economy, full-time jobs are parceled into low-wage contract labor, entry-level jobs turn into internships, salaries are paid in exposure, and dignity succumbs to desperation.
On August 28, 2013, America celebrated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Most Americans associate the march with Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and call for racial harmony. They remember half of the targeted "twin evils" of racism and econom
ic deprivation.
They remember the freedom, and forget the jobs. But the two are inseparable.
"If a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists," King proclaimed in 1968. Economic opportunity, he argued, is essential to human rights.
How far we have fallen today, when survival is sold as an aspiration to the poor. How facile our claims of "equal opportunity" when the content of one's character is eclipsed by the content of one's wallet. Citizens struggling to pull themselves up – through education, through hard work -- sink back down, into debt from student loans, into desperation from appeasing the few and powerful who defaulted on their future. America has abandoned any pretense of social mobility. In 2012, the income gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of America passed the record set in 1927, at the onset of the Great Depression. 40 percent of Americans now make less than minimum wage workers did in 1968, the year King died.
The hidden hand...
The problem in America is not that there are no jobs. It is that jobs are not paying.
America is becoming a nation of zero-opportunity employers, in which certain occupations are locked into a terrible pay rate for no valid reason, and certain groups – minorities, the poor, and increasingly, the middle class – are locked out of professions because they cannot buy their way in.
Why was Margaret Mary Vojtko, an experienced teacher who did the same work as a tenured professor, making less than $10,000? Because her university refused to pay her more than $10,000. Why is Deirdre Cunningham, a New York woman who works two jobs as a bank teller and a sales associate, living in a homeless shelter? Because her employers refuse to pay her enough to live anywhere else. Cunningham's plight is common: 28 percent of homeless families include at least one working adult.
The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior Page 3