Internships, Continued →
I’m ambivalent when I read debates about unpaid internships. In many cases, they’re the luxury of a class that can afford to work a full-time schedule without compensation; that isn’t always the case, though. After working customer service jobs throughout my 20’s, I had little qualification (at least on paper) for jobs that were outside of the service industry—most jobs wouldn’t to accept “ran a tiny DIY label, made crude websites for friend’s bands, and freelanced for small-town alt-weeklies” as experience.
Moving to Chicago at the age of 29, I took the first job I could get (another customer service job) but scrambled to get any internship I could find. I ended up with two, at Bloodshot and Punk Planet, and I credit those two jobs with completely redirecting my career trajectory. After a decade of working for slightly above minimum wage, without health insurance, it didn’t feel like a huge sacrifice to add sixteen hours of unpaid labor to my schedule with the hope of moving out of the career level I’d found myself in.
Six months at Bloodshot, they offered me a part-time job managing the website; six months later, I was doing tour publicity full-time for them. For the first time since I was 16, my main gig wasn’t in customer service. Punk Planet went under a year after I got there, which still saddens me to this day, but I made friendships and connections through there which still help immensely. There are a ton of freelance web and writing jobs that I would never have had the skills or connections to get without having done that internship. Now I make 100% of my income doing freelance writing, web work, and managing web content for a local University. Did it take a few years of working 60-70 hour weeks for very little money to get to this point? Absolutely. (I still work those sort of hours, for not quite as little money.) But after a decade of living on less than a $1000 a month, without health insurance, I’d say the sacrifice was worth it. If it wasn’t for those internships, I’d be 33 and making coffee or spraying out used shoes in a bowling alley or loading and unloading pallets of merchandise, all things I did for work for the fifteen years prior.
There’s a distinction, I think, between these sort of internships (which were not full-time propositions, mind you,) and penny-pinching media Goliaths expecting people with degrees and experience in specific fields to work full-time schedules for little to no compensation. That, to me, is pretty damn reprehensible. I couldn’t imagine accepting that sort of unpaid commitment at this point; I’d rather do customer service.
Fair points, indeed. Just to clarify, I’m not against internships. They’ve worked in your favor, and for me as well (to varying degrees). But from what I gathered in your response, you busted your ass and those organizations rewarded you with better opportunities. That is the implicit “contract” of an internship.
The majority of many internships ignore and abuse this contract. In these organizations (some of which I’ve worked for!), there is no guarantee of a better opportunity ahead. When you combine that with a class of people who can afford to jump from internship to internship or people who are afraid to ask for proper compensation, it breeds a culture of free labor that is very difficult to change. Those kinds of organizations don’t see the point in fixing a broken system that doesn’t hurt them, you know?
