The Obama administration, or at least part of it, is turning its attention to an unlikely target: unpaid internships. “There aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship [at a for-profit company] and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” a Labor Department official recently told the New York Times.
The fear seems to be that dishonest employers will use unpaid interns to do the work that salaried entry-level staffers used to do. Not only does this displace jobless workers in a down economy, it also exploits the college students so desperate for work that they’ll do menial jobs for free. That’s the theory, anyway.
The reality is different, as we can both attest. Horror stories do circulate, but our much more ordinary experiences offer a reality check: In general unpaid internships end up being useful experiences—and serve several important functions in the labor market.
The unpaid internship is no panacea, and for some students it may not be a possible or desirable career starter. They’re hard financially, and we were lucky to enjoy support from our parents and grants from our colleges to help cover our living expenses.
But they were worth doing. In retrospect, the experience we gained and the connections we made turned out to be a significant form of compensation in themselves. It would be a shame to deprive others of similar opportunities simply because that intangible remuneration doesn’t show up in a minimum-wage calculation.
