Internships: A dangerous free-for-all

If there's one good counterpoint to the President Barack Obama's economic recovery narrative, it's the intense competition for unpaid internships. Young Americans are facing such a dire job market that college students must fight with unemployed graduates for positions that don't pay anything.

We're told internships look great on our résumés and that we'll learn valuable skills that will be useful once we're looking for jobs, but none of these justifications change the fact that companies have found a legal way not to pay young people for their labor.

All jobs are learning experiences, but that does not make it okay not to pay your workers. Knowing how to use Excel is great, but it doesn't pay the grocery bills. Interns often end up doing work that they know how to do because they're young; every non-profit in Washington needs someone who understands Facebook and Twitter, and if the interns weren't there, no one would know the account passwords. The skills we're being "taught" are often the ones we bring to the table in the first place.

Anyone who has worked in Washington knows unpaid interns keep the city running. These aren't inessential positions; interns are not neutral for an employer's bottom line. Interns create value, and in exchange, their employers confirm they held the position and evaluate their performance.

Recommendations are not renumeration, they are a description of an employee's work. They are descriptions of a worker's value, not the value itself. The myth that an unpaid internship is just a step to a stable permanent position is just that. It's not uncommon to meet graduates who did years of different internships and still can't find a job. They usually end up applying to more internships.

Even worse are unpaid internships for credit during the semester. Think about the economics of it: Students are paying the university and working for free; in exchange, the university verifies that they did the job and the employer does the same. No wonder I get multiple e-mails about unpaid job openings from the university every week. It's a win-win, if you don't worry about the students.

When the ability to do unpaid work becomes a prerequisite to a successful career, interesting work becomes reserved for people who have enough money to labor 40 hours a week for free and still pay their bills. Students whose families can't pay their rent for them have to take paying jobs waiting tables or delivering pizzas and don't have the shining résumé full of free labor. The students who can afford to take unpaid internships are made dependent on their parents well into their 20s. Forget about saving up money for the year during summer break, students are lucky if they're not broke by the first day of classes.

As long as students are willing to take unpaid positions, companies will continue not to pay their young workers. Congress could make a law forcing firms to pay an actual minimum wage, but the federal government might be the institution most dependent on our free labor. Imagine the crushing effect an unpaid intern strike would have on Washington. Who would answer the constituent calls or write the blogs or know what a hashtag is? The only way to reveal the value interns add to their workplaces is to see what happens when they don't show up. What're they gonna do, dock your pay?

Malcolm Harris is a senior English and government and politics major. He can be reached at harris at umdbk dot com.