You really got to hand it to the NYC labour and employment firm Outten & Golden LLP for tackling the rising prevalence of unpaid internships. Back in the fall they launched a class action lawsuit against Fox Searchlight Pictures over the use of illegal unpaid interns during the filming of the blockbuster ballet noir hit Black Swan. Now they've struck another blow against the unpaid internship scam by filing a lawsuit against the Hearst Corporation over the practice by Harper's Bazaar of using unpaid interns. The firm is representing Xuedan Wang, a former intern at the magazine, in the class action and is presently looking for other plaintiffs to represent.
The lawsuit states the "Employers' failure to compensate interns for their work, and the prevalence of the practice nationwide, curtails opportunities for employment, fosters class divisions between those who can afford to work for no wages and those who cannot, and indirectly contributes to rising unemployment." Those be fighting words and as I've previously argued are part of the core problem of profitable media corporations using unpaid labour - it inevitably (and quickly) leads to situations that are precarious, exploitative and sometimes even deadly for interns.
It is also indivcative of a rising neoliberalization of the workforce in the context of a growing precarious population of youth who are trying to compete in an ever-shrinking flooded labour market. Like you mentioned in your latest post, unemployment amoung youth is unofficially reaching 20% which, when combined with rising student debt (average now close to 37 000) and tuition fees means students are needing to stack their academic and professional CVs with "relevant experience". Of course, this naturally ends up perpetuating unequal opportunity and distribution of wealth because the majority or working students or struggling students cannot dedicate their summers to working at unpaid UN internships or federal government internships in Canada, for example. Instead they opt for the less romantic and less "professionally useful" option, the one of working in the growing number of low-paid service work positions which further contributes to their precarity. as always, Andrew, thank you for your work.
ReplyDeleteThanks Kirsten, your insights per usual are dead on. From a theoretical and practical perspective a lot of the growth in unpaid internships is predicated on issues of class. Essentially, what we're seeing is the cost of training for employers downloaded onto students and their families - be it through taxation via tuition fees, interest off bank loans for education or the near necessity of engaging in unpaid labour.
ReplyDeleteFrom a public policy perspective this situation doesn't make a whole lot of sense as it's going to damaging to society in the long-term through less public resources via taxation, a lower birth rate as people put off starting families or relationships, wasted spending putting students through post-secondary education to have work dead-end service jobs, and through lower productivity and GDP as there is a huge amount of wasted potential in young people.
What needs to occur is the creation and implementation of public policy that launches training programs that properly transition young people from school into the workforce. The rise of unpaid internships is the by-product of shoddy decision making at the federal and provincial levels under the auspices of neoliberalism that decided that governments don't have a role in the "free market" - that's a patently false assumption and one that clearly coming back to bite us now.