22-year-old David Hyde received an internship many college students around the world would kill for at the United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland. However, this prestigious internship came with a catch, a catch that many college students are all too familiar with: it was unpaid. In an attempt to highlight the injustice of such internships, Hyde lived out of a tent for two weeks in Geneva because he wasn’t able to afford the cost of living.
Undoubtedly, college students worldwide can sympathize with the pain Hyde felt when it comes to receiving unpaid internships. Many career paths require students to take up an internship in order to gain on-the-job experience before entering the work force, and such prestigious ones as the United Nations are quite hard to turn down. However, these unpaid internships often leave students in sticky situations, as they literally can’t afford to feed themselves and are forced to find a second, paying job to supplement their income.
These unpaid internships must become a thing of the past.
The majority of the work that many interns do, albeit low-skill menial tasks, keeps these corporations running smoothly. Many of the corporations that offer internships are multi-million (or billion) dollar companies that could easily spare a couple of dollars here or there if it meant helping out an intern or two. In fact, a judge, William Pauley, in New York said many of these internship programs are actually illegal.
“They worked as paid employees work, providing an immediate advantage to their employer and performing low-level tasks not requiring specialized training. The benefits they may have received — such as knowledge of how a production or accounting office functions or references for future jobs — are the results of simply having worked as any other employee works, not of internships designed to be uniquely educational to the interns and of little utility to the employer. They received nothing approximating the education they would receive in an academic setting or vocational school.”
Many probably believe the quest for paid internships is just the latest chapter in the saga of the millennial generation’s sense of entitlement, but it is far from that. It is merely practical for students to receive some kind of pay for the work they’re doing, especially if they’re giving up their summers and turning down summer jobs that offer them money. Unpaid internships must fade away.
