"Yeah"

In a recent interview with HR maven Victoria Humphrey, Leonard Lopate broaches the contentious topic of unpaid interning. To which she, the purported employment expert, replies, "I guess I wasn't aware it was controversial." Off to a great start!

Lopate then explains about how some workers aren't keen on the whole not-getting-paid thing, but adds a not-so-surprising-for-media caveat: "In our field, it's the only way we find out whether somebody would be a good fit for us." Indeed, there appear to be two different tracks by which one can work for free for his show. (As best as I can tell, there's either volunteering or interning, the latter of which includes Metrocard fare.)

Lopate doesn't elaborate on why employee assessment a) can't be done through an application-and-interview process, or b) why, if a trial period is needed, it has to be unpaid. Low-paid is something one can work with. (I should know - I've been working with variants of it for some time now.) Unpaid is trickier to budget. The person being tried out doesn't magically lack living expenses, and if it turns out you're not "a good fit for" whichever industry, the time you spent working in it would be fairly useless but for the pay. It's not like a degree, which can be somewhat transferrable. But if all you have from a gig is the line on your resume, and that's not even a field you're entering, what's the use? (OK, fine, there's some use, in that it's better than nothing, but from the studies I've seen, it doesn't appear that "unpaid" is actually that much more helpful than "blank.")

Humphrey responds, "Oh yes, OK, now I understand," although it's clear from what follows that she hasn't the foggiest. She points out that unpaid internships can make someone more employable, which... are we going to expect her to be up on the research that says this isn't necessarily the case, she who's as good as never heard of the internship question until the past week or so? "It isn't like you're being forced, right?" No, not right, unless you're not counting coercion as a kind of forcing, but anyway. She continues: "I just don't understand why there would be any kind of quote unquote complaining about that from the intern's end. If you don't want to be an unpaid intern then go get a job." Lopate then says, "Well, if you can," to which she responds, "Yeah, I know, well, that's kind of my point, yeah." Yeah. But, I mean, what was she going to say, this workplace expert to whom it was news that unpaid work is controversial?

As best as I can tell, in the most generous interpretation, her "point" was that those losers who can't or won't get a job should be grateful for the opportunity to enjoy the sheer proximity to office life, which could - who knows? - trick down into some kind of money-providing job, at some point in the future. But my real concern here isn't this HR expert I'd never heard of before, but this seemingly left-wing radio host I've been listening to for ages. (Which is, I learned from this program, more than can be said for some people applying to work for him; for pay or not, I don't recall.) Why, Leonard Lopate, do you require unpaid labor to assess candidates? Don't you see how that essentially implies interns from rich families? And how that, in turn, impacts the coverage? (I, as someone who listens to the show regularly, could totally elaborate.) And that it's unfair even to kids from rich families, whose work is also work, and also deserves compensation (and no, subway fare isn't compensation)? Why is it that, in making the seemingly simple claim that work deserves pay, I end up to the left of the left? And what does it say that equivalent employers who present content to the right of what Lopate does are willing to pay at least something to their lowest-level employees?

Circular

I've written again about unpaid internships. The point I was most eager to make was about the transformation of the "arts" job. It used to be that starving artists were artists, whereas now, any office work that's remotely "arts" is unpaid. No one is forced to buy your novel or painting. But if you're doing administrative work that has some tangential relationship to art, you're still doing tasks you wouldn't otherwise, for an entity other than yourself, and that's work in the usual sense. Yet we've normalized the idea that any "arts" job is a dream job that need not pay. This is particularly frustrating for artists, whose connections and interests - and thus plausible day jobs - will be in the arts-broadly-defined.

But the point that probably most needed making was that "prepared" is subjective, and changes according to the supply of applicants with unpaid experience. Consider this comment to the piece:

I think it depends on the industry. In my profession, experience is everything. Every intern I have seen at our office would be woefully inadequate as either an entry level Legal Secretary or a Paralegal. I don't think we would ever hire anyone who hadn't interned somewhere and at least had not only the school background but some experience as well.

This commenter unfortunately doesn't spell out where the purported inadequacies lie. Is it that these are silly youth who show up late or in flip-flops, and who continue to do so even once advised against? Or is it that they've never worked at a law firm before (I'd think graduates who'd never worked at all would be unusual!) and thus require some on-the-job training? I suspect the latter.

If there weren't applicants with internship experience - if internships weren't a thing - surely this firm would hire people without that experience, would show them how to merge spreadsheets or whatever the issue is, and would, as they say, deal. That's how it went when I worked in an office before grad school, back in 2005-2006, when a college degree sufficed.* I mean, which is more likely - that something has radically changed in the skills required of legal secretaries, or that employers now have the option of hiring entry-level applicants who've already done what used to be entry-level jobs, for free?

*There's one line of thought - which I've addressed before - that says, the problem isn't unpaid internships, but rather the insistence on higher education. This might make sense - and not just be changing the topic to an also-important but separate issue - if unpaid internships weren't virtually always in conjunction with higher education. Sometimes you're even paying tuition to complete the internship. If there were some unpaid-internship track, with actual training, this would be a potentially worthwhile conversation. Instead, it's that you go to college and find that the unpaid internships you did as a student qualify you for unpaid postgraduate internships.

"Do you love to clean?"

Everybody was recommending Miya Tokumitsu's Jacobin article about "do what you love," but what stopped me from rushing to it ASAP was that I anticipated recognizing this argument and agreeing with it. Artists, writers, academics, and the like have been making this point for a while now - you're expected to love what you do and thus be willing to do it unpaid, underpaid, without benefits, etc. "Do what you love" had always struck me as something particular to those in a very specific socioeconomic situation - people who are middle-class but not trust-funded, who somehow end up in creative fields where it's assumed that everyone is. Who end up playing by rules that only make sense if you are.

What Tokumitsu does with the argument, though, is much more ambitious and interesting. She connects it to the sometimes extremely high-paid tech world, as well as the least-glamorous jobs. And to capitalism more generally. Go read it!

What I wish she'd done - but this is one of those starts-a-conversation articles, so it couldn't do everything - is get into how even what she refers to as "unlovable" jobs are ones workers are now asked to love. I'm thinking of a Craigslist job ad with the following title: "Do you love to clean?" It's recruiting for a house-cleaning service. Nothing more glamorous. Not cleaning as dues-paying at an internship. This is to be a maid.

"[F]unding [...] entry-level positions"

David Carr takes on internships. He seems to mean well, and I like his conclusion, but I can't say I follow his argument. How exactly have interns who've sued the places they worked for free "won the battle but [...] lost the war"? Because now these companies don't have internship programs? Many programs as they exist do need to be chucked, certainly now that "internship" is a word that can be tacked onto absolutely any task anyone wants done for free. (As parodied on "Seinfeld," so not all that recently, when Kramer had that NYU intern; it's just gotten worse since then. Although my favorite remains one from a real NYU listing, some vaguely famous person looking to take on the unpaid services of an "aspiring personal assistant.") Certainly when what's meant is full-time post-college employment.

The internship discussion always seems to go off course at the same place: people accuse unpaid interns of thinking they're too good for menial tasks, of being ungrateful. This is the sentiment Carr evokes with "Pity the poor interns, or tell them to get over themselves [...]" But the grievance is with not getting paid for these tasks. "Paying your dues" shouldn't literally mean paying for the opportunity. People seem to miss that non-payment creates a sense of entitlement. The idea with an unpaid internship is that you get something else from the experience - connections, a line on a resume that matters, and/or knowledge of an industry. Someone might expect the same of a paid job, but if it doesn't deliver, at least there was the paycheck. Remove that and you get perfectly reasonable entitlement.

In any case, it seems obvious that organizations getting rid of unpaid internships will still have lowest-rung positions. Does Carr think getting rid of them means companies will hire mid-career and on only? "The people who know someone who know someone will probably still get a low-paying gig," he writes, which is partly true. As long as family connections don't account for all hiring - and as long as those with connections but without the ability to do the job keep getting gently channeled away - this is something it's more or less futile to address. Carr admits that his own 17-year-old daughter had a three-day unpaid internship at a fashion mag. Nepotism along these lines isn't actually the greatest concern. If anything, unpaid internships can exist as favors to important people, without any promise that the kid ever actually gets a job or has any influence in an organization. Once a salary's involved, a company may be more inclined to go by merit. I mean, one would imagine.

"The people working with only their bootstraps will be out of luck," Carr adds, but there I'm not convinced. Low-paid - assuming something above and beyond the proverbial Metrocard - is fundamentally different from unpaid. It's possible to budget once you have a small salary to work with (ahem, grad school); not if you're working full-time for no pay.

Which... Carr then seems to get, when he switches over to praising paid internship programs, which then becomes a discussion about how this will make journalism less lily-white. But isn't this precisely the idea with getting rid of unpaid internships? He encourages "funding fellowships and entry-level positions," which just seems odd. Funding entry-level jobs? Isn't that just... paying employees? Is it something akin to charity, or a scholarship, to pay someone for their work at a for-profit organization? Is there some reason diversity couldn't be taken into account when recruiting for jobs? How would lawsuits against companies that don't pay interns in any way threaten the kind of opportunities Carr rightly encourages?

I suppose what I can't wrap my head around is how what Carr wants to see is any different from what would inevitably result from scrapping unpaid positions. Businesses would still need people to do menial tasks, as well as a first rung on the professional track. There is of course "value" in recruiting new employees. Each business/industry would need to sort out for itself how much to merge the two - whether there's any sort of advantage to forcing the future professional elite to demonstrate willingness to get coffee for higher-ups, or whether symbolic dues-paying is a waste of time and division of labor means hiring someone not on that track to do such jobs. Which is how it already works with internships - some are more 'substantive' than others, but it's not necessarily an inaccurate picture of what really needs to be done at a company if you're running errands. The only difference would be that the first rung would be paid.

A smattering of the usual

-Parental overshare at its most face-value creepy: Your child's having an age-appropriate tantrum? Publish a photo of your kid in tears, with a caption that implies your own kid is a brat. (And if so, whose fault would that be?)

-Tim Kreider on writing and illustrating for "exposure." It's not that I don't share the complaint - as a naive recent college grad, I wrote this Gothamist post, irony of ironies, for $0 - but it isn't really all that mysterious why someone would think to ask for free writing, but not free dental services. As comes up in the NYT comments, the fault may lie not with trust funds, but day jobs. As in, freelance writing, at least, is something you can do in your spare time, without special training or equipment, and that, unlike, say, accounting, you might enjoy doing regardless of what it pays. It's no coincidence that not one but two (if not more!) freelance writers without another source of income matter-of-factly describe themselves as unemployed. It's work, and it can pay something, but that something may be best thought of as supplemental. But it's not like an unpaid internship, where you're presumably going into some office during hours you might otherwise be at a job that pays, and doing tasks you yourself wouldn't have chosen. The more pressing issue might be that many of the positions that used to be day jobs for writers are now unpaid internships.

-According to Jezebel, Lena Dunham has written something "tinged with privilege." I can't possibly be the only one who's come to the conclusion that coming-across-as-privilege is Dunham's... not gimmick, exactly, but what? Niche? Career-defining motif? Whatever we're calling it, if I were Dunham, I'd keep it up.

Class, parents

-So, this week's second "Ethicist" question. There are two issues, the first - and the one I wouldn't know how to address - being the ethics of applying for a scholarship for those with a disability you don't necessarily have. (Is someone who functions well in whichever area, but with extensive intervention, no longer thought to have whichever disability? I'd imagine that if you have prosthetic devices that could even out-perform regular legs in a race, you'd still be disabled on account of not having legs, even if you were relatively advantaged over someone else without legs or prosthetics.)

The second is the ethical question of whether a graduate student from a wealthy family should not accept scholarship money, or not do so if said family has offered to pay for school. I've thought about this before, in the context of law schools asking financial-aid applicants, or just those under a certain age, to provide parental income information. It seems clear why colleges must do this, but is there a cultural assumption that parents pay for their adult children? Put another way, is an adult child of rich parents necessarily "rich"?

It seems like there's a huge difference between someone who's independently wealthy in a trust-fund sense, whose money is theirs (even if there's a healthy dose of guilt at that unearned stroke of luck), and someone whose parents would pay for this but not that, and might use that capacity to control life choices. Which could be anything from an insistence on law school but no MFA, to, don't marry X, or don't be (openly) gay, or keep observing whichever religion. Structures in place that make it more difficult for the child of wealthy, controlling parents to renounce that support and live independently... on the one hand, this is a way of indirectly giving a boost to those who didn't grow up rich (with the exposure to all kinds of cultural-capital-enhancement and good schools that implies), which is a good thing. On the other, it's not exactly no-harm-done, either.

And then there's the question of whether graduate merit-based scholarships are more like scholarships - where we can have a reasonable conversation about whether there's much point directing these at kids whose parents can pay - or jobs. We generally don't ask whether it's really right to pay a 25-year-old a salary because maybe this person's parents could afford to keep them as dependents. We don't generally think it's wrong for a job to offer health insurance to people whose parents could, in theory, foot that bill. Or maybe we kind of do - thus the rise of unpaid internships and stipend-paying fellowships in lieu of full-on grown-up jobs for those at an age where maybe parents theoretically might be paying, even if most of the time, they're not.

Anyway, the Ethicist seems to buy into the idea that a young (?) but post-college adult remains an implicit dependent, or that's what this bit - "as a responsible child, you feel a responsibility to save your parents as much money as possible" - leads me to believe. I'd say this is more about being a responsible adult, which generally means someone who turns to parents for financial assistance sparingly if ever.

-I heard Lisa Miller, author of a story I still need to read, about "ethical parenting," interviewed on Leonard Lopate. Miller said something about parents getting their kids internships, and Lopate, providing the devil's-advocate position (or just disagreeing?) explained that his own interns have arrived through connections. Which... here's the thing. Yes, that's how life works, and yes, 99.99% of why this sort of thing gets to me is that not only is this a form of advantage I've never had, but one I kind of suspect many assume I do have, as if coming from New York (and being Jewish?) inherently provides media connections. Not so! Yes, the waambulence has been contacted to this effect. There's some klezmer playing on the tiniest violins, I assure.

But it seems like there's a difference between the seeming unfairness - but perhaps, ultimately, fairness - of the knowing-the-right-people that comes from networking (is it unfair that friendlier, more outgoing, more persistent people get ahead?), and the kind of knowing-people that arises from having been born to those people. It's not that I doubt that Lopate's friends' kids would be capable of internship-type work (or that, if they're not, they wouldn't be fired/not recommended for permanent employment). It's that so, too, would be a great many more college students, but if the position's never advertised... Again, word-of-mouth is one thing if there's some world of people who already have whichever achievements, and who are benefitting from "privilege" they've actually earned. It's another if we're talking people whose sole achievement thus far is having been born into the right family. Longwinded story short, Lopate generally seems a good liberal, so I was a bit surprised by his blasé attitude towards what it says about the news business and what gets covered if that's how you get a foot in the door.

"Lean into an unpaid internship"

Fiction is better, the article. By yours truly. I need to be better about the whole social-media self-promotion thing, i.e. it's not enough to just link to the article without making it clear that I, you know, wrote it. I need to... "lean in." I mean, I'm getting there. I have the beginnings of a functional website.

OK, so I've finished Lean In, and will provide my much-anticipated verdict. (I must phrase it like this, despite not actually thinking my verdict is especially anticipated, because Sandberg promotes faking it until you make it.) Which is not entirely unenthusiastic, if somewhat less positive than Flavia's.

As a reader, I'm not the biggest fan of books that are collaborative efforts between famous people and people actually capable of writing. It's not the principle of the thing - as long as the "with" is acknowledged, it's fine - but the writing style that ensues. There are these little quasi-humorous asides, where you may find yourself wondering, is this Sandberg? Her "with"? The moments that are meant to feel natural just don't. I found the style incredibly distracting, even though I could tell it was designed for easy reading.

Style aside, it's a mix of sensible advice applicable to all women; sensible advice applicable to the three or four women in Sandberg's boat (the second-after-Sartre problem); artificial-feeling nods in the direction of stay-at-home moms doing really important work, too (although I might file that, too, under "style" - it feels very much included to preempt that accusation, but cuts against the book's main message); and painful attempts to make Sandberg's career trajectory relatable. There are also platitudes - be confident, but not obnoxious. Fair enough, but how? Isn't the problem there that the line is only ever visible to others?

First, the sensible-and-applicable. The bit about how you should do what you would do if you weren't afraid, it's self-help-ish, but not wrong. And the advice about the long haul - that just because your work hardly/doesn't pay for childcare doesn't mean you should quit - seems right. There's value in staying in the workforce in some capacity. And the big-picture argument - that there ought to be more women at the top of every field - was true when Anne-Marie Slaughter said it and remains true. Fewer women opting out means a broader pool from which Slaughters and Sandbergs might emerge, and means a lot of good-but-not-spectacular careers for women who don't quite reach the top. (Most men won't, either.) And the biggest, overarching point - that the person who steps back in a straight couple shouldn't by-default be the woman - is entirely true and important. And relevant to everyone, not just executives.

Next, the not-as-applicable. The stuff about the two-body problem was... not so helpful. First, a 27-year-old woman is faulted for not wanting to move abroad for a year for some very important job because she has a boyfriend. Fair enough - if you're not going to go abroad for your work then, when? (I did, and have the grungy Paris-dorm flip-flops to tell about it.) Then Sandberg insists that women should be open about their personal lives as this relates to geography, and proudly recalls telling her mentor, Larry Summers, that she'd rather not move abroad because she wants to meet a man (they're only found domestically?), and also would rather not live in D.C. because it's where her ex-husband lives. What normal person could do this, given that there are enough problems for many people trying to tell higher-ups that they want to live near the person they're actually involved with? What message does this convey, other than that it's good to be at a place in life where Larry Summers has your back? (As someone I discussed this with said, this sounds more like leaning out.)

We then reach the point where Sandberg is happily married to her second husband, but they live in different cities. The cost (or, one suspects, comfort) of travel isn't an issue, but they have a kid now, which complicates matters. Her husband - 50-50 partner that he is - graciously decides to move to her city. Has he opted out? Not exactly - he's become CEO of another company and moved that company to her city. And how delightful that must have been for all the employees of said company, who must now move away from their families. This isn't how it goes for white women, or for white women with college degrees. This is how it goes for like three people in the world, and she and her husband are among them. Between this and the enthusiasm for "Porn For Women," that book about how, ha ha, women's biggest 'turn-on' is for their husbands to clean the house, Sandberg would lose me from time to time.

The main problem with the book is that it's trying to be two things - a guide for all the women, and one for the second-after-Sartres of the world. It's not exactly that it's offensive to women who are less ambitious. It's very every-box-checked, with privilege acknowledged, the full deal. It's just... maybe not so useful if you're never orchestrating the merger of two companies or some such. If your goal is ruling the world, then yes, it's incredibly important to pick a spouse who'll embrace this. Yet few men - and, drumroll please, few women - are interested in signing up for that life, and if you want a happy relationship, and don't want to be CEO of an especially large corporation, this may not be a wise strategy. This one woman is discussed and praised for having played mind games with boyfriends, canceling on them for fake work events, to see how they'd react, and asking them to travel with her (was she paying?) at a moment's notice. It's not worse for a woman to do this, but it's kind of weak behavior on anyone's part.

And then there's the Lean In empire, which is its own thing, and which just feels like internet-age positivity without much direction. A 20-something unpaid intern tells her Lean In story (dream the big dreams!), as do Sarah Ferguson (!) and Tyra Banks (!!!), who evidently leaned into her position as a supermodel. You can also intern for zilch at the Lean In organization. For all that Lean In has to say about the need, as a woman, to deftly negotiate, there sure is a lot of space left open for celebrating women who work-for-no-pay outside the home.

Garrets and lofts

Garance Franke-Ruta is right: there have always been struggling artists, and it's long been a struggle to be one in New York.

But what's new - and not limited to New York! - is the expansion of the struggling-artist category. Are academics starving artists? Lawyers? Journalists? I can understand that if you want to live off your own pure creativity (music, writing, visual arts, etc.), it's always been and always will be a struggle, unless you have family money. These days, though, you can go any number of providing-a-specific-service-to-others professional routes that would have sounded sensible a couple decades ago, and this will be viewed as decadent. It's possible to be an unpaid intern at an office job, the very sort of office job that back in the day, an artist or writer might have used to pay the bills.

Unpaid internships and downward mobility

So I have at long last read Ross Perlin's Intern Nation. What took me so long? Part of it was grad school's way of preventing me from keeping up with new non-fiction. Part was simply that Perlin, who I think says in the book he began researching the topic in 2008 (the book itself only came out last year), is not the one who alerted me to this issue. I was complaining about entry-level internships in 2006, for Gothamist which, I might add, allowed me to submit that post for exposure, but there was never any talk of compensation. I'm not sure it would have even occurred to me to ask (even though I knew the editor from school! what was I thinking?), which is its own sinkhole of a conversation.

But back to Perlin: I didn't have that uh-oh-what-if-someone-had-this-idea-before-I-did panic that can get me to a book or article ASAP. I didn't feel that I'd stepped on his turf, as it were. (Nor, of course, do I think he stepped on mine - ever since there have been unpaid internships, there have been people noting that this is perhaps not terribly fair. And slavery was abolished before any of us were born.) But I want to write more on this, and must get whatever education on it there is.

So Intern Nation is clearly the reference for this topic. Stats, yes, but also the full scope of the issue: the law (and with the lawsuits these days, that's important as background), the international scene, and the classification of burger-flipping jobs as "internships."

Its greatest strength - apart from collecting all that material in one place - is that it shouts from the rooftops that much - not all, but much - that's called an "internship" is a complete joke: "Bosses" in no position to offer you paid work or useful training, who aren't anything more than individuals wanting free personal assistance (Perlin of course references the "Kramerica" episode of "Seinfeld"), or who don't even know you're there (and alerting them to your presence would be too uppity and entitled) and thus can't give you a reference.

The pervasive belief that "internship" means something that leads to white-collar work leads young people and their parents to sacrifice in order to make this happen, yet to what end?

Which is what I still can't figure out after reading the book. Are unpaid interns on this separate and tough-to-exit track, amassing qualifications for ever-snazzier... unpaid internships, but self-defining as people not suited for compensated work? Do employers with actual jobs on offer - the ones who, as has been much-remarked-upon, demand three years' experience for entry-level - actually consider unpaid internships "experience"? Reports there are mixed.

It does start to look like a lot of unpaid internships exist in fields where you don't need them to get an entry-level job. And from Perlin's research, it kind of does look like connections can often get the fancier young people a never-ending series of internships but not a paying job. As in, just because there are unpaid hotel-housekeeping internships (thanks Moebius Stripper!) doesn't mean the field of hotel housekeeping has closed off to those who go straight to applying for jobs.

From what I've seen - including in Perlin's own book! - it seems entirely possible that unpaid internships are if anything an engine of downward social mobility, sending certain children of rich or middle-class families onto a dead-end track, yet not driving the entire economy to a halt, so clearly someone's working for pay.

The one counterargument I find (somewhat) persuasive is that they tilt certain fields (several of which were already that way, though) towards the rich. Regular journalism: not always thus. Government work: probably also not always thus. With both of these, a socioeconomic shift really is a big deal, and needs to be among the central arguments against unpaid internships. But fashion magazines? Art galleries? Publishing? Non-profits?

What could be happening - and commenter Fourtinefork may want to weigh in - is that the "trust-fund job" is something to which those from middle-class homes now aspire to - and the traditional "pin-money" jobs are now ones women (and some men) who fully expect to be self-supporting now take - but the Golden Age when one could support one's self on these incomes never was. There's a big difference between unpaid and underpaid in terms of self-worth, but maybe less so in terms of upward mobility.

Quote of the day

"Our [unpaid] interns are learning how to [...] blog [...]."

WWPD Industries can do one better. We will graciously allow you to pay us to teach you how to blog. An unpaid internship is more prestigious than a lowly paying job, so surely this arrangement is better still. Your first task: sort out the tax situation of such an arrangement. Your second: think of more posts for WWPD that will infuriate sub-communities (?) on Reddit, thereby driving up traffic, thereby permitting us to "hire" more paying interns. 

In exchange, we will direct you to a website called Blogger, and will teach you html so rudimentary that you could never in a million years put that as a skill on your resume.

"Lovers," mason jars, and internships

A weekend! No observations of Ivy reunion rituals, but fun all the same:

-Saw "Lovers and Other Strangers," a 1968 play (and 1970 movie I'm now dying to see - with Cloris Leachman aka Phyllis, and Diane Keaton's film debut) co-written by Renée Taylor aka Sylvia Fine. Fran's mother on "The Nanny," and thus the performer behind one of the best quotes of sitcom history, or so I thought in 2004. (Almost nine years have passed, but I still think it's pretty great.) I have next to no knowledge of theater - community or otherwise - but the acting was quite impressive. The sound technique that involved draping microphones over the cast's foreheads was somewhat distracting, but as if I'd know how one deals with performance acoustics, so all is forgiven.

Like I said, theater performance, I have no idea. The script is something else. The overall mood of the play was very much early-1970s sitcom. Which meant both the rhythm and world of comedy I know well (Rhoda Morgenstern could have popped by at any minute) and a certain dated-ness to the proceedings. Somehow one can look past that sort of thing when watching "The Bob Newhart Show" on the couch. But in public, in 2013, it becomes extra-salient. Things like a scandal over whether a woman will or won't spend the night with a guy she's just met, the obstacle being her commitment to second-wave feminism (and general women-are-like-so nuttiness). Or: a man furious that his wife has taken a job outside the home. The play is a series of vignettes, set - in this production - in different years, from the late 1960s up to the present. The "2002" vignette included a cake from "Whole Foods," but was otherwise set entirely in the "All in the Family" universe.

But most jarring, dated-ness-wise, was the casual homophobia of an era before Stonewall, AIDS, or same-sex marriage. In one vignette, a woman calls her ex-marine husband a "faggot" when he refuses to have sex with her that night. In another, it is debated whether or not a well-known performer from long ago was a "fairy." In neither of these cases are gay people being directly insulted - the characters are being (gently) ridiculed for these conversations. But in both, it's just... insulting in a way that wouldn't go over in 2013. Which brings up that WWPD persistent motif: the tendency of writing from earlier eras to be offensive by today's standards, and the question of what to do with that information. I'm used to looking at this question as it relates to novels (specifically 19th century French novels and their remarkably nasty representations of Jews, no matter the author - looking at you, Zola), but it's more complicated, I now see, when it comes to performing text written in a not-so-enlightened Then.

Here's what this production did with that information: They made the final vignette, "2013," one about cold feet before a wedding, about a lesbian couple. Because it's 2013! There are weddings with two brides! While the sentiment was admirable, the execution somewhat less so. It was a bit of men-are-like-so sitcom humor about male fear of commitment. While there are no doubt lesbians who fear commitment, this twist was so far beyond the sophistication of the script that it took a while to sort out that this even was a same-sex couple, and not a couple girlfriends-in-the-pre-enlightened-sense chatting about another wedding. As in, it's not that this was unrealistic, but that the universe of the play was one of clingy dingbat (R.I.P.) women and macho, philandering men.

Anyway, those who know more about theater than I do (Flavia?) can weigh in, if interested, about how such issues are generally/ideally approached.

-Went to Brooklyn Flea Philly. It did indeed seem much like Brooklyn Flea Brooklyn, which is to say, a lot of curated knick-knacks such that, if you're there to shop, you'd perhaps be better off at a thrift store. But the point is obviously people-watching, which was if anything better at the Philadelphia equivalent. Places other than New York just have space, so around the market itself were a large number of outdoor cafés. I had heard tell of Philadelphia hipsters - that Philadelphia had a Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick - but my prior experience of Northern Liberties brought me to what must have been the wrong edge of it. Wrong as in, there was just nothing much there, maybe two cafés over many blocks, otherwise just... residential? This time, though, I got a sense of the full scope of the area, and... I wasn't in Princeton anymore! I had a Mason jar iced Stumptown coffee and a lemon bar five times the size one would have been in New York. Fabulous.

-Less fabulous: Thomas Friedman's new thing where he promotes some start-up he has a personal family connection to, and somehow uses that as a springboard for advising Young People Today to take unpaid internships as possible, to do the lowliest tasks for no pay, and to "add value" to companies that can't quite get it together to pay you anything. This is going to be missed, because it emerged the same time as the more compelling you're-being-watched information, but it's still a big deal:

Since so many internships are unpaid these days, added Sedlet, there is a real danger that only “rich kids” can afford them, which will only widen our income gaps. The key, if you get one, he added, is to remember “that companies don’t want generalists to help them think big; they want people who can help them execute” and “add value.”

Interesting jump there.

This is also particularly delightful: "Internships are increasingly important today, they [Friedman's family friends] explained, because skills are increasingly important in the new economy and because colleges increasingly don’t teach the ones employers are looking for."

There's of course no evidence provided that unpaid internships provide any particular skills, or - more pertinent - that employers view them as work experience. By all means, work for free! (I.e., pay to work!) Why? Because it might mean you'll get a contact. (It would be altogether entitled to expect it to lead to a job.) Networking!

But also: when was the Golden Age of colleges as vocational school? I know this is supposed to be code for 'students today just drink, sleep in, and learn far-left drivel', but it's not as if the critical thinking and Great Books of a traditional liberal-arts education provide the skills needed to become a "product manager," let alone to know that such a job exists.

It just does seem awfully convenient to define today's college grads as uniquely incapable of entering the workforce without one or multiple stints in unpaid employment.

Things that are not underwear

-Conor and Elizabeth just did a Bloggingheads where they talk about my fiction-is-better hypothesis. Conor suggests a move towards a new genre somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, using the techniques of non-fiction but without the overshare-about-real-people element. This I'd certainly support, although I'm not sure it - or different versions of it - doesn't exist. There are articles where pseudonyms are used. And one does notice that in the blog comments at Motherlode and such, people are happy to take stories seriously even if the author is identified only as Alice in Omaha (say). And then there are works of fiction that play with the idea of being non-fiction - Philip Roth using the protagonist "Philip Roth," for example. But maybe there should be some genre in its own right that somehow full-on captures the public appetite for non-fiction - 'reality' - while at the same time sparing identifying information? More on this later, most likely.

-Friends, Facebook friends, currently in Paris: I "like" your posts, but I also envy. Tremendously. Dessert would be nice. But the best bet in the area - the only one, really - is an ice cream place. Ice cream would do, but it's pouring. If such a thing existed, I would call the waaambulence and have it take me to the nearest decent-pastry-having establishment.

-A department list email with info about a six-month internship that would prefer "graduate students and recent graduates." I feel as though I've blogged about this posting before - I guess they advertise this position a lot, considering the rather limited market for an unpaid job for which you need to be quite that old/educated/fluent in French/having of prior work experience. Seemingly legal, but also seemingly the sort of thing that ought to pay. The annoying thing is that other than the thing where it doesn't pay, it sounds like a great job.

Free trade coffee UPDATED, TWICE

Of course there's an unpaid coffee-roasting internship; of course Matthew Yglesias is defending it at Slate.

Anyway, Yglesias is completely right that from the perspective of a company, it's better to hire employees you know will pan out. It's better not to pay for any time spent training or weeding out prospects. It's also better for the company to ask for a long-term commitment - these interns Yglesias writes about are asked to "Be willing to commit at least one year to working for the company" - a company that has yet to pay them a cent. Sure, the company's hiring process ultimately contributes to its profits, but technically speaking, you the first-day employee aren't adding much and might indeed be taking away.

But! That's just one part of the equation. There are also the interests of the would-be employee, and the cost of that person's time. If you're showing up for work at a job you're almost certain to be fired from after a trial period (yes, better eight hours than eight months), what's in it for you? Training in coffee-roasting, evidently. (While it's generous of this company to provide free coffee classes, the relevant comparison here isn't the kind of coffee classes yuppies might pay for as a hobby, but the paid on-the-job training other companies may provide.) But is coffee-roasting such a widespread field in the area that these skills are going to be transferrable? Even if you're not literally roasting the beans the place will sell, isn't this trial period about increasing the company's profits more than it's about increasing your employability with firms other than this one? Why, if not out of a sense that this was all that was out there, would anyone apply for this job? If Yglesias is right in his stats, that's not likely to be the case. So maybe you'd do this if you're someone who doesn't need the money?

"Their calculus," writes Yglesias, "is that, rather than picking who to hire first and then train them, it makes more sense to train first and see who does the best job of taking to the training." This order, however, distorts the process itself. Many people will work really hard for pay - including low pay. But it's going to be a different group of candidates who put in their all for nothing in return. These are people who think coffee-making is neato, but who aren't quite rich enough to be paying for coffee-making lessons.

And I think, ladies and gentlemen, that we have finally arrived at the kind of unpaid internship for which the traditional social-justice argument against them is the most appropriate.

UPDATE

A commenter, who has committed the bloggy sin of not providing at least a pseudonym (it's not as if I have any idea who "Petey" is, but at least this appears to be the same character across the years), finds my concerns here "ridiculous," because the "internship" is eight hours long, and so are some regular job interviews.

As I respond in the comments, I concede that job interviews can last even more than eight hours, but the job one is interviewing for in such cases tends to be a big deal as in high-status and long-term. People I know who've applied for tenure-track academic jobs report interviewing processes longer than eight hours, but they're being assessed as colleagues for life. Whereas the kind of job for which the training is eight hours long - as opposed to eight years, give or take, for someone on the academic job market - is probably a very different sort of job. Granted, I don't know anything about coffee-roasting, but my experience cappuccino-frothing was, one did get paid on the job to learn how to do this, even though one's first efforts may not have been sold.

If I sound particularly miffed about this particular internship, it's because this one actually hits closer to home. I've managed to avoid even applying for unpaid internships marked as such. But on at least three occasions (one bakery, one juice bar, one PR firm*) in my youth, I was informally taken on, asked to work for a trial period, not hired, and never compensated. I don't take this to mean something larger about my youthful attitude or abilities, given that I was also hired for (and never fired from) similar positions around the same time. Point being, I wasn't not paid on account of not having worked. The reason was, these places could get away with that.

The thing is, it's relatively easy to avoid unpaid work if it's clearly labeled as, this is unpaid and there are no promises it will lead to a particular job. (Those positions are more depressing, but also more upfront, and, as I understand it, more likely to be legal.) But once there's this other realm of work that might start paying, and it's up to the discretion of the employer when you're good and ready to deserve payment. I mean, what's to stop this coffee company from saying, gee, there are four really excellent candidates, it's so tough to decide, how about another eight hours unpaid? Or from saying, oh, what a shame there's only room in the budget to hire two people, but how about you six - care to stay on unpaid, in exchange for valuable experience and free coffee?

As the very junior, not-so-skilled individual trying to find work, you're in a position of not a heck of a lot of knowledge or power. Unless mom or dad happens to be an employment lawyer with time to spare (not my situation), you're on your own. And it's easy enough to get sucked into working for nothing - whether or not you're wealthy enough to afford doing so - if it's your impression that this is the only route to working for something.

*SECOND UPDATE: I now remember that the PR firm didn't not hire me. I "quit," I think, once it was clear that there was an indefinite period of unpaid. I think. This was, I believe, exactly one hundred years ago. I did get something interesting out of that "job," though, which was to learn that there are people who appear in the society pages not because they're real socialites, but because they pay to get placed in them. Of course, this was in the pre-"Real Housewives" era, back when faux-aristocracy really meant something.

Unpaid work, in three parts

1) NYU sophomore Christina Isnardi - not someone I've ever had as a student, or heard of until today, unsurprising considering NYU has like ten billion students - has organized against unpaid internships, specifically the illegal ones listed on the school's own career database (via). And, I mean, true enough - you go to that website (and unless you start grad school knowing that some wood-paneled office awaits you at the end - which you don't - you will) and lo and behold, perhaps a third of the "jobs" listed will pay anything at all. This had been bothering me, and I didn't do anything about it. Well, I did something, but not enough. 

What I like about the petition (which I of course signed) is that it acknowledges the myriad problems with unpaid internships: that they are often illegal, that they don't actually help you get a job, that they are only available to the rich (which I believe is less important than it's often made out to be - if they can't really get you a job, who cares how those who can afford not to get paid spend their time, but it no doubt impacts perceptions of who can enter which field, thereby impacting who tries; and sure, in some cases, they probably do get people jobs), they leave the quasi-employee open to all kinds of not-at-all-quasi harassment, etc. 

This was, I might add, my first experience looking at USA Today comments, and there are some charmers. "Join the nation's conversation," implores the paper, and what does that attract?

You have to love 20 somethings who aren't worth anything demanding renumeration for a position where they get experience so they can go out and get a job! This must be the same group whose parents gave them all trophies in soccer because they didn't want anyone to lose.

Yes indeed, so entitled, demanding to get fairly compensated for work that one is doing. Because that's really the mark of an entitled college student: having a job. This in response to:

Hey moron don't like it? Then DON'T APPLY!!!!

Both of these, by the way, from "top commenter[s]," both using what appear to be their own real names and Facebook accounts to comment.

2) Paging Emily Matchar: Food journalist Kristin Wartman has an op-ed in the NYT, arguing that if we-as-a-society are going to declare The Home-Cooked Meal the solution to all of our problems, the producers of said meal ought to be compensated. She points us back to a "long-forgotten" - well, not entirely, given that Madeleine Schwartz just wrote about it - movement from the 1970s, Wages for Housework.

The idea here is - and this is me expanding on where I think Wartman is/should be going with this, not just paraphrasing Wartman - Second Wave feminists decided that empowerment meant working outside the home. (This is Wartman.) Which was nice and all for whichever women had the potential and drive to go do something empowering, but effectively meant trading housework for blah outside-work for a great many women. Outside-work of the sort that, the men who do the same sort of work, they'd probably also prefer to stay home, if it were socially acceptable for them to express this. (This is WWPD.) And regardless, women who worked outside the home were more or less fated to continue doing housework as well, or outsourcing said housework to poorer women who'd perhaps rather be home with their own families, cleaning up a more homey heap of mess (Wartman.)

I *think* Wartman is arguing that subsidizing home cooking could happen in such a way as to encourage men to do half the work, or at least more of it. But there's also this aspect of the argument that's kind of defeatist, or realist, or at any rate unrelated to whichever dreamy world of Pollan-Bittman-inspired men who, home from their creative-class jobs, whip up something local-sustainable. It's more like, women will always for all eternity deal with drudgery, but will not always have husbands with jobs supporting this, and even if they do, they deserve financial independence/official recognition of their labor, so the state has got to start paying them.

And, I'm not sure quite what to make of this. It's not entirely unappealing - cooking is work. Its market value isn't as immediately obvious as that of labor done at a job-job, but if we really are eating so terribly as to cause an ever-worsening health crisis, then it is indeed in the state's interest to keep medical bills down by subsidizing leisurely trips to the farmers' market. Interesting, then, but.

Aside from whichever libertarian philosophical objections that don't bother me because I'm not a libertarian, there are just certain practical concerns. How exactly could the state pay you to home-cook a meal? How much say will the state have in what you make for dinner? If you give people money and say, 'stay home and cook kale,' maybe they won't spend it on food at all. (The 'welfare' critique, which is, I would think, why we don't hear more often about paying women/people of both sexes for housework.) If you give them food-vouchers, maybe they won't buy kale.

And if you give them kale-only vouchers (Wartman says, "money for good food"), what counts and what doesn't? The official science on what we are and are not supposed to eat changes all the time, 'processed' is a construct (is pasta processed?), and... it just seems complicated.

And those of us who don't have children, are we also getting these kale-vouchers? I suppose I'm not clear where the line between making it possible or easier to cook at home ends, and where effectively ordering "stay-at-home parents" (ahem, mothers) to report for "education on cooking, meal planning and shopping." And this gets to a bigger question for the food movement - is it that people think they don't have the time-and-money to cook, and are merely waiting for the government to step in and give them the resources, or do people actually prefer not having to cook? And: would it be as empowering to have the state giving you a home-cooking allowance as going out into the world (physically, or from your home, what with technology) and having a job?

These are, as the prose suggests, rambling thoughts, and there could well be some overarching reason why Wartman is entirely right or (I suspect) entirely wrong that you, my loyal band of equally-unpaid copy-editors and idea-clarifiers, can lay out.

3) In honor of Mother's Day, presumably, "Into The Gloss" profiles Arianna Huffington and her daughter, a young woman who, by freakish coincidence, works at the Huffington Post. (Not hating, just saying - nepotism once got me a summer job as a file clerk, and has got others in my life jobs at supermarkets, bakeries, etc. Same thing, really.) While the profile goes into the particular high-end lotions these two Huffingtons slather themselves with and why, the star of the show is Arianna's bathroom, which looks like the bathroom in an upscale department store (and, on that topic, if you're ever in a city and in need of facilities, upscale department stores are the place to go).

The profile gives off the kind of girl-power pseudo-feminism one comes to expect from fashion-and-beauty blogs. The takeaway is that we are to admire the elder Ms. Huffington on account of, she's a woman entrepreneur. And one with such great values, too - she has as fancy a shower as she does, one that allows you to "sit down and have a steam," because "it's just so detoxifying." We who must stand while we shower are basically walking toxic waste. Says Arianna:

The thing that’s exciting for me is that our Lifestyle sections are really growing. We put them all together under this theme of “Less Stress, More Living.” It’s a challenge, trying to practice that at work and at home, and trying to create peaceful, orderly environments in both spheres.

Affirms her daughter:

At HuffPo, I think she’s trying to do it differently. So, we have meditation that we can take twice a week, and nap rooms. I mean, it can be tough when you’re working in a twenty-four-hour news organization—there is always something else to be done.

Affirms an acolyte commenter:

The message I really caught from this, and it's something I'm working on, is to slow down. Get more rest & take care of your skin and body. Give yourself the gift of time.

It's Zen with a twist of Sandberg.

The advertorial of sorts - oh, we're also meant to admire Arianna for not having had cosmetic surgery, or so she claims, and I honestly haven't given this enough thought to know if I'm supposed to doubt this - is trying to convey that Huffington mère has created a softer, more feminine version of capitalist world takeover. Kinder, gentler, better for women. Except... the people (many - most? - of whom are women) whose content it uses but doesn't compensate.

Disclaimer time: I've never been on their unpaid-blogger crew, but I did once agree to let them reprint something I had written for pay elsewhere, but on other occasions, things I've written for pay elsewhere have popped up there, with some subtle distinction in format - once it just popped up, another time they had asked to reprint it and I hadn't even had a chance to get back to them. I've been asked to provide unpaid content for them on two other occasions, and declined once, never answered the second time. In principle, I oppose providing content to some other entity for 'exposure.' In principle, I also think it's less bad than unpaid internships, where one might do all manner of drudgery for 'exposure' to theoretical contacts who never even notice you're there. I am - as you may have guessed - far more enthusiastic about having a blog, where you get to write what you want, when you want, and try out ideas, and produce 'work' you maybe wouldn't send, in that state, to a publication.

So the general rule is, I'm not keen on free work for other people. But I also think, in principle, that it's wrong to blame those who take unpaid work of any kind, when the blame should go to the employers that exploit the opportunity. Yes, if all unpaid workers refused to be the 'supply' in this equation, companies would need to decide if the work was something they were prepared to pay for. Yes, it is possible that I have at times sabotaged my own writing-world prospects by refusing to consider unpaid jobs and trying to avoid the temptation to accept exposure as compensation. But the balance of power, the economy, the perception of the economy... people are going to take what they can get.

Anyway, longwinded story short, there's something about that bathroom that says, 'the money I didn't spend paying you fools, I spent on marble surfaces and $70 concealer.' I thought it. I wasn't alone. A commenter, self-identifying as "Guest," but no, not me (as if I'm ever that succinct), wrote: "Beautiful bathroom! Amazing what all of the Huffington Post's unpaid labor can buy." While I suppose technically, she was marble-bathroom-level rich before the HuffPost era, the point got across. 

Stage

Of all unpaid internships, the ones that tend to jump out in their ridiculousness are those that involve traditional youth labor, but without pay. Unpaid internships in trendy mall-store retail and, apparently, at New Brooklyn pizzerias (with $10 individual-pie-the-size-of-a-normal-slice Manhattan food-cart outposts)... and NYMag has a piece defending this. On account of, there's a French name for working for free at a restaurant - "stage," note the italics. It's a thing that predates Bushwick hotspot Roberta's foray into not paying farm workers, because Roberta's is farm-to-fork, you see. Food's just so much more ethical that way!

On the one hand, one might say, at least in such cases, this doesn't involve kids from poorer families being excluded from high-prestige, high-mobility professions. If more rich kids enter such lucrative fields as chain-store salesperson or pizza-place urban farmer, that might leave some slots at the top for kids whose parents are non-glorified retail or food-service workers. And in principle, these are fields that don't require college, and so whichever apprenticeship period might be in lieu of tuition.

On the other, it seems especially off when jobs that normally go to people looking above all for a paycheck - not some long-range career benefit, the forging of connections - switch to unpaid. And realistically, these positions are not going to be taken in the place of college, but in addition to it. Who else but those in, bound for, or graduated from college is even thinking about "internships"? And it's not as if all such labor is going this route. These positions seem mostly restricted to organizations with a certain highbrow allure - Anthropologie, not Old Navy, and Roberta's, not the local utilitarian slice joint. The extreme of this, I suppose, would be internships at restaurants in France that you have to pay to do, and the job requires constantly demonstrating how grateful you are for the opportunity. (Some kind of immersion tourism for those who want to be sneered at by French restaurant workers more than tourists normally are?) But still, Anthropologie isn't Chanel, and Roberta's isn't Per Se. It's clear enough that lines are getting blurred, and that employers are learning the lesson that one doesn't even need to pretend that one pays one's workers.

Friday's assortment

-We've established that Rejected White College Applicant is entitled, just as we caught a similarly barrel-dwelling fish when we confirmed that Princeton Mom is simultaneously sexist and elitist. But if there's any message to take from this high school student's cringe-inducing essay, it's absolutely not that young people are entitled if they don't take (often unpaid) internships.

-The famous writer who's lost it and his particular brand of losing it is Gucci. Sad, really. That GQ essay now joins Zola's Ladies Paradise as the document to read if you find yourself with a shopping urge, however slight, you'd rather not have. I had, as you all remember, lost even the vague interest I'd ever had in Lululemon yoga pants once the scandal broke. I ended up with some much cheaper running tights, and none of the deer I pass on my jogging route (the ticks, the ticks!) have remarked on the material. But I did have my eye on a bottle of $8 pale-blue nail polish. Now? No.

-The New Brooklyn involves houses with space for the wife to "get dressed and go to work in the morning without waking [the husband] with the sound of clomping Louboutins."

-What was that you said? You want something about something I didn't read or listen to? Something from... life? Not as much material at the moment. My husband and I had a fun dinner party last weekend, and lately I'm taking a break from Chapter 7 to work on the Conclusion, which means having to reread Sartre on The Jews... which is almost identical to Zola on The Jews, which seems relevant. 

"[O]pportunities to work for free"

Matthew Yglesias has been defending unpaid internships with a lesser-evil argument: they're better than pricey grad school. Specifically, Columbia's journalism grad program, which doesn't come cheap.

I know a bit about about NYU's journalism grad program, which doubtless also doesn't come cheap (although there are scholarships, as there probably are at Columbia), because my own program overlaps with theirs. (French Studies, in its various permutations.) And... journalism grad students also do unpaid internships. Quite possibly the for-course-credit kind.

And this is how it tends to work. Unpaid internships don't replace the need for extra education. Finding them in the first place - getting an in, figuring out which are legit, even knowing to look for them - often requires that you be a student. Maybe in an ideal world (more on that in a moment) an apprenticeship system would make it easier to go less-credentialed, but that's not what happens.

But would this be such an ideal world? School is not work, and paying to go to school is different in several ways from paying to go to work. (Which is what working for free means, all the more so if "free" is happening in a city like New York. Grad school with a stipend that allows you to break even at best might count as "free.")

1) If you pay to work, you're paying to increase a company's profits. Your work, then, however much it may incidentally benefit you (the much-vaunted learning experience), is selected according to what the company needs. Whereas if you pay to go to school, a) the company you're paying is (FWIW) a non-profit, and b) the work you're doing has been chosen according to how much it will benefit you.

2) Degrees are transferrable in a way that work experience is not. That's one reason work needs to pay - because all you take from a given stint might well be the pay. Once you have "MA" affixed to your name, this... may count against you at the Starbucks you're applying to work at, may be in a not-so-lucrative subject area, etc., etc., but it's there. Whereas a line on your resume might mean absolutely nothing more than that you filled your time. I say "filled your time" and not "were employed" because my understanding of this is that time spent unpaid-interning is not necessarily (not usually?) considered time spent employed.

3) If work doesn't always pay, if that isn't just what work is, who's to say when it does pay? After how many weeks, months, years of a position does it begin to offer a paycheck? After how many weeks, months, years in an industry can a "worker" start demanding compensation? Not to get all "Girls" on you, but it's clear enough where this can lead. You can work somewhere for free for ages, but if you're starting from zero pay, negotiating up to even minimum wage can seem a lost cause. It becomes that a worker who demands pay is entitled. It becomes something above-and-beyond to expect from one's employer. (And who's likely not to want to make a fuss? Women. Also those of both sexes not raised to expect to triumph professionally.)

Sigh

I think Instapundit did a close reading of my post about unpaid internships.

Intern-sectionality

Because the topic has interested me for so long, after writing about gender and unpaid internships for a wider audience, I did take a close-ish look at the comments, and have reflected on some of them here. Not, this time around, to apologize for having dared say my piece before a mass audience. I'm getting used to the scale of this, but am curious to see others' reactions. I haven't quite kept up with all of them, but there is one point I believe must be addressed:

Many feel that I missed the big picture, namely that unpaid internships are unfair to those from poorer families. (That they're often illegal fails to compel, because then you'll get libertarian sorts arguing that if these arrangements are voluntary, it's the law that's the problem.) While the general unfairness of life for those from poorer families is a point worth repeating, this is not the strongest case against unpaid internships. Against the ridiculous cost of going to college, yes - that very much is the rich getting richer, given that it still helps to go to college (and then some) to get a job, given the difference between graduating with and without debt. Against unpaid internships, no.

So it's not that I forgot to mention this, or that I don't think poor kids getting screwed over is an important social-justice issue. Indeed, as I say in the post, these internships are not of much use in helping you get a job. I'm not convinced that unpaid internships are this great destroyer of social mobility. Social mobility's lousy for other reasons.

Are they needed to break into specific high-influence fields? (This post is in part a longer response to Caryatis's comment here.) They're certainly perceived of in that way, and obviously there are individuals who believe that the connections they made and skills they learned at unpaid internships got them a paying job in their desired area. It obviously sucks to feel that you're missing out on an opportunity, even if in truth, employers only care about proper work experience, and may even prefer candidates who had real builds-character jobs. (I don't believe I've personally been held back by not having ever had an unpaid internship, but who knows - maybe if I'd had one I'd now control the media.) But I think we forget - and this I also mention - that many who had a chic internship and then got a chic job had connections in the first place. I'd like to see (or do?) some research on how many paying entry-level jobs in journalism/publishing/etc. go to ex-unpaid-interns, on how many people with positions of power at these orgs started as unpaid interns.

But also, compensation for work is not something one is only owed if one would be out on the street without it. That's the housewife connection. The gender angle. It's wrong to not pay a female employee, or not pay her properly, because she's got a husband who earns enough for the family. It's extra-wrong not to pay a female employee because she might not need to work to eat, and this is just being assumed on account of she's female, and lo and behold, she's not even married in the first place, or she is and her husband is an aspiring basket-weaver. But once paying women less/nothing becomes the norm, it becomes more difficult for any woman to get paid properly for her work.

What's bizarre is that this continues, only now the assumption is more that the parents/loans of a young woman will foot the bill. And... this does end up screwing over those who don't have some other source of cash. But it's not all fun and games for those who are working unpaid and still able to eat. Being channeled into a path where economic self-sufficiency always seems within reach, but never is, isn't a fluffy non-problem, even if there's a roof over your head, even if you're living in splendor. It's this odd quasi-intersectionality, a branch of misogyny that's about hating "rich girls," but that extends to girls, women, who aren't even rich.

Bitter baristas, disgraced designers, and unpaid interns

-There exists a blog entirely made up of the nasty thoughts a barista (well, ex-barista) has about his customers (seemingly written in real time). Even the customers who do seemingly innocuous things like order decaf or soy milk. It's not as clever as it could be, but if you're someone who appreciates being judged unfavorably by the person making your cappuccino, you'll get a kick out of it.

-Galliano-the-Hasid-gate. This is so my beat, but I'm late to it, and have nothing to add other than that it sure is something that Galliano dresses like a Hasidic Jew, and that Abe Foxman has no idea what he's talking about.

-Oh, and then this just happened! My thing about gender and unpaid internships is out there for all to see.