本帖最后由 我选择新西兰 于 2020-11-13 17:27 编辑
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Interns aren't just cheap labor to abuse: they're workers – and they deserve pay
Unpaid internships are inherently exploitative, open only to the few who can afford it and mostly illegal. It's time to end them
Internships are meant to be opportunities for learning and to gain experience. At their best, they can be. But the draw of cheap labor for employers means that they often aren't – and that the supposed "opportunity to learn" is only emphasized to obscure the lack of compensation for interns who are actually just doing work.
That internships are unpaid or poorly paid means that only those with means can even afford to take them, but that's where their "privilege" ends. Interns – predominantly young, inexperienced, temporary and poorly protected – are the unrecognized workers at the very bottom of the professional food chain.
Driven by fear of a bad economy and the fantasy of "getting a foot in the door", hordes of young graduates put up with a lot: underpaid and ignored almost by definition, interns have also been sexually harassed and even worked to death. But with next to no bargaining power and reluctant to complain for fear of jeopardizing their “future success” (the promised lure of all internships), interns have only recently begun to challenge such conditions .
The critical issue is, of course, pay. "There's a value associated with paid work that isn't necessarily there when you're working for free," said Juno Turner, the lawyer for the interns who sued Fox Searchlight last year for not paying them on the set of Black Swan. And Turner says that there's plenty of research to prove it: the National Association of Colleges and Employers, for example, has consistently found that paid interns are more likely to be hired and start with better salaries than their unpaid brethren.
That is why internship culture is so deeply flawed – being poorly paid is synonymous with being poorly valued, and it's given rise to a wider culture of denigration around internships. But while the growing intern labor rights movement is making impressive strides in addressing issues like wages, sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, what will it take to actually change how we think about interns?
As the saying goes, there is no such thing as degrading work, only degraded workers – and in the case of interns, this degradation is as cultural as it is economic. Every intern wants to do the "real", substantive work of the industry in which they're working, and should have the opportunity to do so. But the truth is we often don't, and it has consequences for how interns are treated more generally.
The trope of the coffee-fetching and photocopy-wielding intern is marked for degradation not only because anything we're expected to do is seen as the requisite pound of flesh we must pay to join the workforce, but precisely because such labor is itself deemed unworthy of payment – or respect – by employers. The idea that an internship can be a mutually beneficial and respectful transaction among equals has therefore become a casualty of the culture that surrounds all undervalued and underpaid work.
Interns form a part of the professionalized workforce that is expected to be both obedient and unseen – a group in which women, migrants and others doing marginalized (or otherwise denigrated) work have long labored, and historically, under far worse and far more precarious conditions.
When we question the notion that all interns are is expendable labor, or that interns should be grateful for their work, we're also challenging a professional caste-system dictating that your worth as an individual is solely determined by the work that you do.
The case against unpaid internships no longer needs to be made – it's inherently exploitative, open only to the few who can afford it and mostly illegal (with some exceptions). But the case to change the fundamental relations of power undergirding internship culture still does.
Paying interns is one step toward recognizing their value, and it's one that holds the potential to radically recast the social relations of the office. Because it's crucial to recognize interns as workers, but it's equally important that employers see them as individuals, too.
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发表于 2020-11-13 16:58:46
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老板表示我们这是给应届毕业生提供免费的实践舞台呢~
