The Oppressive Nature Of Unpaid Internships

To build their resume out of pragmatic necessity, interns might endure weeks or months of unpaid labor.  For the intern, this arrangement provides experience, a glimpse into a company or industry they might not have seen up close before, and a networking avenue.  For the organization, the benefit is free labor!  While there might be some appealing or useful aspects of an unpaid internship for the intern, the fact of the matter is that any labor is unpaid is unjust.  That is, if it is just for employees to receive compensation, and interns do work as employees do, they would deserve compensation on the same grounds.

The possibility of securing future employment does not supply a person with the means of paying for necessities like housing, food, and water in the meantime.  Unpaid interns work for the chance at perhaps receiving a job after the term ends, with no wage or salary along the way even if they work full-time hours.  Obviously, this takes advantage of interns with no other opportunity to turn to in the field they are establishing themselves in (while/after potentially spending a great deal of money on education to make entry into that field more accessible).  It is also exploitative by default to perpetuate a system of prolonged, unpaid professional labor altogether, even if someone has the resources to survive.

Compensation is the only foundational reason why professional work is done.  The intern's money-related needs do not vanish simply because a company has them in an evaluative trial period.  Rent or the mortgage must still has to be paid, the car still uses gasoline that must be replenished, and food and water must be obtained somehow.  An array of companies, jobs, and industries severely underpay employees as it is, failing to grant them livable compensation or pay that also takes relevant factors like seniority or value provided into account.  Unpaid internships on one level by design place workers in an even more precarious situation, as they lack even the greater relative security of regular employment (which can bring benefits beyond pay or at least extend beyond the length of an internship term).

Since many American employers hold more power than employees and revel in gratuitously expressing it, of course it is not unusual for them to invite unpaid labor to test if a worker is "a good fit" when it by nature takesadvantage of people.  The fact that interns need work experience and thus might tolerate such internships anyway is because the hiring system tends to be based around the asinine prioritization of experience over intelligence and willingness to learn.  This means that perfectly competent or teachable people who would work if given the chance get overlooked because they lack an arbitrary amount of experience as measured in years.  Such workplace exploitation is inherently rooted in irrationalistic philosophical ideas!

Other manifestations of unpaid labor are more common inside an established job well after someone's unpaid internship days—staying longer at the office while working after clocking out due to managerial pressure, completing work clocked out on weekends when a boss demands it, and so on (some of the same figures who push their employees for this might also insist working from home is illegitimate and all work must be done at an office!).  One and all, these circumstances have the same foundational form of exploitation at heart: the worker is not paid for his or her work that the organization still benefits from.  No one who rightly recognizes the oppressive nature of one should struggle to see the logical necessity of the others having this same quality.