Abstract
Educated at Stanford, University of London, and Cambridge, Asian-language expert Ross Perlin has produced the first extended treatment of the Great Internship Scam that originated during the Ronald Reagan era, 30 years ago. This insidious transformation of labor relations in the developed world coincided with the destruction of unions and the ending of organized labor’s power in the marketplace. Though written in easily digested journalistic style, Perlin’s book is scholarly and analytic, inspired not only by research but also by his own internship experience and that of his generation. It is worth reading by old and young alike, and would serve as a fine ancillary textbook for many social science courses, since interning has become ubiquitous, and has so far remained under-examined, to the imagined delight of its many proponents.
When Reagan betrayed PATCO (the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), a union which had supported him against Carter in the 1980 election, by eviscerating it in 1981, he cleared the way for the exploitation not only of seasoned workers, but of the young and poor as well. Labor historians as well as corporate managers now regard that event as pivotal in the steady weakening of workers’ rights and pay over the succeeding decades. Given inspiration and symbolic support from the White House, corporate America challenged labor at every turn, and was only too eager to embrace the novel practice of interning in order to discipline unruly workers and fatten their profit margins. Interns are the perfect underling: no pay, no benefits, no rights, and eager to please.
Perlin rehearses some, though not all, of this background, and wisely points out that rather than calling young people who work for nearly nothing “servants” or “the indentured class,” which would have been historically accurate, some bright spinmeister during Reagan’s period misapplied the existing term “intern.” The word to that point already carried a certain dignity because until around 1980, interns were exclusively medical students with degrees in hand, working for certification in specialty areas. Nobody else was entitled to use the term. Its cagey application to any job whatsoever, no matter how humble, that pays little or nothing, at first only to the young but now even to the elderly, was a public relations coup for industry and government. And educators at all levels were swept up in the thoughtless adoption of this concept, without whose help the rite de passage of interning could never have exploded into the socio-economic phenomenon it has become. As Perlin explains, “An overwhelming majority of colleges and universities, as well as some high schools, endorse and promote unpaid internships without a second thought, provide the lucrative academic credit that employers wishfully hope will indemnify their firms, and justify it all with high-minded rhetoric about ‘situated learning’ and ‘experiential education’“ (p. 83). Or, more simply, to quote Stephen Colbert, “This country was built by unpaid interns. And in exchange, I assume they got college credit” (ibid.).
Perlin’s first chapter on how Disney uses interns to cut labor costs at its amusement parks, working young people 12 hours a day, is a set piece in itself. More seriously, he analyzes the legal background to interning, showing that labor law explicitly forbids unpaid work of the kind that one to two million college students do every day in the United States. His chapter “The Economics of Internships” is especially valuable, as it brings in Gary Becker’s “human capital theory,” and how that was neatly used by Reagan and his followers to justify unpaid labor. By interviewing scores of interns in a dozen cities, along with sociologists (e.g., Mark Granovetter), economists, and labor lawyers, Perlin has exposed this Dickensian practice for what it is, and deserves our thanks for doing it well. He has apparently struck a nerve, since he and his book have been attacked online by those who profit from setting up internships, and probably wish he was still translating Chinese documents in London, which was his first unpaid internship.