unpaid internship

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 24 Apr 2015

The end result hurts individuals struggling in the labor market but also restructures the market itself. Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience.” The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity—and quality—in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity. Worst of all, unpaid internships in policy and human rights send the message that fighting poverty, inequality, and other issues of injustice is something that only rich people should do.

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She moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as a waitress—one could once afford to live in D.C. on a waitress’s salary—and then got a clerical job at the Washington Daily News, which led to a job with the United Press Service. Helen Thomas worked her way up from the bottom. She did not buy her opportunities, because exorbitant journalism schools and unpaid internships did not exist. Her time in the service industry was not perceived as indicative of her abilities or her future path. Today, a reporter of Thomas’s modest background is out of luck. Journalist David Dennis argues that requiring unpaid internships shuts out voices from poor communities by denying those who hail from them the ability to work: “Opinions or perspectives reflecting my own come few and far between. How many journalists can say they have firsthand knowledge of the mentality of someone from the inner-city?

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The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged. In a searing commentary, political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships, which were once limited to show business, have now spread to nearly every industry. “It’s almost impossible to get a job working on policy in this town without an unpaid internship,” he writes from Washington, D.C., one of the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net for American strivers, is now a profession which pays as little as $10,000 a year—unfeasible for all but the wealthy, and devastating for those who have invested more than $100,000 into their degrees.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

The number of university-backed internship programs rose from two hundred in 1970 to one thousand in 1983. 18 But it was in the 1990s that the modern internship really took off, and it was also in the 1990s that the pushback against the spread of unpaid internships began. Architecture students, organizing with the American Institute of Architecture Students, began to protest the prevalence of unpaid internships in their field—one already known for its grueling educational programs. The organization lobbied other groups to condemn the practice too and managed to change the culture in the field in favor of paying interns. Unpaid interns also sued a prominent public relations firm after the company had gone so far as to explicitly bill its clients for the hours worked by employees it wasn’t paying.

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If internships these days offer “a chance to look at an environment rather than as a chance to learn the job,” what are they worth when one can no longer be in the workplace? 29 The real ground zero for unpaid internships—and for the publicity around them, as well as the highest-profile battles for justice—is in the arts and media industries, where competition is fierce and the sheen of glamour hangs around the top jobs, where hope labor has always been the name of the game. The art world is filled with unpaid internships, though in 2019 the Board of Trustees of the Association of Art Museum Directors issued a resolution calling for museums to pay their interns.

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A 2016 survey found that less than half of the unpaid interns got job offers, and nearly one-third of the paid interns didn’t, either. 33 Not all interns have it as bad as the North Carolina zoo intern killed by an escaped lion, whose family told reporters she died “following her passion” on her fourth unpaid internship. Nevertheless, the interns have begun to rebel. Amalia Illgner, for example, announced, in the pages of The Guardian , that she was suing over her “dream internship” at UK magazine Monocle . She wrote of her 5:30 a.m. morning shifts, and interns dispatched “as human FedEx boxes,” including one sent to Milan to hand-deliver magazines to Monocle ’s editor. “So Monocle, since you’re listening, I have taken the first step in legal proceedings to claim my unpaid wages,” Illgner wrote. In another example, Diana Wang sued over what was her seventh unpaid internship, also in journalism, at Harper’s Bazaar , alleging that Hearst (Bazaar ’s parent company) had violated federal and state labor laws by having her work for free for up to fifty-five hours a week, including nights until 10 p.m., and shuttle pricey fashions around New York for free. 34 The internship lawsuit heard around the world, though, or at least around the media, was the Black Swan case.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared that private companies (in this particular case, Fox Searchlight) were permitted to continue with unpaid internships so long as the intern derived more value from the arrangement than the employer.57 This decision is a setback for attempts to rein in internships, effectively inaugurating a new and weaker legal framework, not least by diluting the previous legal standard that employers should gain no “immediate benefit” from the intern. Some observers wish we could be rid of unpaid internships altogether. The thoughtful Atlantic writer Derek Thompson wrestled at length with this question and came to a stark conclusion: “Unpaid internships aren’t morally defensible.”58 Thompson makes a good argument.

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The thoughtful Atlantic writer Derek Thompson wrestled at length with this question and came to a stark conclusion: “Unpaid internships aren’t morally defensible.”58 Thompson makes a good argument. I suspect that society would be fairer without unpaid internships. But abolition would be too draconian, illiberal, in fact. At least for the foreseeable future, then, unpaid internships will be with us. The challenge is to bring them within reach of less-affluent young adults. Government has a role to play here. One promising idea is to extend student financial aid to cover internship opportunities, as proposed by Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici in 2013 in the shape of the Opportunities for Success Act. There was not much political appetite, however; the act failed to make it out of the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training.

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National Association of Colleges and Employers, The Class of 2014 Student Survey Report (Bethlehem, Pa.: NACE, September 2014) (http://career.sa.ucsb.edu/files/docs/handouts/2014-student-survey.pdf). 36. Ibid. 37. Quoted in Amy Scott, “Why the Unpaid Internship May Be on its Way Out,” Marketplace, May 5, 2014 (www.marketplace.org/2014/05/05/education/why-unpaid-internship-may-be-its-way-out). 38. “The Role of Higher Education in Career Development: Employer Perceptions,” Report presentation prepared for The Chronicle of Higher Education and Marketplace, December 2012 (www.chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf). 39.

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
by Anne Helen Petersen
Published 14 Jan 2021

But that didn’t mean the overarching idea that you should do what you love, no matter the cost, faded away. Sofia, a white woman who grew up “privileged as fuck,” had a string of unpaid internships at small museums and Sotheby’s before graduating from a small liberal arts college with a degree in art history. But it was 2009, and a promised job at Sotheby’s suddenly evaporated. She applied for hundreds of paid and unpaid internships in New York and Chicago; she finally got a single interview with a theater company and took it, knowing that her parents could help support her, since the internship was unpaid.

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In a 2019 blog post, Erin Panichkul, the first in her family to go to college, wrote about how she’d taken out loans throughout her undergrad career, not just for tuition, but to cover rent, groceries, utilities, and books: first at Santa Monica Community College, then at UCLA, and finally at law school. When the prospect of the unpaid internship came up at the United Nations, she knew she had to take it—even if it meant taking out student loans (i.e., paying) to do work for free. “Exposure does not pay bills,” Panichkul wrote, in a post entitled “Unpaid Internships Keep Women Like Me Out of the Legal Field.” “Experience doesn’t cover rent. It doesn’t pay for my transportation to get to my internship. It doesn’t feed me. But I believed the experience was so important that taking out a loan was worth it.”

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She tried to get a waitressing job on the side, going door to door in Astoria, Queens, distributing her resume to every restaurant. She never heard a thing, landing a job only when a position opened up at the restaurant where a friend worked. “If I learned anything in that search, it was that networking, nepotism, and insider connections are largely the only way to get a job,” she said. “And even then, that job was an unpaid internship.” And yet, that internship led to a paid internship, which eventually led her to a PhD program. But before she got that far, Sofia helped assist the intern coordinator at one of the museums where she worked—and gained “firsthand knowledge of how nonchalantly they exploited interns (in terms of low/no pay) because they knew how competitive the internships were.”

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series)
by James Bloodworth
Published 18 May 2016

However, this is an over-representation of a very particular class of white male. White men from the working class are not – by a long stretch – ubiquitous in the elite. In fact, they encounter economic hurdles at least as difficult to surmount as the barriers of gender and racial equality faced by their contemporaries. A six-month unpaid internship at a prestigious newspaper – or an unpaid internship in any job, for that matter – is as off limits to a white working-class boy as it is to anyone else who lacks the sufficient funds. Professor Savage’s analysis of the British Class Survey found evidence of a social class pay gap comparable to the gender pay gap that rightly induces so much opprobrium in liberals.

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More and more, the newspapers rely on free labour for their content, including unpaid interns and impressionable young people willing to write copy for nothing on the promise of supposedly career-benefiting ‘exposure’. This gives an in-built advantage to those from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds who can afford to take unpaid internships and spend time churning out articles for nothing. London is now the unpaid intern capital of Europe, and in journalism it shows. According to a recent survey by the National Council for the Training of Journalists, 83 per cent of journalists who started work in the three years prior to the survey did some sort of work experience or an internship before getting their first job, 92 per cent of which were unpaid.

Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America
by Linda Tirado
Published 1 Oct 2014

Here’s another thing the poor can’t afford: unpaid internships. I’ve had to turn down offers that might have improved my circumstances in the long run because I just couldn’t afford to work for nothing. Again, the people who can afford unpaid internships are getting help from home—in my world, everyone else has to work for a living. And this means that we’re being cut out of all that potential networking too. That’s at least one reason why I’ve never had much of a professional network—I never had the chance to build one. Accepting an unpaid internship, or one of those internships that basically pays you lunch money, is for people who don’t have to pay the rent.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition, Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell. Honoré, C. (2004) In Praise of Slowness, New York: Harper Collins. Horkheimer, M. (1974) Critique of Instrumental Reason, New York: Continuum. HR Review (2014) ‘Most Graduates Happy to Take on Unpaid Internships, Even With No Job Guarantee’, HR Review website, 30 July (available at: www.hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/l-d-news/graduates-happy-to-take-on-unpaid-internships/52291). HSE (2014) ‘Health and Safety Statistics: Annual Report for Great Britain’ (available at: www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overall/hssh1314.pdf). Huffington Post (2013) ‘Benefit Reforms Are Putting Fairness Back at the Heart of Britain’, 6 April (available at: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/06/benefit-reforms-cameron-welfare-_n_3029737.html).

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In exchange for knowledge and credentials, students agree to a debt that will end up regulating their actions and shackling them to a future obligation to work (Berardi, 2009). Like the competitive graduate, the indebted graduate is more easily cajoled into doing more for less, making him ideal fodder for the thousands of unpaid internships available in today’s labour market, many of which offer no guarantee of skills development or future employment (Perlin, 2012).5 Ultimately, the pressures of employability are bringing to fruition Max Horkheimer’s lamentation on the ‘loss of interiority’ in advanced capitalist societies: societies in which ‘the wings of the imagination have been clipped too soon’, as individuals are increasingly forced to adopt a more practical and instrumental orientation to the world and others (Horkheimer, 1974: 25).

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These figures are based on projections from the student debt survey by Push. The survey was conducted with 2,808 students at 115 UK universities, and accounts for the money owed to parents, banks, and student loan providers. See www.push.co.uk Return to text. 5. A 2014 survey by savoo.co.uk asked 1,505 graduates whether they would be willing to work in an unpaid internship to gain experience. Some 85% said they would, with 65% saying that they would do so even if there was no job guarantee at the end (HR Review, 2014). Return to text. 6. Figures from the Economic History Association, ‘Hours of work in US history’ (available at http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/).

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan
Published 16 Jan 2018

Aren’t unpaid internships a massive loophole? Not taking the law literally. In the for-profit sector, the U.S. Department of Labor allows unpaid internships only if “the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.”32 A bizarre rule. Why would a for-profit firm bother hiring workers from whom it derives zero immediate advantage? If you sought to convince a CEO to start an internship program, your pitch wouldn’t be, “Let’s hire a bunch of inexperienced workers to provide our firm with no immediate benefits whatsoever.” Unpaid internships survive because authorities hypocritically fail to enforce the letter of the law.

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Is full-time compensation times probability of employment a fair measure of everything a student fails to earn? Almost. Main doubt: many full-time students have part-time jobs. We should subtract their pay from foregone full-time earnings. Still, part-time workers’ low pay—not to mention the prevalence of unpaid internships—calls for only a modest adjustment—say 10% of full-time compensation. Accounting for experience. When you have a job, you don’t just earn income. Job experience improves your job skills—and the labor market rewards these extra skills with higher pay—also known as the “experience premium.” The longer you stay in school, the longer you wait to learn skills on the job—and the longer you postpone the attendant raises.

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In modern times, is there any decent reason to discourage kids from getting jobs and learning job skills? The silliest objection is that businesses “exploit” our children, handing them a pittance for their toil. No one expects schools to pay their students; the training kids receive is payment enough. Why hold firms to a higher standard? College students ferociously compete for unpaid internships because training is valuable compensation—and total compensation, not cash alone, is what counts.22 In any case, if the young were really grossly underpaid, employing them would be extraordinarily profitable—and thanks to competition, few business models stay extraordinarily profitable for long.

Financing Basic Income: Addressing the Cost Objection
by Richard Pereira
Published 5 Jul 2017

As David Suzuki (2008) and James Hansen (2009) have argued, exacting a proper levy on the use of the commons can mitigate such destructive activity and bring it down to a sustainable level while generating large revenues for a “green dividend” or green component to basic income.27 New forms of free labour being extracted from populations, especially younger demographics entering the workforce, in the form of unpaid overtime work, unpaid internships, excessive hours worked without premium pay previously associated with overtime, deliberate misclassification of employees as self-employed, etc. all represent social dumping (Perlin 2012; Pereira 2009; Standing 2009). Even more extreme versions of it involve the horrible vision of suicide nets placed outside the factory of mobile phone producer Foxconn (Trenholm 2012) as a twenty-first century solution to degrading labour.

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Index A Alaska Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, Permanent Fund Corporation B Basic Income (BI) demogrant NIT Universal Basic Income(UBI) Bureaucracy C Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), Offshore Tax Informant Program Care work CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) Charitable sector philanthropic giving and charity law tax deductions tax shelter schemes Corporate welfare Croll Commission, Report (1971) D DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Daycare, childcare night daycare overnight care Democratic theory of rent economic rent Demogrant E Earned income See alsoUnearned Economic multiplier effect Economic rent EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) See alsoWITB [Canada] Electromagnetic Spectrum EU Externalities F Fee and dividend Food banks Forget, Evelyn France Free-riding G GDP Germany GFC (Global Financial Crisis) H Healthcare I Individual Savings Account program (UK) Internal Revenue Service (IRS) International Telecommunication Union (ITU) J Japan K Keynes, Maynard John L Labour (forms of free labour being extracted) Labour income Labour-market Labour standards Land rent Liberal theory of rent, economic rent LICO (Low income cut-off) Liquidity rent Locke, John M Maternity, paternity leave, benefits Mill, John Stuart Mincome Monopoly (rent) Multiple jobholding, multiple job workers Murray, Charles N Negative Income Tax (NIT) Norway O Oil fund P Paine, Thomas Pension(s) AHV – Switzerland Canada Pension Plan (CPP)/Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) Old Age Security (OAS) – Canada Philanthropy Precarious jobs, employment, precarity Pregnancy, pregnant women and job dismissals Public trust resource R Registered Retirement Savings Plan See alsoTax shelters Regressive taxation See alsoTaxes Royalties S Scarcity (rent) Social housing Sovereign Wealth Funds SeeNorway; Alaska; Oil fund Speculation speculative activity T Taxes carbon tax carbon fee carbon levy fee and dividend corporate taxes cuts multinational companies reductions evasion personal income tax regressive tax cuts to corporate rates by implementing basic income neo-liberalism tobin tax, 33(speculation tax[es]) unearned vs. earned income VAT, sales taxes Tax exemptions Tax-Free Savings Accounts(TFSA) See alsoTax shelters Tax havens, offshore tax havens Tax shelters Transfer pricing U Underemployment Underground economy Unearned income ( vs. earned income) Unemployment United Kingdom (UK) United States (US) Universal Basic Income (UBI) See alsoBasic Income Universal dividend Universal public health care (or universal health care) Unjust dismissal, dismissal (pregnant women and employers) Unpaid internships Unpaid overtime Unpaid work, unpaid labour V Van Parijs, Philippe Vermont (and public trust resources) W Whistleblower protection White, Stuart Windfall profits See alsoEconomic rent WITB (Working Income Tax Benefit) See alsoEITC [US] Workplace culture(s) Workplace disability (and costs) Workplace mental health Workplace standards violations See alsoLabour standards Footnotes 1SWI swissinfo.ch, “Vote results: June 5, 2016”, 5 June, 2016. 2SWI swissinfo.ch, “The district that voted in favour of a basic income”, 7 June, 2016. 3BBC News, “Switzerland’s voters reject basic income plan”, 5 June, 2015. 4 Scott Santens, “The Results of the Basic Income Referendum in Switzerland”, medium.com , 5 June, 2016. 5Angus Reid Institute (ARI), “Basic Income?

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
by Abigail Shrier
Published 28 Jun 2020

I think that would be a huge mistake because I don’t think that you are a guy, and I don’t think you can ever become a guy.” For a while, that message seemed to sink in; Sally stopped bringing up transitioning, and Mary was relieved. Sally graduated and moved to New York to begin an unpaid internship in the non-profit sector. Mary and Dave covered her security deposit and her first year’s rent while Sally endeavored to turn an unpaid internship into a full-time job. Sally didn’t mention any plans for gender medical treatments to her parents, but the friends she made in New York all seemed to be transgender. Sally began seeing a gender therapist. “And she really went full bore into the trans thing.”

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Mary scrambled to explain herself to her daughter, worried that Sally was headed down a bad road, but Sally no longer wanted to hear it. “We paid for her tuition 100 percent the whole way through. We paid for her to get settled in New York City. We paid for her first six months when she had her unpaid internship so she could get her first job. The week before she cut off all contact with us, she borrowed two thousand dollars.” Mary and Dave continued paying for Sally’s cell phone and health insurance long after she wouldn’t return their calls or emails. “We’re toxic, but our money isn’t.” PUBERTY IS HELL Puberty is a trial for anyone, perhaps girls especially.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg
Published 13 May 2019

§ I ran some calculations in an Excel spreadsheet and expanded the net to include Millennials born 1983–1997. ¶ Born 1983–1994. * I have to confess to a certain amount of confusion on this myself. In 2010, a colleague at the Wall Street Journal and I wrote an op-ed about how we had benefited earlier in our careers from opportunities to take unpaid internships. Those “jobs” had given us a foot in the door in a competitive field, and had reduced the element of financial risk for employers in hiring us temporarily. I still believe that argument was correct as far as it went, but with the benefit of more experience and knowledge I’d wonder why it is that employers are now more reluctant to take risks on training paid entry-level employees than they used to be—a subject for Chapter 2

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Boomer politicians and policymakers aren’t unaware of the consequences of gig work and intern employment for younger workers, but those leaders are seriously blinkered when it comes to what has caused these phenomena and what to do about it. Too often, the response has been to extend to gig platforms such as Uber the same expensive employment regulations that apply to other companies—and that have helped push more and more investment into the gig economy in the first place. And in 2010, the Obama administration cracked down on unpaid internships by imposing a strict new legal standard that made it almost impossible for employers to avoid paying interns. That might have prevented some of the worst abuses in the internship job market, but none of these measures fundamentally improve the incentives for companies to invest in productivity enhancements and training for workers, instead of trying to replace as much labor as possible.

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See GDP (gross domestic product) Gurner, Tim avocado/coffee and, 1, 2, 3 homebuying and, 116 inheritance, 4 Hamilton, Alexander, 147, 147n, 148 Hammond, Darrell, 153 Harris, Kamala, 214 Hawley, Josh, 212 HCAI (Housing Credit Availability Index), 139, 139n health care electronic medical records, 235 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare; health insurance health insurance economic security and, 65 employer-based insurance/history, 65, 66 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Hillbilly Elegy (Vance), 45 HOLC (Home Owner Loan Corporation), 119–120 Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC), 119–120 housing amortizing mortgage, 120, 120n balloon loans, 119 Boomer ownership, 109, 110, 111 Federal Reserve/mortgage lending and, 61–62 GI Bill and, 120 Great Depression/government response and, 119–121 history, 113–114, 114n, 118–119 Millennial home ownership/education debt and, 94–95 mortgages/taxes and, 120, 126, 127 multigenerational households, 112, 113 ownership value debate, 120n postwar boom and, 121 Housing Credit Availability Index (HCAI), 139, 139n housing/financial crisis bailouts, 130, 130n, 132n bank liquidity and, 129–130 Boomers and, 134, 135 description/consequences, 128–129 foreclosures and, 111, 132, 132n, 135 home equity increase and, 125–128, 126n home equity loss and, 10, 110–111 home ownership decline and, 121, 122 homeowners “lock-in” and, 136 housing debt/policies, 123–127, 125n insolvency crisis and, 129–130 interest rates and, 124–125, 125n, 127–128, 136 managing policies, 129–137 Millennials and, 131, 135–140, 141–143 mobility and, 135–136 mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market and, 124, 125n, 128, 129 mortgage security and, 122–124 press release/beginnings, 128 quantitative easing, 133, 135, 136, 137 quantitative easing dollar amount, 137 regulations following/Millennials and, 137–140 subprime/prime borrowers and, 126–127, 126n housing/Millennial issues economics and, 17, 110, 111, 112–113 expectations, 109–110 living with parents/statistics, 111–113, 114 locations/job locations and, 116, 117–118 multigenerational households, 112, 114n ownership/demographics, 115–116 renting/costs and, 113, 113n, 114, 114n, 141–142, 141n starter homes and, 116, 117 supplies and, 116–118 Howe, Neil, 6–7 HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development), 123 Iceland and financial crisis, 180 immigration Millennials views, 218, 225–226 Trump, Donald and, 225–226 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 211 India, 178, 201 Industrial Revolution, 113 information/computer technology rise, 56, 235 inheritances/Millennials beliefs/estimates, 103–104 Boomers life expectancy/health care finances and, 104–105 feudalism/history and, 106 Fidelity surveys, 105 Millennials retirement and, 107–108 timing and, 105–106 interest rates Bush and, 57 Federal Reserve and, 18, 19, 124 housing/financial crisis and, 124–125, 125n, 127–128, 136 Trump and, 19, 231–232 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 182–183 internships/Millennials numbers, 31 Obama and, 73 overview, 31, 72–73 pay and, 31, 72 work descriptions, 32 investment Boomers childhood and, 49 consumption relationship, 50 costs of labor vs. capital, 63–64, 65–66, 229 during Bush administration, 57 during Reagan administration, 53, 54 fixed investment, 49, 51, 53, 56, 57, 60, 127 growth (mid-twentieth century), 49 need to increase and, 15–17, 51 productivity and, 16, 49 technologies replacing labor and, 62–63 investment-and-productivity boom (1950s/1960s), 49–50 decline (1970s/1980s), 50 Ireland and financial crisis, 180 Italy Millennials and, 184, 201 temporary work, 184 Jackson, Alphonso, 123 Jackson, Andrew, 147 Japan consumption tax, 206 corporate scandals, 202, 202n debt, 205–206 demographic boom, 203n economic growth (1960s/1970s), 201–202 population trend, 207 working mothers and, 209 Japan Millennials delayed marriages/children and, 208–209 economy and, 203, 205, 206–207 inflation and, 207–208 interest rates and, 207–208, 208n job/training investments and, 204–205 lifetime employment deal and, 203–204 regular/nonregular work, 202–203, 202n taxes and, 205 Jeffersonians, 147n job hopping, 37–38 “jobless recovery,” 35, 69 jobs/job market and Millennials age of employee/job losses, 35–39 Boomers vs., 27, 46 company size and, 38–39 economists categories of jobs/job losses and, 33–34 experience requirements and, 37 financial crisis/recession losses distribution, 32–37 “fun/fulfilling” work and, 29 goals/dreams, 31 job losses by skill level, 34 job opportunity losses/time effects, 39–40 jobs replaced by robots, 34, 34n lower-skilled/low-paying employment replacements and, 36–37 mentors vs. bosses, 29–30 overqualification and, 42–43 pay/job losses and, 33–34 recovery from financial crisis and, 35, 59 statistics on white/blue collar jobs, 28 transformed jobs and, 27–29, 27n wants description, 29 See also specific components Johnson, Lyndon, 149 Kander, Jason, 212 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesian economics, 50n, 58, 163n Kotlikoff, Laurence J., 171–172 labor capital vs. labor costs, 63–64, 65–66, 229 costs, 65–66 costs (by 1990s), 55 replacing labor and, 17, 34, 34n, 62–63 See also union power labor-force participation rate in 1970s, 47 in 1980s, 54 description, 30 Millennials/post-2008 decade, 30–31 labor productivity complementary technologies and, 49 definition, 48n labor hours and, 49 output per hour worked and, 48, 48n, 56, 57 labor share in 1950s/1960s, 47, 50 definition/description, 47 during Clinton presidency, 56 during Reagan presidency, 56 economic theories on, 62 trend past 50 years, 62 Lehman Brothers, 11, 129, 133 Libertarian candidates, 219 McAfee, Andrew, 41 McCain, John, 225 McCain, Meghan, 215 Maloney, Carolyn, 219 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 58 ManpowerGroup, 31 manufacturing economy (US) decline, 12, 14 description, 15–16 MBS (mortgage-backed securities) market, 124, 125n, 128, 129 Medicaid Affordable Care Act and, 167 financial problems, 156 role, 149 Medicare for all Americans, 211 financial problems/Millennials and, 153–161 inflation and, 169 insurance comparisons, 154 Millennial resources and, 142 role, 149 See also entitlements for elderly Medicare Part D, 157 Merkel, Angela political party/government and, 197, 200, 200n taxes and, 197 Merrill Lynch, 11, 128–129 Merrill Lynch survey/savings, 78 military spending deficit spending (government) and, 151 generational fairness and, 171 Millennials avocado/coffee debate, 1–3 childhood diseases and, 3–4 definition/description, 5–9, 237 diversity and, 216, 237–238 ethnicity, 9 as immigrants/children of immigrants and, 8–9, 112 material well-being and, 3–5 navigators and, 21–23 numbers, 8 parents/security and, 3–4 as “retirement plans” for parents, 145 second language and, 8 sex and, 217 social questions, 216–217 stereotypes and, 1–3, 29–30, 235 term origins, 6 views of, 1–3, 4–5, 26–27 wars and, 4 minimum wages debates/views on, 185 Europe, 183–184 in US, 183–184 Mondale, Walter, 20 mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market, 124, 125n, 128, 129 Mortgage Servicing Assets (MSAs), 138n Mulligan, Casey B., 165 Murphy, Patrick, 212 National Center for Education Statistics data analysis, 92–93 National Football League union refs lockout (2012), 49n National Home-ownership Strategy (1995), 123 navigator Millennials, 21–23 NEETs (youths “not in employment, education, or training”), 181 Netherlands minimum wage, 184 New Deal/regulations, 52–53, 148–149 Obama, Barack Boomers and, 64 education policy and, 93–94, 97–101 financial crisis/Great Recession and, 129, 131–132, 132n, 137, 162–164, 223–234 Millennials and, 64, 218–219, 224 policies and, 18, 19, 24, 64, 73, 93–94, 97–101 regulation and, 229 unpaid internships and, 73 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria election to Congress, 211 as Millennial, 211, 219 policy positions/views, 211, 222 taxes and, 195, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 130, 214 Ohio Public Employee Retirement Systems (OPERS), 175 Once and Future Worker, The (Cass), 58 Operation Twist, 134 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 61 O’Rourke, Beto, 214 Patel, Suraj, 219 Paul, Ron, 222 Paulson, Hank, 129, 131 peace dividend, 151 Pell Grant program, 97, 99, 100 pension/plans Boomers and, 121, 159, 221 Detroit city government example, 175 European countries, 183, 196, 198, 199, 200 Germany/Millennials and, 199, 200 Japan and, 203, 205, 208n mid-twentieth century, 49 Millennials (US) and, 79–80, 81, 81n, 82 Ohio example, 175 problems with state/local government plans, 150, 158–159, 175 trend in private work, 158 Perot, Ross, 217 politics and Millennials 2018 midterm elections, 213 first nationally-elected officials, 211–212 fixing problems and, 213–214 House Member age statistics, 212 interns and, 213 party support/political views and, 214–216, 217–219, 222–223 political influence and, 213 state offices, 212 stereotypes, 214 trade policy, 217–218 voting and, 213 wants, 220–223, 232–236 working economy, 220–221 Powell, Jerome, 231–232 productivity by the 1970s, 48 investment and, 16, 49 measuring, 48n “qualified mortgage” (QM) standard, 139–140 quantitative easing description, 133 Federal Reserve and, 18–19, 60 housing/global financial crisis, 133, 135, 136, 137 Reagan, Ronald economic policies, 24, 52–54 fixed investment, 53 supply-side economics and, 52, 54–55, 58 support for, 20 taxes and, 52 recession postwar period, 62 See also financial crisis/Great Recession regulation (financial) changes/consequences, 56–57 during Reagan administration, 52, 54 regulations and Trump, 229–230, 234 religion and Millennials, 216–217 Resolution Foundation think tank, 178 retirement finances 401 (k) plans, 80 Millennials as “retirement plans” for parents, 145 Millennials/savings and, 79, 80–81 See also pension/plans; Social Security Revolutionary War/state debts, 147, 147n Romney, Mitt as candidate, 215, 225 manufacturing background, 232n youth vote, 215 Rubin, Robert, 54–55 “Rubinomics” program, 54–55, 124 Ryan, Paul, 231 S&P 500, 10 Sanders, Bernie description/political party and, 219, 222 Millennial support, 195, 214, 219 taxes, 173, 195, 197 savings/Millennials college-educated Millennials and, 78–79 debt and, 81n, 82 defined-contribution plans, 80 description/overview, 77–83 emergency-lending facility use and, 78 job market and, 79 obsession and, 79 parents vs., 77 pension plans and, 79–80 retirement finances and, 79, 80–81 Social Security benefits and, 82–83 statistics on, 78–79, 80–83, 83n Wall Street payback and, 83 worries about, 81–82 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 50n Say’s Law, 50n Schock, Aaron, 211–212 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 41 self-employment trends (since 2000), 71 See also gig economy September 11 terror attacks/consequences, 57, 152 Shapiro, Ben, 215, 224–225 “sheepskin effect,” 90 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 Smith, Brad, 71–72 SNAP (Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program), 164 social capital, 22 social programs/benefits consequences/Mulligan and, 165–166 financial crisis and, 163–165 Social Security beginnings, 149 financial problems/Millennials and, 153–161 housing and, 114n insurance comparisons, 154, 157–158 Millennial expectations, 82–83 Millennial resources and, 142 taxes and, 150n, 196 See also entitlements for elderly solar panels installation, 28 Spain and financial crisis, 180 steel industry (1970s to 1990s), 50–51 stock market crash (1929), 10 financial crisis, 10 Strauss, William, 6–7 “structural deficits,” 150–151, 151n Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 164 supply-side economics, 52, 54–55, 58 TANF, 164 TARP (Troubled-Asset Relief Program), 59, 130, 130n taxes on capital/consequences, 53 Clinton and, 55, 152 cuts with Great Recession, 163 inflation as, 207 myth on, 195 national consumption tax and, 173–174 politicians in Germany/US and, 197 Reagan and, 52 Republicans and, 174 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 tax wedge, 183 Trump and, 227–228 Tea Party movement, 130, 231 technology labor and (mid-twentieth century), 49 role in economic problems, 234–235 See also computer/information technology Thatcher, Margaret, 189 “total-factor productivity,” 48n total number of hours worked in 1970s, 47 as measure of labor market, 47 trade policy and Millennials, 217–218 training investing less, 17, 69, 88 investing more, 228 Millennials wanting, 29, 72 See also internships/Millennials Troubled-Asset Relief Program (TARP), 59, 130, 130n Trump, Donald Affordable Care Act and, 68 description, 19 entitlements and, 231 immigration and, 225–226 interest rates/Federal Reserve and, 19, 231–232 Japan/foreign competition and, 202, 217–218, 225 Millennials and, 214, 215, 217, 224, 225–232 real estate background and, 232n regulations and, 229–230, 234 taxes, 227–228, 234 traits/character, 224 unemployment rate and, 226 Uber, 70, 70n unemployment Britain/Millennials and, 189 NEETs, 181 unemployment-assistance programs (US) creation, 149 financial crisis and, 164 unemployment rate (US) in 1950s and 1960s, 47 in 1970s, 47 in 1980s, 54 changes post-2008 decade, 30, 33 description, 30 global financial crisis/recovery and, 11, 12, 13 Millennials and, 42 Trump and, 226 See also labor-force participation rate union power other countries and, 186 in US, 49, 49n United Kingdom minimum wage, 184 Urban Institute, 139 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 28, 30, 37, 47 Vance, J.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

‘At one time I got into massive debt which, thank God, is now all gone.’ But there are other reasons, too. Trade unions and local government used to be avenues for aspiring working-class candidates, helping to give them political training and a support base – but now, trade unions have been drastically weakened. Unpaid internships that only the well-off can afford to do have become ever more widespread in Parliament, think tanks, and other significant points of entry into the political world. It is not just that politicians are so unrepresentative of those they serve. MPs themselves are often treated as little more than voting fodder by governments that have huge amounts of power.

…

She was hired, broadly, because Murdoch knew she would be effective at ensuring the News of the World projected his own views. It’s not just who owns the media that ensures newspapers toe the Establishment line. Media outlets have increasingly become a closed shop for those from privileged backgrounds. The less well-off are filtered out for a number of reasons. First, there’s the proliferation of unpaid internships, which force aspiring journalists to work for free for long periods, often with little prospect of a paid job. Generally, only those able to live off the Bank of Mum and Dad can afford such exploitation, particularly in London, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Another barrier is the rise of costly postgraduate qualifications, which are often now prerequisites for getting a foot in the door of the industry.

…

Any reform of the media has to be undertaken with care to avoid imperilling press freedom and infringing on journalists’ independence from the state. To begin with, there should be limits on how many national media outlets one individual can own, restricting the power and influence that oligarchs can wield in a democracy. Barriers in the path of non-privileged aspiring journalists should be torn away, for example by scrapping unpaid internships. After all, such internships help to ensure that only those with prosperous parents can afford to be exploited and enter the media – or, for that matter, a whole range of other professions from politics to law. Mandating all media organizations to include a ‘conscience clause’ in their contracts would allow journalists to turn down work that was either unethical or illegal.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

Economic segregation has become the order of the day, so much so that even those well-off and well-intentioned selective colleges that instituted programs of economic affirmative action—explicitly trying to increase the fraction of their student body from lower socioeconomic groups—have struggled to do so. The children of the poor can afford neither the advanced degrees that are increasingly required for employment nor the unpaid internships that provide the alternative route to “good” jobs. Similar stories could be told about each of the dimensions of America’s outsized inequality. Take health care. America is unique among the advanced countries in not recognizing access to health care as a basic human right. And that means if you are a poor American, your prospects of getting adequate, let alone good, medical care are worse than in other advanced countries.

…

Young people from families of modest means face a Catch-22: without a college education, they are condemned to a life of poor prospects; with a college education, they may be condemned to a lifetime of living at the brink. And increasingly even a college degree isn’t enough; one needs either a graduate degree or a series of (often unpaid) internships. Those at the top have the connections and social capital to get those opportunities. Those in the middle and bottom don’t. The point is that no one makes it on his or her own. And those at the top get more help from their families than do those lower down on the ladder. Government should help to level the playing field.

…

We could have made sure that every young person was either in school, in a training program, or on a job. Instead, we let youth unemployment rise to twice the national average. The children of the rich can stay in college or attend graduate school, without accumulating enormous debt, or take unpaid internships to beef up their résumés. Not so for those in the middle and bottom. We are sowing the seeds of ever more inequality in the coming years. The Obama administration does not, of course, bear the sole blame. President George W. Bush’s steep tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and his multitrillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan emptied the piggy bank while exacerbating the great divide.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day
by Craig Lambert
Published 30 Apr 2015

If these bankers had gone out on hundreds of mortgage appraisals like my dad did, seeing the actual houses for which they were lending money and meeting real, live borrowers, would the 2008 banking crisis have happened? Starter positions, including summer and part-time gigs, are where young people learn how to hold down a real job. (That means a job with wages—not a volunteer job, not an unpaid internship, not an NGO project in a developing country.) This is where they learn to show up on time, appropriately dressed and groomed, with a professional attitude, and learn habits like cooperation, punching a clock, and service with a smile. But how does an aspiring banker work his way up from the teller’s window if ATMs and shadow-working customers have displaced tellers?

…

They recruit a throng of healthy, energetic, young shadow workers who collect very little in either salaries or benefits. The world economic recession that began in 2008 strengthened the intern trend. Managers economized by replacing full-time jobs with internships, solidifying unemployment in some areas. They also cut expenses by substituting unpaid internships for paid ones. Internships can become little more than a way for employers to sidestep labor laws. For their part, the interns supposedly learn something meaningful about the field they are trying out, and in the best case they jump-start a career. Sadly, it rarely turns out quite that way.

Social Class in the 21st Century
by Mike Savage
Published 5 Nov 2015

But it also sometimes manifested itself as a more overt and concrete disadvantage, such as when George reflected on the powerful social connections wielded by his public school-educated colleagues in law, or when Samantha explained her difficulties in ‘getting ahead’ in political lobbying because she couldn’t afford to take the unpaid internships that helped propel her colleagues forward in their careers. To recap, stable members of the elite tend to have higher levels of all three types of capital than those who have recently gained entry into this group. This provides them with advantages in the competitive race to the top of the highest peaks.

…

There is no evidence that native Londoners are advantaged over those who migrate to the city. Some of our interviewees saw this process very clearly. George explained how his ability to enter his profession had hinged largely on a pivotal period after graduation, when he was able to work in a number of unpaid internships whilst living at home with his parents (just outside London). While George obviously worked hard to establish himself during this period, his ability to get a foothold up in his career was dependent on both the financial support and geographical positioning of his parents. In the case of John, a retired IT director, the pull of London was also intimately connected to how he narrated his career success.

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work
by Joanna Biggs
Published 8 Apr 2015

A rectangle of sea-blue fabric was pinned to the wall and a PowerPoint slide with the slogan ‘LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA – YOUR POLICIES ARE OUT OF TUNE – PAY YOUR INTERNS’ was projected on to it, so that the letters could be traced with black paint. I sat with C at the silver MacBook, whose job it was to keep pressing the space bar so that the projection wouldn’t disappear. C had found the Future Interns online. She had spent the two years since graduating from a prestigious South Asian university going from unpaid internship to unpaid internship at international NGOs across the world. She was now 23. After South-East Asia and Scotland, the UK appealed: ‘I wanted to experience something new, I wanted to go out of my comfort zone.’ She was ‘impressed’ by what the Future Interns did at the Serpentine after reading about it online.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

With the economy tanking, media outlets transformed full-time jobs into contract work and entry-level positions into unpaid internships, and changed worker expectations along the way. Told that advanced degrees would help them keep their jobs, my former coworkers shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for journalism school, where they were taught skills they already knew or that technology would soon render obsolete. In the end, it did not matter—the layoffs came anyway. By 2010, my old Daily News job had been converted into an unpaid internship. My old Astoria apartment rented for over $2,000 per month. The cost of living in New York had skyrocketed, while wages remained stagnant or even decreased as desperate writers took pay cuts to stay in the profession.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

Artists’ reactions to Google’s request for free art is found in Andrew Adam Newman, “Use Their Work Free? Some Artists Say No to Google,” New York Times, June 15, 2009. The story about free lawyers is in Elie Mystal, “It’s Come to This: Unpaid Internships for Lawyers with One-Three Years Experience,” Above the Law, September 30, 2009 (abovethelaw.com/2009/09/its-come-to-this-unpaid-internships-for-lawyers-with-one-three-years-experience/, accessed 07/18/2010). Hal Varian’s suggestion on how newspapers can make money is in Hal R. Varian, “Versioning Information Goods,” University of California Berkeley Working Paper, March 13, 1997.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

Overwhelmingly from middle-class, professional backgrounds, the combined salary and expenses of the average backbencher comfortably puts them in the top 4 per cent of the population. Scurrying around after them, or gossiping over lattes in Portcullis House, is an army of fresh-faced, ambitious parliamentary researchers. With unpaid internships (often, quite unlike their bosses, without even expenses provided) almost always a prerequisite for making it on to an MP's staff rolls, Parliament is a middle-class closed shop. Only those able to live off the financial generosity of their parents can get their foot in the door. At the service of MPs and hacks alike are the cleaners and catering staff.

…

Many get into desirable jobs as much through recommenda- tions and friends of friends as through their qualifications. Could a working-class kid from Liverpool or Glasgow even dream of this kind of leg-up? But nothing has done more to tum major professions into a closed shop for the middle classes as the rise of the intern. Unpaid internships are thriving, particularly in professions like politics, law, the media and fashion. According to a recent survey of 1,500 students and graduates, two-thirds of young people feel obliged to work for free because of the recession. For many, internship can follow internship, with paid jobs dangled like carrots but never offered.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

Always take that into consideration. What is the purpose of the anonymity? Is it to protect someone’s job or freedom? Or to insulate the person against political consequence if the story goes sideways? 11. THE CLASS TABOO “Journalism has evolved into a career with significant entry barriers, one of which is the unpaid internship. This makes the profession whiter, wealthier… and less concerned with public policy issues that affect the poor and even the middle class.” —Dana Goldstein, The American Prospect In the late 2000s, the British Cabinet Office issued a report called “Unleashing Aspirations.” It found journalism to be one of the most socially exclusive professions in the country, noting: •98 percent of journalists born since 1970 were college-educated •Less than 10 percent came from working-class backgrounds •A journalist on average grew up in a family in the upper 25th percentile by wealth In America the change came in stages.

…

If I did it, I knew, police would find a hundred bodies buried under the candidate’s lawn the next day. There was something to the whole courtier thing, however. By that time in history, to even get on the plane as a reporter, you had to jump over a slew of cultural and financial obstacles. The aforementioned unpaid internship was just one. Another was travel cost: the price tag for a news organization to send a reporter on the campaign trail was thousands of dollars a day, which limited traveling press to the richest corporate outlets. There are no alt-weeklies on the trail. The Internet accelerated the class divide.

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent
by Joel Spolsky
Published 1 Jun 2007

By the way, before I move on, I need to clarify something about internships in computer science and software development. In this day and age, in this country, it is totally expected that these are paid internships, and the salaries Finding Great Developers are usually pretty competitive. Although unpaid internships are common in other fields from publishing to music, we pay $750 a week, plus free housing, plus free lunch, plus free subway passes, not to mention relocation expenses and all the benefits. The dollar amount is a little bit lower than average, but it includes the free housing so it works out being a little bit better than average.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

Just as self-financed politicians can block the upward movement of lifelong public servants, so, too, can trustfund activists use their superior resources and connections to snag plum positions within nonprofits. We are used to this phenomenon in other sectors—the way that rich kids can afford to take prestigious unpaid internships in publishing or Hollywood or finance that burnish their résumés or can use Daddy’s Rolodex to get their foot in the door of elite institutions. But it is different when these same advantages come into play in a sector that is explicitly aimed at democratizing U.S. society and reducing inequalities.

…

It is a good thing, for instance, that more wealthy heirs are doing community service in prep schools and choosing careers in the nonprofit sector, but it’s a bad thing when these young people use their superior both.indd 279 5/11/10 6:27:57 AM 280 fortunes of change resources to gain an edge by taking unpaid internships or low-paid entry-level jobs. Rich kids, as it happens, can more easily afford to save the world than can middle-class kids, and guess who ends up with the better résumés? In the Republic, Plato imagined a leadership group called the Guardians who could govern society in a totally selfless fashion.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

No one can teach that, but an apprenticeship lets you stare, and fiddle, with the market on someone else’s dime. 3. Better Value AKA Play with House Money Instead of paying six figures to go to law school or get a MBA, you can get paid to learn skills and build relationships valued by the marketplace. Apprenticeships are also an astoundingly good value right now. Many people think free work or unpaid internships are exploitative, but find the idea of someone taking out a quarter million in debt to get a college degree and a MBA a smart investment. That may be a legacy of the knowledge economy that we haven’t adapted to yet. Advantages of Apprenticeships to Entrepreneurial Companies It’s certainly important to have tight hiring practices, as many applicants fall into the camp of people who like the idea of being an entrepreneur, but may not be willing to make the sacrifices.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

About a third of legacy applicants – those whose parent attended – are accepted into Harvard. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution calls them ‘dream hoarders’.33 Judged by aptitude, almost half those in America’s top two-fifths income bracket are there because of the luck of family background. Think of the value of those unpaid internships and family connections. Think of what those pricy weekend tutors did for your prospects. A big share of those in the bottom fifth would be in the top if they had the same life chances. According to one Harvard study, more students attended America’s elite universities from the top 1 per cent of income backgrounds than from the bottom 60 per cent.34 About one in four of the richest Americans attended an elite university, compared with less than half of 1 per cent of the bottom fifth.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by Alexis Ohanian
Published 30 Sep 2013

The previous year, I’d spent a formative summer in Singapore, competing on behalf of UVA at an international technopreneurship conference (oh, bless the Singaporeans and their technopreneurship conferences). One of my favorite teachers, Professor Mark White, had invited me to go on this all-expenses-paid trip. I’d even turned down an internship at Ogilvy because I like free travel even more than I like unpaid internships in the most expensive city in America. It was there in Singapore on our first night that I pitched Mark the idea Steve and I had cooked up. Mark’s was the first unbiased feedback I’d gotten on the idea (my parents had always been ludicrously supportive of whatever I told them I was up to), and he thought we’d be able to pull it off.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

As one journalist reflected at the time, “It’s a small but symbolic labor dispute in one of the country’s most often praised economic sectors that could have ramifications for workers at other studios.”15 The strike, which Habert described as “a very spontaneous movement,” ended in the second week of April, even though the strikers’ demands were not met. Some then chose to take legal action against the studio.16 The STJV has continued to build from this strike, representing not only workers in the industry, but also students and unemployed workers. The union has since focused on campaigns against unpaid internships, low wages for starting workers, and precarious contracts.17 These initial struggles of voice actors in the US and videogame workers in France foreshadowed the emergence of a new organization. This is not to say that videogame workers in studios across the world have been passive—rather, that these were some of the few open moments of class struggle.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

ABC, 148–49, 149–50 abortion, 45–49 compromise between individual rights and government role and, 49 genesis of life and, 46 left’s fetishizing of, 46 public rights versus governmental role, 48–49 survival rates of premature babies, 48 time limits for, 47, 48 Abriss, Erik, 154 Act for America, 133 admitting you don’t know something, 172–75 Adorno, Theodor, 67 Advocate, The, 85 Affleck, Ben, 18–20 Affordable Care Act (ACA), 102 Afghanistan, 70 African Americans intact families and, 91–93 systemic racism and, 89–92, 97–100 welfare state and, 92 Alain de Lille, 202 alcohol, 33–34 algorithmic manipulation of news intake, 163 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 6–7, 133–35 Amazon, 142 American Civil Liberties Union, 50 American Conservative Coalition, 110 American dream, as non-discriminatory, 146–47 American Revolution, 131 anti-Semitism, 108 Argentina, 101 Asian Americans, 143 Aslan, Reza, 155 assault rifles, 106 automation, 66 avoidance behavior, 129 “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (song), 198 Backer, Benji, 110 balanced life, tips for living, 204–6 Banaji, Mahzarin, 98 Baquet, Dean, 158 Barre, Siad, 133 Bercovici, Jeff, 161 Berger, Joseph, 79–80 Bergman, Ben, 161 Berlatsky, Noah, 154 Birth of a Nation, The (film), 112 Black Hebrew Israelites, 153, 154 blatant falsehoods, 163 Block, Hyman, 137 Boghossian, Peter, 87 Booker, Cory, 155–56 books, 164 Boothe, John Wilkes, 112 borders, 40–41 Boston Tea Party, 131 Bouyeri, Mohammed, 134 Brampton, Sally, 203 Brown, Danielle, 26 Bunch, Sonny, 199 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 104 Bush, George W., 70, 131–32 Buttigieg, Pete, 159 BuzzFeed, 9, 21–22, 60, 149 Cain, Caleb, 159, 161, 162 cancel culture, 85 Capehart, Jonathan, 154 capitalism, 141–42 Carlson, Tucker, 122–24 Carnevale, Anthony, 104 “Cashing in on the Rise of the Alt-Right” (Harkinson), 77 catastrophizing, 196–97 CBD (cannabidiol), 33 CBS, 149–50 Chabloz, Alison, 52 character assassination, 16–17 Charlesworth, Tessa, 98 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, 20–21 China, 139–40 Churchill, Winston, 203 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 38, 112 Clarkson, Kelly, 198 classical liberalism, 7–8, 28, 29–71 abortion and, 45–49 definition, 30 drugs and, 32–36 economics and, 62–67 foreign policy and, 67–71 free speech and, 50–54 gay marriage and, 37–39 gun control and, 54–58 historical proponents of, 30–31 immigration and, 39–45 individual rights, protection of, 30–31 political language of, 96 stereotypes, neutralization of, 31 tolerance of opposing viewpoints and, 37–39 trans issues and, 59–62 class warfare, 65 Clinton, Hillary, 42, 113 CNN, 10, 21–22, 148–49, 150 Covington story and, 153, 155 Jussie Smollett news story and, 157 Russian Hoax and, 158 college professors, left-wing political brainwashing by, 151 comedy, 187–90 coming out, 3–5 Confederate flag, 112 conservatives political language of, 96 pro-life position of, 49 Cook, Tim, 146 Covington story scandal, 152–55 crack, 34–35 Cruz, Nikolas, 58 culture war, 197–201 Cuomo, Andrew, 156 Daily Beast, The, 149 Daily Show, The (TV show), 62–63, 134–35 Daily Signal, The, 92 Damore, James, 25–26 Daniels, Jessie, 92 Darcy, Oliver, 161 David and Goliath story, 183 debt, government, 66 Declaration of Independence, 31, 144 Deconstructing Harry (film), 4 defensive gun use, lives saved from, 106 DeFranco, Philip, 159, 160–61 DeGeneres, Ellen, 146 Democratic Party, historical background of Civil Rights Act, opposition to, 112 Confederate flag, creation of, 112 Dred Scott ruling and, 111 Ku Klux Klan, formation of, 111–12 Lincoln assassination and, 112 opposition to Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, 112 school choice, opposition to, 113 War on Poverty and, 112 Democrats = good, Republicans = bad myth, 111–13 Demos, 101 denial, 12 digital journalism, 151 discrimination, 83 Dred Scott ruling, 111 dressing as the person you want to be, 175–79 drugs, 32–36 alcohol, 33–34 government role, 34–36 marijuana, 33 nicotine, 33 Schedule I controlled substances, 34–35 state versus federal issue, 36 taxation and, 35 Dunham, Lena, 127 economic issues, 62–67 government debt, 66 government size and spending, 64 minimum wage, 62, 65–66 tax rates, 64–65 unpaid internships, 62–63 welfare, 66 Economist, The, 80 Ehrlich, Paul, 108 Elder, Larry, 87–95 “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” (Fryer), 98 environmental issues, 108–10 extreme weather, 109 food shortage, 108–9 polar bears, 110 Equality Act of 1974, 38 Evans, Chris, 127 Evergreen State College, 22, 23 extreme weather, 109 Facebook, speech guidelines of, 53 fact checking, 8, 87–113 Democrats = good, Republicans = bad myth, 111–13 Elder interview and, 87–95 environmental issues, 108–10 gun control, 105–6 hate crimes, 107–8 learning and growing when faced with new facts, 94–95 nuclear family, importance of, 91–93 political languages, recognizing, 95–97 slow thinking, practicing, 96–97 systemic racism, 89–92, 97–100 wage gap, 103–5 war on women, 100–103 fake news, 9–10, 148–65 algorithmic manipulation of news intake, 163 blatant falsehoods, 163 categories of, 162–63 college professors, left-wing political brainwashing by, 151 Covington story scandal, 152–55 curating list of trusted journalists who operate in good faith, 163–64 distrust of media, 162 gut instinct, following your, 164 historical background, 149–51 institutional, 163 Jussie Smollett news story, 155–57 narrative-driven, 162 political activism and propagandism by journalists, 151–52 proprietors of, examples of, 148–49 Roose’s hit piece blaming Rubin and others for radicalizing youth, 159–62 Russian Hoax and, 157–58 family, 91–93, 112–13 Family Guy (TV show), 189 fatherless children, 91–92 Feinstein, Dianne, 44 Ferguson, Niall, 134 Field of Dreams (film), 177 Fifteenth Amendment, 112 First Amendment free speech rights, 14, 50–54 Fonda, Jane, 103 food shortage, 108–9 foreign policy, 67–71 peace through strength strategy, 67–68 red line in Syria, failure to enforce, 68 troop withdrawals, 70 Ukraine, NATO’s failure to help, 69 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 111–12 Fourteenth Amendment, 112 Fox News, 150 France, 69, 141 free speech, 50–54, 207 combating conspiracy theories and bad ideas with, 50–51 comedy and, 189 as essential to civilized society, 52 exceptions specified by Supreme Court, 50 hate speech laws and, 52 Kaepernick’s kneeling for national anthem and, 53–54 progressive policing of, 52–53 free thinking, 7–8, 28, 29–71.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

As inequality rises, growing numbers of people turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, while they become increasingly concerned about themselves and how they are seen. That is why charity fundraising events involving the superrich are public spectacles, with the press often invited along. In the same year that the Eton exam paper came to light, Westminster School was ridiculed for holding an auction for unpaid internships. These included a chance to work in the investment office of the private bank Coutts, or a week with the master jeweller Fabergé, or with retail communications agency Portas, or with a premier investment services advisory firm established by a man who has ‘more than 14 years experience in private banking and wealth management’.29 Parents bid huge sums of money so that their children could work unpaid; the connections they would gain were clearly seen as worthwhile.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

Today the in-state tuition is $13,500. The effect of the average student debt of $30,000 upon graduation is to increase the pressure to get a good job. As economist Joseph Stiglitz has written, “On average, many college graduates will search for months before they find a job—often only after having taken one or two unpaid internships. And they count themselves lucky, because they know that their poorer counterparts, some of whom did better in school, cannot afford to spend a year or two without income, and do not have the connections to get an internship in the first place.” And at least from the vantage point of a California college, getting a job seems to mean work in the technology sector.

Working Hard, Hardly Working
by Grace Beverley

Now I’m not suggesting that we need to overhaul our entire working practice legislation yet, but it does go to show that working ourselves tirelessly into the ground is not the same as being productive. There seems to be another, seedier and more gruesome possibility taking place behind the scenes, whereby extra hours of unpaid work are allowed to be framed as ‘productivity’ for the benefit of everyone except the labourer themselves. Alongside late nights at the office with no overtime, unpaid internships and work experience are the norm in many industries. While the UK is by no means the worst when it comes to labour protection, it does become all the more shocking when we learn that other EU countries are proactively fighting this change in work culture by putting further laws in place to protect their citizens as the issue develops.

Getting a Job in Hedge Funds: An Inside Look at How Funds Hire
by Adam Zoia and Aaron Finkel
Published 8 Feb 2008

I graduated from an Ivy League college in 2003 with a degree in business administration and was thinking of a career in the hospitality industry, perhaps in a restaurant or hotel. After graduation I spent two and a half months traveling in Europe. My life-altering moment came when I was staying with a cousin who runs a hedge fund in Europe. I ended up not only staying with him, but shadowing him to work for a month. It became a type of unpaid internship during which time I watched how he traded. I also went on, and listened to, client and investment calls with him. By sitting at the trading desk and observing the fund’s senior currency trader, I learned the basic principles of momentum trading as well as the overall principles of foreign exchange and futures trading.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

Shapiro write in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth, “the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history,” and it generated trillions of dollars in equity that would eventually be converted into choices: the choice to go to a better college, or to take an unpaid internship, or to hire a better lawyer to keep a promising-but-occasionally-foolish adolescent out of prison. Ninety-eight percent of those loans went to white families. By 1984 the median white family in the United States had a net worth of over ninety thousand dollars. The median black family had less than six thousand dollars.

Animals
by Emma Jane Unsworth
Published 2 May 2014

It’s enough to make you never get on a plane again. I looked to my side and saw a glass I’d somehow had the sense to fill and place there before I collapsed. I reached for it, gulped one twice three times. My gunky mouth made the liquid milky. Swallowing was an effort. I drank water like it was a job to do, an unpaid internship at my own inner (highly corrupt) Ministry of Health. Getting the whole pint down was hard work. As soon as the water was in me it wanted to come out. I ran along the thin hall to the bathroom, left tight-leg trailing. Slammed the door. The tiles were blissfully cool under my feet. Bathrooms were the best kind of room.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
by Anna Wiener
Published 14 Jan 2020

I wanted to tell him that I thought I was still young: I was only twenty-five. Instead, I told him I would try. Everyone I knew in San Francisco had already left. Our college class had graduated straight into a recession, and while most of us trudged to New York or Boston to compete for unpaid internships and other scraps of a ravaged economy, those who moved west refused to bend to despair. They chose instead to hide out for a while, work on their art. They lived in sun-flooded apartments, took part-time service jobs, and had complicated, consuming social lives. They freely experimented with hallucinogens and polyamory; smoked weed and slept in and day-drank; went to BDSM parties and wolfed burritos afterward.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls
by Tim Marshall
Published 8 Mar 2018

A 2014 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report found that on the BBC’s influential Question Time programme, 43 per cent of guests had attended Oxford or Cambridge University. And there are other factors at play that help perpetuate the imbalance across society. Many major companies offer only unpaid internships, effectively barring a young person from applying unless their parents can subsidize their living costs. Consequently the better off, many of them privately educated, gain the experience and contacts that help them succeed in the world of work. With both politics and the media disproportionately packed with the privately educated, the latter tend to dominate public discourse, which can have a huge impact on influencing public opinion.

Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life
by Sarah Edmondson
Published 16 Sep 2019

“I don’t think any one person can be credited with having all the answers.” But she was forgetting: Keith Raniere was known to be one of the smartest men in the world. “Who says that about themselves? Only a megalomaniac,” she said under her breath. I ignored her. I was on my way in NXIVM. Now that they’d made me a yellow sash, this would be like an unpaid internship, but now I could attend intensives for free. I’d also be shadowing the highly skilled trainers, which, I was told, would help me move up the Stripe Path quickly to reach proctor status as a full, legitimate coach. When the upper levels determined you were ready to become a proctor, then you could officially start on one of the career paths within the company and finally get paid for all the time you put in.

Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game
by Paul Midler
Published 18 Mar 2009

In this regard, Chinese manufacturers faced the same paradox as college graduates. Experience was needed to land a good job, but without a prior job there was no experience to be had. The factory agreed to produce merchandise at close to cost in order to prove its expertise. For the manufacturer, Johnson Carter’s account was the equivalent of an unpaid internship. Once the factory learned how to make a product line that was up to export standards, the factory owners could convince other importers to take a chance with them. King Chemical’s showroom was filled with examples of products that the factory had made for Johnson Carter. Along a single wall in the showroom, Johnson Carter’s modest product line appeared rather impressive, especially to those importers who came from the second market.

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain
by Lisa McKenzie
Published 14 Jan 2015

And yet, as working-class Britain was expected to pay for a crisis caused by powerful elites, the voices of those punished by austerity were all but airbrushed from existence. No wonder: according to a government report published in August 2014, over half of the top 100 media professionals are privately educated, while the number of working-class MPs shrinks with every general election. The rise of unpaid internships and the weakening of trade unions and local government have helped turn the media and political worlds into closed shops for the privileged, ensuring that working-class voices are ever harder to come by. That’s why a book like this is so important: because it allows intentionally ignored people to speak on their own terms about their experiences and their lives.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

In particular, the boroughs of Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham have an average yearly income of £63,286, which would position the average earner living there firmly in the top 10%.24 One of Friedman and Laurison’s most interesting arguments in The Class Ceiling is that among the most important mechanisms by which privilege is reproduced at the top is the fact children from privileged backgrounds can rely on what they call ‘the bank of mum and dad’.25 In other words, the children of affluent parents have the possibility of delaying their entry into the workforce even while living and studying in places like London, where housing costs and salaries are highest. This allows privileged children to work in unpaid internships, spend more time in education, grow their networks and hone their skills so that they can compete in ever more specialised and credentialled labour markets. In terms of gender, the figures are no more encouraging. Women comprise the majority of earners at each and every of the six poorest deciles, and their share diminishes the higher you go.

More Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky
Published 25 Jun 2008

And, my hope is, they won’t even bother going to that interview. By the way, before I move on, I need to clarify something about internships in computer science and software development. In this day and age, in this country, it is totally expected that these are paid internships, and the salaries are usually pretty competitive. Although unpaid internships are common in other fields from publishing to music, we pay $750 a week, plus free housing, plus free lunch, plus free subway passes, not to mention relocation expenses and all the benefits. The dollar amount is a little bit lower than average, but it includes the free housing, so it works out being a little bit better than average.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

The seemingly endless “jobless recovery” makes no sense at all, particularly at a time when many of us are working longer hours as overextended freelancers or the nominally unemployed than we did when we had real jobs. It’s hard to imagine how this all looks to young people just graduating college, who now chase unpaid internships with more energy than those in previous generations sought paying work. But what if joblessness were less of a bug than a feature of the new digital economy? We may, in fact, be reaching a stage of technological efficiency once imagined only by science-fiction writers and early cyberneticists: an era when robots really can till the fields, build our houses, pave our roads, and drive our cars.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

Nairn, G. (2009), ‘Telework Cuts Office Costs’, FT Report - Digital Business, 12 March, p. 4. National Equality Panel (2010), An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel, London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion and the Government Equalities Office. Needleman, S. (2009), ‘Starting Fresh with an Unpaid Internship’, Wall Street Journal, 16 July, p. D1. Nink, M. (2009), ‘It’s Always about the Boss’, Gallup Management Journal, 25 November. Obinger, J. (2009), ‘Working on the Margins: Japan’s Precariat and Working Poor’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 25 February. OECD (2010a), International Migration Outlook 2010, Paris: OECD.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
by David Graeber
Published 13 Aug 2012

Most obviously, if you wish to pursue a career that isn’t simply for the money—a career in the arts, in politics, social welfare, journalism, that is, a life dedicated to pursuing some value other than money, whether that be the pursuit of truth, beauty, charity—for the first year or two, your employers will simply refuse to pay you. As I myself discovered on graduating college, an impenetrable bastion of unpaid internships places any such careers permanently outside the reach of anyone who can’t fund several years’ free residence in a city like New York or San Francisco—which, most obviously, immediately eliminates any child of the working class. What this means in practice is that not only do the children of this (increasingly in-marrying, exclusive) class of sophisticates see most working-class Americans as so many knuckle-dragging cavemen, which is infuriating enough, but that they have developed a clever system to monopolize, for their own children, all lines of work where one can both earn a decent living and also pursue something selfless or noble.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

Two of the top talent agencies had just merged and there was an abundance of talented people with years of experience looking for work. He considered going back to school in order to postpone the job hunt for a few more years, but his parents wouldn’t pay for it. Not wanting to take out loans, Jacob accepted an unpaid internship and moved back home. After nine months of internships, during which time his parents generously supported him, Jacob finally got a break, even if it was not the one he had been waiting for: He took a job delivering mail at a talent agency for $7 an hour. The college degree, which had once seemed like the key to his success, was beginning to seem more like a joke.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Overall, US student loan balances are more than US$1.1 trillion, having almost quadrupled since 2003. This compares to increases of 65 percent in mortgage debt (to over US$8 trillion) and a decline in credit card debt of around 4 percent (to US$660 billion) over the same period. Even with qualifications, there may be no jobs. Paid apprenticeships and training have been replaced by unpaid internships to gain work experience. The employment-to-population ratios for 25–34-year-olds globally has declined more than for older workers. Youth unemployment is high throughout the world, with levels of up to 60 percent in some developed countries. Young workers face increased competition from older workers, who are deferring retirement or reentering the workforce because of inadequate retirement savings and low returns on investments.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

Morby had been married to a successful banker and had two children when she decided she wanted more out of life. At forty, Morby enrolled in the all-women’s Simmons College Management School, taking classes at night. A few months shy of graduation, she interviewed with an investment banker from Paine Webber in Boston for an unpaid internship. After a lengthy talk that seemed to be going well, the banker leaned in and told Morby, “We think you’d be great, but you have two small children.” Before Morby could reply, he went on, “Your husband works at the Bank of Boston. He needs you at home.” The banker added, “My wife couldn’t do this.”

How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong
by Elizabeth Day
Published 3 Apr 2019

I could have stayed and waited for the next round of voluntary redundancies but I didn’t want to hang around and it seemed slightly dishonest. I’d rather they saved the money and spent it on hiring a junior feature writer who could bring enthusiasm and fresh ideas to the newspaper and who might not otherwise be able to afford the endless string of unpaid internships now required to bag a job in media. I had no plan in place. I simply knew I had to leave. Something would work out, I told myself. I’d built up enough of a reputation to get some freelance commissions and I was nearing completion of my fourth novel. But it was still a terrifying risk to take.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 14 Oct 2021

Noncontroversial statement of the day: Maybe, just maybe, some white people have a bit too much free time on their hands. I mean, I thought the purpose of training to compete at the CrossFit Games and apple picking at an orchard for leh-zur (that’s leisure for the unpretentious) was to eat up any and all spare time they had. Guess I was wrong because some white folks are committed to working an unpaid internship while studying at the University of Now Would Be a Good Time for Me to Mind My Own Business, But I’m Not Ready for That Conversation because keeping tabs on someone else’s grass is . . . ignorant. What I’m getting at is that these sorts of low-grade nuisances are what Black people are conditioned to “look forward to” instead of wanting to see and experience the world, which is often coupled with the myth that Black people have zero desire to travel.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

This question pops up everywhere, underlying familiar parental concerns about their children’s “failure to launch” and the increase in “boomerang kids”—kids who return home. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course. As more young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, they go back to school for lack of better options. Others travel, avoid commitments, compete ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) gigs, and otherwise forestall the beginning of adult life. The median age for a first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were coming of age, was twenty-one for women and twenty-three for men. By 2009, it had risen to twenty-six for women and twenty-eight for men.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 26 Mar 2013

He’s placing a huge bet on paltry information. This is a situation that cries out for an ooch, and an obvious one would be to work in a pharmacy for a few weeks. He’d be smart to work for free, if need be, to get the job. (Certainly if he can afford several years of school without an income, he can afford to take a monthlong unpaid internship.) Surely this concept—testing a profession before entering it—sounds obvious. Yet every year hordes of students enroll in graduate schools without ever having run an experiment like that: law students who’ve never spent a day in a law office and med students who’ve never spent time in a hospital or clinic.

Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement
by Robert Clyatt
Published 28 Sep 2007

With this preparation, it is quite possible that your own employer or another industry player will agree to hire you on a part-time basis. If you know you are going to switch gears to a new profession or avocation, you can lay groundwork for that, too. Whether through networking and attending conferences or taking on unpaid internships or projects, you’ll begin building momentum and confidence about your decision to change work domains. Kicking around in a new area for a few years allows you to build contacts, understand your personal fit and aptitude, and think through where and how to make some income in this area. Once you stop working full time in your old career, you’ll have the time to progress in the new one.

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945
by Pat Thane
Published 18 Apr 2010

The growth of commercially successful ethnic minority media in the 1980s and 1990s may have been a factor in the increasing ability of minority communities to influence the language used to describe them. Publications like The Voice and Asian Age have also provided ethnic minority journalists with a route into the mainstream media, although research suggests that ‘low-level racism’ still pervades the culture of the newsroom.33 A heavy reliance on unpaid internships and personal contacts as ways into the media tends to exclude those who are outside the ‘old boys’ network’ and those with fewer financial resources. Television has a better record than newspapers, with the success of pioneers such as Trevor MacDonald and Moira Stewart in the 1970s, replicated by Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Zeinab Badawi since the 1990s, although minority ethnic groups remain under-represented in the mainstream media.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

For people like Sanni, Brexit was a story of marginalization and of Britain’s unaddressed legacy of colonialism—an attempt to right the wrong of denying immigrants and people of color access to the very country that had plundered them for centuries. And it was by identifying this bubbling resentment that the pro-Brexit movement managed to create a counterintuitive alliance between some sections of immigrant communities and cohorts of jingoist Brexiteers who wanted them all to “go home.” * * * — PARKINSON GAVE SANNI AN unpaid internship. He started in the spring of 2016 as a volunteer. Because the outreach team was so small, his duties quickly multiplied. Much of his work was focused on minority and queer communities. He would visit impoverished neighborhoods to ask residents how they were planning to vote and why. On Sanni’s first day at the office, he noticed a dandy in a green blazer and pink pants: Mark Gettleson, in his full homosexual plumage.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Only 2.2 percent of the nation’s students graduate from nonsectarian private high schools, yet these graduates account for 26 percent of students at Harvard and 28 percent at Princeton.13 High-income parents can also give their children such advantages as museum trips, SAT coaching classes, and unpaid internships. Robert Reich, a lion of the left and a former Harvard professor, characterizes the modern elite universities as being designed mainly “to educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class.”14 Today’s leading universities are filling the role envisioned by Charles Eliot, who became Harvard’s president in 1869: taking the lead in creating an enlightened national ruling class—the Alphas, if you will.15 A National Journal survey of 250 top American public sector decision makers found that 40 percent of them were Ivy League graduates.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

McFarland’s friend, who estimates she had earned a few thousand dollars, ultimately got a check for around $1,200—and only after threatening Spling with a lawsuit. She remembers McFarland seeming unfazed at the idea of losing both an employee and a friend. “We just stopped talking. I got really mad at him. I was like, ‘Oh, we were friends, how could you do this to me?’ I had an unpaid internship that summer, so I was banking on having that money,” she said. “I mean he just didn’t really seem to have any remorse or care about the friendship. It was just all about himself.” The friend suggests that McFarland’s questionable form of user acquisition wasn’t the only thing he’d apparently been using investor money to pay for.

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us
by John Hills
Published 6 Nov 2014

It is easy to see how that might make a difference, and why the research evidence suggests that ‘money matters’ on top of all the other factors that later outcomes might be associated with.42 While there are, of course, many things that ‘money can’t buy’ (in the words of the title of Susan Mayer’s book43), there are lots of things that money can buy, such as: • high-quality pre-school care • houses in the catchment areas of the best-regarded state schools (which then command a significant premium) • after-school activities, private tutors, etc • private schooling • parental support in going on to tertiary education (and reduction in the worries associated with student loans) • support in taking a Master’s degree (for many better-paid careers this now represents the same basic required qualification that a first degree did a generation ago).44 Parents, if they can afford it and choose to do so, can also provide support with living costs at the start of careers, including during the unpaid internships that often act as an entry barrier into particular professions. The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission reports that, ‘Graduates who have completed internships are three times more likely to get a job than those with no work experience, but 90 per cent of placements are unpaid in professions such as journalism.’45 Beyond that, parents (and grandparents) may provide substantial help with housing costs – allowing their children to afford to live in the areas where there are jobs, including help with deposits for house purchase, without which few young adults now become owner-occupiers.

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo
by Rebecca Walker
Published 15 Mar 2022

They hadn’t been to the cabin in several years, and when they did come, the visits were short and devoid of the intimacy we had once shared. The lake water was too warm, they complained, no longer refreshing, and the neighbors had built bigger houses along the opposite shore, ruining our once idyllic view. Our childhood was over, they said; it’s time to move on. But I was living in a one-room apartment in LA, with an unpaid internship and thousands of dollars of student debt, and the lake house was part of my backup plan. If rents got too steep and I couldn’t find a real job, I could always go there to reset. Without it, the pressure to succeed increased exponentially. But beneath the worldly concerns was the unbearable pull of nostalgia, the ache I suddenly felt for the innocence and ease of childhood.

The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison
Published 28 Jan 2019

-C. 306n23, 308n14 Bourdieusian approach 186–8, 195 Breen, R. and Goldthorpe, J.H. 294n2 Bridge Group 229, 231, 235, 236 Socio-economic diversity in the Civil Service Fast Stream 230 British Broadcasting Corporation see BBC British Social Attitudes survey 2016 286n31 Britton, J. et al 295n18 C capital (Bourdieu) Bourdieu on 186–7 class as total 196–7 cultural 14–17, 162, 164, 197, 199–203 dimensions of 194 economic 14, 24, 90, 93, 105–6, 197 embodied cultural 154, 187, 197, 199–208 ‘field-specific’ 199, 201–3 social 14, 110, 149, 162, 164 technical 141, 187, 203–8 Carter, C. and Spence, C. 159 Casciaro, T. and Lobo, M.S. 301n18 CCIs see cultural and creative industries CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) 33fig, 35fig, 40, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Charlesworth, S.J. 314n71 Chetty, R. 192 Chinese ethnic group 42–3, 49fig, 51, 52fig Civil Service, Opportunity Network 237 ‘Clarendon Schools’ 148 class ‘death of ’ 5–6 origins and destinations 10–17 as multidimensional 196 class pay gap 7–9, 47–55, 57–70 within companies 85 company size and 67–9 demographic differences 59–60 drivers of 70fig, 86fig, 217fig education and 61–5 and elite occupations 52–5 and gender pay gap 50–1 and racial-ethnic pay gap 51–2 class-structural approach 189 client matching 147, 158–64 comportment 14, 132, 200 confidence cultural 154 fallacy of 23–7 and fitting in 124, 130, 151 misinterpretation of 102 and progression 19 and sponsorship 114 and typecasting 99 confidentiality 274 contest mobility 109 Coopers (architects) 81–3, 105–7 belonging 174–5 culture of 164–8 and embodied cultural capital 206 female representation 82, 120–1 fitting in 140–3 glass ceiling 143, 207 hierarchy 83 internal and external culture 164–8 merit 225–6 opting out 175 parental financial support 105–7 privilege 82, 83fig 361 The Class Ceiling racial-ethnic representation 82 researching 246–7 and sponsored mobility 118–21 working-class 82, 83fig Corbyn, J. 287n39 corporate senior management 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Crawford, C. et al 295n21 Crenshaw, K. 289n75 cultural affinity 111, 116, 122, 214 cultural and creative industries (CCIs), precarity of 91 ‘EGP’ (Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero) approach 288n53 Elias, N. 302n3 elite signals 148, 156 Ellis, A.J. 306n20 embodied cultural capital 154, 187, 197, 199–208 emotional cost 173–4, 175, 178–83 engineering 33fig, 35fig, 40, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig, 54 Equality Act 2010 237, 296n1 The Equality Trust 238 Erickson, B.H. 307n38 ‘cultural competency’ 126 ‘cultural guides’ 120 F failure, anticipation of 173 ‘Fairer Scotland Duty’ 237 fairness 8, 9–10 feeding back 219–20, 273 Feinstein, L. 294n5 field (Bourdieu) 186–7, 198–9 ‘field-specific capital’ 199, 201–3 film and television industry access to 33fig class pay gap 53fig, 54–5 education 136 female representation 40, 42fig, 73 micro-class reproduction 34, 35fig racial-ethnic representation 40, 41fig, 73 social exclusivity 40, 74fig finance 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig, 54 fire service chiefs 33fig, 35fig, 40, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig first class degree, earnings premium 38, 39fig, 64 fitting in 123–44 behavioural codes 134–40 ‘glass slipper’ 125–7 merit 144 polish 127–34 technical skill 140–3 cultural capital 14–17, 162, 164, 197, 199–203 D decomposition 58, 269 degree classification 63–4 deregulation 7, 246 disability 39–40, 41–2, 49, 51 discrimination 17, 40, 45, 57, 144, 224–5, 276 domestic migration 66–7 Dorling, D. 299n22 double disadvantage 50–2, 191, 218, 302n30 dress codes 126, 128–9, 134–5 Durkheimian approach 311n34 E Eagly, A.H. and Carli, L.L. 289n71 education and access to elite occupations 35–9 Bourdieu on 172–3 and embodied cultural capital 199–200 as ‘equaliser’ 61–5 grammar schools 6, 166 private 46, 78–81, 94, 104, 121, 123, 157, 159, 162, 172 public (elite private) 148–9 362 Index Fleming, P. 125–6 France, class pay gap 47 Friedman, S. 308n14 Future Leaders scheme 123–4, 244 G gatekeepers 114, 132, 144, 147–8, 166, 187 gender anxiety and 180–2 and dress 129 and merit 226 and technical capital 207 and tradition 39–40 under-representation of females 42fig see also double disadvantage; glass ceiling; intersectionality gender pay gap 45–6, 49, 61, 143, 221 ‘gig economy’ 91, 241, 270 glass ceiling 17–19, 45, 120, 143, 186, 190–1, 218 glass escalator 310n24 glass slipper 124–7, 128, 132, 133, 136, 142–3 globalisation 7, 286n17 Goldthorpe, J. 6, 8, 10, 189, 311n31 Goldthorpe, J. et al 309n7, 311n30 Goodall, L. 46 grammar schools 6, 166 Granovetter, M. 110 gravitas 159–60 H habitus (Bourdieu) 14–15, 186, 194, 198 Bourdieu on 288n69, 307n9, 308n1, 308n18, 314n80, 314n81 Hall, T. 45–6 Harman, H. 237 Heath, A.F. 310n20 hexis 200, 202 highbrow culture at 6TV 145–7, 150–6, 206, 219 as barrier 149–50, 164, 167 Bourdieu on 200 and privileged networks 168 Ho, K. 306n28 Hoggart, R. 307n35 homophily 214–15 and glass ceiling 17, 190 sponsorships and 113–14, 119, 120, 121 horizontal segregation 69, 272 Hout, M. 61 human capital 88, 90 I imposter syndrome 179 Indian ethnic group 42, 43, 49fig, 52fig individualisation 6, 26, 114, 144, 162 industry, decline in 6 Ingram, N. and Allen, K. 126 insecurity economic 91, 93 emotional 120, 139, 173, 179–83 institutionalised cultural capital 199, 315n92 intergenerational transfer 9, 15, 192, 193, 222 internships 149, 234 intersectionality 18–19, 40–4, 139, 190–1, 223, 233, 293n17 see also double disadvantage intra-generational mobility 193 IQ (intelligence quotient) 57, 61 isolation 181–2 IT 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig J Jencks, C. et al 290n83, 311n29 Johnson, B. 57 Jones, D. 306n20 journalism class pay gap 53fig, 294n19 363 The Class Ceiling female representation 42fig Labour Force Survey (LFS) 264t micro-class reproduction 35fig privilege and 32, 33fig, 205 racial-ethnic representation 41fig and social mobility 30fig Just Fair 238 Lizardo, O. 149 ‘locus of control’ 23 London City of 19, 132, 212 parental financial support 24 privileged employment 22, 66, 69, 80, 106, 212 salary 66–7 senior positions 77 K Kitagawa, E 320n23 Koppman, S. 305n18, 313n58 KPMG 78, 230 Kuhn, A. 17 Kynaston, D. 132 M Macron, E. 29 management consultancy 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Matthew, M. 304n30 May, T. 7, 29 measurement of class background 230–2 medicine 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig ‘merit’ measures 67fig, 68fig meritocracy 232–3 City of London 132, 133 and cultural similarity 111, 168–9 as driver 58, 62, 65 education 21–2, 61–3 and fitting in 144, 212–14, 215–19, 220–2 justification 88 ‘occupational effects’ and 198–9 and popular culture 179 and privilege 102, 103, 226–7 and progression 4–5 and sponsorship 118, 122 and technical capital 204 in UK 5, 7, 38–9 Weber on 4 meritocratic ideal 209, 210, 298n4 meritocratic legitimacy 8, 104 methodology 239–83 6TV 242–4 confidentiality 274 Coopers 246–7 elite occupation definition 265–6 L Labour Force Survey see LFS Lamont, M. and Lareau, A. 315n88 language 15, 128, 137–9, 151, 155–8, 306n23 see also speech Lareau, A. 15–16, 120 law class pay gap 53fig education 37 female representation 42fig micro-class reproduction 34, 35fig privilege 32, 33fig, 54, 85 progression in 19 racial-ethnic representation 41fig unpaid internships 234 Lawler, S. 18, 51, 308n15 Lawler, S. and Payne, G. 302n6 legal protection 237–8 Lexmond, J. and Reeves, R. 302n11 LFS (Labour Force Survey) 10, 30–1, 65, 72, 189–90, 240–3, 263–8, 271 life sciences 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig linearity of career 196 Lineker, G. 45 ‘linguistic capital’ 306n23 364 Index feeding back 219–20, 273 interviews 247, 248t–60t measurement of social mobility 262–5 Turner Clarke (TC) 244–6 see also LFS (Labour Force Survey) microaggressions 17, 190, 224–5, 304n29 micro-class reproduction 34–5, 192 middle-class socialisation 126 Mijs, J.J.B. 298n4 Milburn, A. 9, 29–30 Miller, N. 229 Mills, C.W. 132, 148, 319n16 mixed race ethnic group 42, 43fig, 49fig, 51, 52fig Morrissey, D. 84 Mosca, G. 319n16 multiple race ethnic group 42 Murray, C. 57 N ‘neo-institutional theory’ 301n21, 303n26 networks and highbrow culture 149–50, 168 and inequality 121–2 old boys’ network 17, 109, 132, 211 and sponsorship 110, 115, 118 Norway, class pay gap 47 NS-SEC (National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification) 11, 222, 263–5 nudge theory 307n37 O objectified cultural capital 199 ‘objective merit’ 2, 168, 212, 214, 221 O’Brien, D. 241 ‘occupational effects’ 198–9 ‘old boys’ network’ 17, 109, 132, 211 ‘opportunity cost’ 182 ‘opportunity hoarding’ 148, 164 other Asian ethnic group 43fig, 49fig, 52fig otherness 146 Oxbridge 2, 3, 62, 63, 148, 155 P PACT (Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television) 243, 297n5 Paired Peers project 299n18 Pakistani ethnic group 40, 41fig, 42fig, 43–4, 49, 51, 52fig parental financial support 87–107 for actors 87–105 at Coopers 105–7 at Turner Clarke (TC) 105–7 parental occupation 31–2, 231–2, 240, 263 performing arts 33fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Pfeffer, J. 290n83, 320n28 Piketty, T. 286n25 police service chiefs 33fig, 35fig, 40, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig Policy Exchange 286n31 polish 19, 127–34, 142, 159, 161, 180 popular culture 149, 202, 219, 307n38 primary socialisation 153–4, 194, 199, 202 private sector pay 68 Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television see PACT professional and managerial sector, increase in 6, 59 professionalism 159 progress in career 19–20, 45–55 class pay gap 47–55 cultural barriers 164 and education 62 female 143, 167 fitting in 124–5, 129 and merit 4, 102–3, 109, 111, 210 365 The Class Ceiling and parental financial support 90, 101, 106 and polish 127–34 self-elimination 173 sponsorship 113, 115, 118, 121 technical capital and 203 public assets, sale of 7 public sector access to 32, 33fig, 34 class pay gap 53fig, 68 female representation 42fig micro-class approach 35fig racial-ethnic representation 41fig public spending cuts 7 Puwar, N. 158 R racial-ethnic minorities at 6TV 139 access to elite occupations 20–1, 43fig at Coopers 82 and glass ceiling 190 and higher education 280fig, 281fig and IQ 57 pay gap 49–50, 283fig progression 21 at Turner Clarke (TC) 114 and upward social mobility 18 see also double disadvantage; intersectionality Received Pronunciation see RP Reeves, A. and de Vries, R. 315n91 Reeves, R. 149 regional differences 66–7, 80, 106 regression analysis 58, 268–9 Reith, Lord 306n21 RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) 175 Rivera, L. 19, 113, 129, 131, 223 Rollock, N. 289n80 Royal Institute of British Architects see RIBA RP (Received Pronunciation) 128, 156–8 Russell Group universities 38, 39fig, 62, 63fig, 100 S Saunders, P. 294n2 Savage, M. 205, 207 Sayer, A. 299n20 science, career in 33fig, 35fig, 41fig, 42fig, 53fig self-elimination 171–83 cultural mimicry 177–8 emotional self-protection 175 opting out 174–5 playing safe 175–7 self-worth 173 service-based economy 7 Sherman, R. 103 Skeggs, B. 18 SMC (Social Mobility Commission) 9, 57 social bridging 149 social capital 14–15, 110, 149, 162, 164 social closure 147–50, 189 social mobility, measurement of 30fig, 262–5 Social Mobility Business Compact 230 Social Mobility Commission see SMC Social Mobility Employer Index 230 Social Mobility Index 2017 305n3 Socioeconomic Duty 237–8 ‘sociology of elite recruitment’ 188–9 space, egalitarian organisation of 79 speech 126, 128, 156–8 see also language speed of career 176, 196 Spence, C. and Carter, C. 298n16 sponsorship 109–21 at 6TV 115–18 366 Index at Coopers 118–21 formalisation of 235–6 at Turner Clarke (TC) 111–15 standard mobility analysis 186, 198 standard mobility tables 188, 191–2 stereotyping 17, 218, 225, 303n28 studied informality 134–40, 142, 150 Sweden, class pay gap 47 ‘symbolic capital’ 201 ‘symbolic mastery’ 15, 16, 200 traditional/technical divide 32–4 Trump, D. 29 Turner, R.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

Whatever it means to others, $36,000 was a living wage to me—more than enough for a childless dirtbag like me to live in comfort. Most people in my social circle—my tribe—were also comfortable, as were most people I’ve met in journalism. Coming from a middle-class background, I’m still kind of on the scholarship-kid end of my generation of journalists—it’s rough getting through the years of unpaid internships and might-as-well-be-unpaid freelancing without outside financial support, and the barriers have gotten even higher since I elbowed my way in a decade ago. And, god, politics is so much worse. Before party officials from the DCCC* will even consider you as a candidate for national office, you have to pass a “phone test”—take out your phone, scroll through your contacts, and add up how much you think you could get each contact to donate.

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
by Yascha Mounk
Published 19 Apr 2022

Diverse democracies need robust laws to ensure that employers don’t discriminate on the basis of race or religion. They must ensure that the most prestigious institutions of higher learning are genuinely open to high-achieving applicants from all social groups. And they should stop companies and public institutions from offering unpaid internships that make it harder for those without deep-pocketed parents to break into promising careers. But if diverse democracies are to overcome their historical patterns of domination, they need to focus less on who attends the most famous universities or is hired for the most prestigious jobs, and more on how to ensure that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have a chance to develop their talents in the first place.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
by Temple Grandin, Ph.d.
Published 11 Oct 2022

With government funding, and additional backing from philanthropic organizations and financial services, a statewide apprenticeship system was created, with the goal of giving students real-world experience and work-based learning to close the state’s skills and labor gap. In states that have large numbers of manufacturers, there will usually be more of these programs. It is important to distinguish between paid apprenticeships and the unpaid internships many college students pursue. Many students cannot afford to perform unpaid work. However, not all internships are unpaid. JBS Foods, the large meat company headquartered in Colorado, has paid summer internships where students learn management-level jobs in quality assurance. Often the intern is not only compensated but expected to meaningfully participate.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

In countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, according to a YouGov poll, the dominant opinion is that the next generation is less likely to be richer, safer, or healthier than the last.23 In Western families, bambinos all too often stay bambinos, and then become what Italians call bamboccioni (big babies), as they cannot afford to leave the nest. For millennials, the job market has become increasingly difficult to navigate with many having to jump from one low-paid job to the next whilst others can only find poorly paid or unpaid internships. Those who begin their careers out of work are more likely to face lower wages over the course of their working lives along with bouts of unemployment. The future looks bleak. But it is not just the young who feel trapped. Job creation and destruction have been on a slowing trend for decades, and those unhappy at work have greater problems in finding a new job.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

There’s virtually no way that same daughter will ever become an international human rights lawyer, or drama critic for the New York Times. Even if she could get into the right schools, there would certainly be no possible way for her to then go on to live in New York or San Francisco for the requisite years of unpaid internships.5 Even if the son of glazier got a toehold in a well-positioned bullshit job, he would likely, like Eric, be unable or unwilling to transform it into a platform for the obligatory networking. There are a thousand invisible barriers. If we return to the opposition of “value” versus “values” laid out in the last chapter, we might put it this way: if you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value—whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth—and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there’s simply no way in.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

But Osborne didn’t bother waiting for permission from either the Cabinet Office or the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA).6 For Owen Jones, Osborne’s seamless switch from Westminster to Fleet Street reflected the gulf between the unconnected working class and the wealthy elite. Talented working-class aspiring journalists are discriminated against because they can’t live off the Bank of Mum and Dad. With few exceptions, only the well-to-do can afford to do the unpaid internships and expensive journalism masters’ degrees that increasingly must adorn the CVs of those with hopes of making it into journalism. Having parents with connections has helped multiple journalists, too. And yet a man with precious little experience in journalism – other than being rejected by the Times’s graduate scheme – can get parachuted into the editor’s seat of a major newspaper because of who he is and who he knows.

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
by Lauren A. Rivera
Published 3 May 2015

Others had difficulty obtaining the extensive documentation required for financial aid applications.26 By contrast, students from affluent families in Radford’s study made their college choices based on noneconomic factors, such as academic or extracurricular offerings, or feelings of personal “fit” with a university or its student body.27 Once on campus, parental financial support can help offset the cost of children’s college tuition and living expenses. Freed from the need for paid employment, students from well-off families can concentrate on academic and social activities and accept unpaid internships, all of which can facilitate college success, valuable social connections, and future employment opportunities.28 Those who have to work part- or full-time to pay tuition bills or to send money to family members do not have this luxury. To summarize, parents with more economic capital can more easily help their children receive better-quality schooling, cultivate the types of academic and extracurricular profiles desired by selective college admissions offices, and participate fully in the life of the college they attend.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

For young African Americans, it was more than 30 percent. Millennials with college degrees did much better than those without them, but even graduates of good colleges had trouble finding work that paid them enough to manage their loans. Underemployment became a significant social problem, even among the highly educated. They scraped together unpaid internships, gig work, and freelance assignments, and many of them ended up moving back in with their parents to make ends meet. By 2012, when the economy was inching its way back toward stability, the class of 2009 had already been left behind. Many employers preferred the fresh college graduates over ones who graduated three years earlier and might expect higher wages for the same work.

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal
by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz
Published 20 Jul 2020

Because if colleges post figures on who got in because of a rich dad or grandmother, or even stopped giving extra weight to candidates with the “recruited athlete” tag, privilege would still course through the admissions system. Wealthy students would still have more opportunities to burnish their résumés with volunteer trips and unpaid internships, and they’d still have influential family connections who can put in a good word at a particular university. They can continue to afford SAT or ACT tutoring, private coaches to brainstorm and polish essays. They can pay private school tuition to attend schools like Buckley and Brentwood. And as long as admissions offices leave open the gaping holes in their verification processes for regular applicants, little incentive will exist for high school seniors—or whoever’s filling out their applications—to think twice before signing an affirmation on the Common Application that submitted material “is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

Whistleblowers are targeted by government agencies and treated as traitors. For those that like the James Bond movies and have always dreamed of being a secret spy, gathering important information to help save their country from the evil of foreign governments sounds pretty cool. Those people might be interested in an unpaid internship with one of the dirtiest organizations in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security needs help catching terrorists, and all a concerned citizen needs to do is spy on their neighbors for them. DHS has even started a marketing campaign that encourages citizens to rat out their friends, family members, and casual acquaintances.

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO
by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Published 1 Nov 2022

Girls is set in contemporary Brooklyn and tells the story of four friends struggling to define themselves in the confusing, exciting, bittersweet aftermath of college, at a time when anxiety is running high for liberal arts majors. At the outset, an aspiring twentysomething writer named Hannah Horvath (Dunham) is cut off financially by her parents—a cataclysmic moment in the life cycle of a Brooklyn hipster. She is devastated. How will she possibly survive? Later, she goes to the supervisor of her unpaid internship in book publishing and asks him to start paying her for her labor. But rather than give her a salary, her boss instead sends her packing, further ratcheting up the economic pressure. Afterward, feeling dispirited, Hannah has rough, awkward sex with Adam, a muscular, underemployed, aspiring actor (Adam Driver).

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

For capitalists, it’s what this fetches in money when it’s sold that matters. 87 Marx, K. (1996) [1867] Capital, vol I, ch 13, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp 448–9. 88 Marx, K. (1998) [1894] Capital, vol III, ch 23, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p 545. 89 Though in several professional occupations, unpaid internships are becoming a precondition of subsequent employment. 90 As in the case of Apple, highly profitable companies may decide they do not need to pay dividends; their shareholders are nevertheless happy as long as the value of their shares is increasing. Arthur, C. (2012) ‘One year on, Apple after Jobs has a new, more ethical flavour’, Guardian, 5 October. 91 The secondary market in shares is generally defended as necessary for encouraging people to buy shares in the primary or initial public offering market; ‘investors’ will be more confident about buying new shares if they know they may be able to profit from a rise in their market price, or offload them if they are dissatisfied with their returns.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

When this might be, no one can quite say, but it’s similar to the philosophy that social media’s exercises in self-branding and self-promotion will eventually pay off for enterprising users. (Many white-collar workers, especially recent college graduates, know another form of this treatment: unpaid internships, which cater to those who can afford to work for free.) For years, AOL relied on its Community Leader Program, comprising thousands of remote volunteers charged with moderating message boards and chat rooms, enforcing the terms of service, serving as chat room hosts, or writing content. The staffers were unpaid but received modest discounts on their AOL memberships.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

Few entrepreneurs get it right first time: for instance, Henry Ford’s first company, the Detroit Automobile Company, went bust; as did Henry John Heinz’s. But both had the assets to relaunch and succeed the second time.55 The big, expensive, one-off jumps that people have to make – especially early in their lives – in terms of acquiring education or building a portfolio of unpaid internships to secure their first job are more feasible if they are underwritten by assets. Assets therefore provide ways out of Lynsey Hanley’s concrete people-lockers. This was the inspiration for New Labour’s child trust fund – whose almost gleeful abolition was one of the coalition government’s most unthinking acts.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Pure artists are, in any case, today everywhere subordinated to the market and its pursuit of private profits. Today’s creativity crisis is unfolding in the shadow of the financial meltdown and an economic climate where public jobs are being cut from Athens and São Paulo to Chicago and Stockton, where persistent recession undercuts private job growth and rationalizes minimum wage jobs, and where unpaid internships and other inequities hostile to the development of a creative class proliferate. The persistence of economic segregation walls off too many from the advantages of urban generativity. Cities are not merely creative but capable of generating and nurturing hope, innovation, and a sense of possibility and hence of breaking the vicious circle in which segregation, poverty, and inequality feed off one another.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

By 2010 40 per cent of London’s children lived in poor households – twice as many as the national average.30 The children of affluent families with connections certainly benefited from the concentration of wealth and opportunity in the capital. Oscar Greene, the son of a university professor, grew up in London. After moving away in the 2000s to study at a Russell Group university, he embarked on a career in publishing, ‘which I was able to do because I could live in the family home in London’.31 Studies found that unpaid internships and work experience, informally arranged through family friends, were important conduits into the financial, advertising and legal sectors centred in London.32 But Londoners from working-class backgrounds were no more likely to get the ‘top’ jobs than inhabitants of other areas of the country.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

“I have several ideas which could be very easily and cheaply implemented,” Luckey wrote, and then described a prototype he had already built that did exactly that. It was a bit awkward, offering to try and help one of the very few VR experts in the world, but Luckey hoped that Bolas was the type of guy who would appreciate that kind of gumption. Especially because of the big ask that bookended his email: “I would love a low pay or unpaid internship at somewhere where I could get some experience,” Luckey wrote. “If there is anything you can do to help me out, or point me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.” Luckey knew that this was a long shot. But by the time he reached out to Bolas, he was beginning to suspect that those were the only kind of shots that he would get.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

But members of groups that continue to be underrepresented in prestigious organizations like Ivy League universities or the executive floors of Fortune 500 companies often have good reason to feel that exclusion has merely morphed into more subtle forms. They field backhanded compliments from older colleagues or face structural obstacles, like unpaid internships, that make it harder for first-generation college students to break into influential fields from politics to the arts. It is possible to recognize these injustices and fight against them without subscribing to the identity synthesis. Anybody who knows that their country does not live up to universalist ideals like tolerance and nondiscrimination should advocate for the cultural changes and the political reforms that are needed to fix these shortcomings.

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific
by David Bianculli
Published 15 Nov 2016

So at the start, what Lena saw it as was that moment when you’ve been out of school for a few years, and things should be beginning to fall together properly, and they’re just not.” He points to the plot of the premiere episode, which begins with Hannah asking her parents for money to support her while she continues an unpaid internship in New York and ends with her reading samples of her writing to them in hopes of persuading them to invest in her future. Both times, they refuse. “And then the pilot’s over,” Apatow says, laughing. “That’s the whole pilot. ‘Can I have money?’ ‘No.’ Then, at the end, ‘Can I have money?’ ‘No.’

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

But university-based professional training skews dramatically toward wealth, as the disproportion of rich students at elite graduate and professional schools matches and even exceeds the socioeconomic imbalance among elite college students. (The one form of workplace training that survives and indeed thrives today—the unpaid internship—similarly favors young workers from wealthy backgrounds, who are disproportionately able to afford working for free.) This should not come as any surprise. Most immediately, graduate and professional schools are academically competitive, and the most elite schools are immensely competitive—indeed, more competitive than even the most elite colleges.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area
by Nick Edwards and Mark Ellwood
Published 2 Jan 2009

Draining courtroom drama based on the true story of an The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino 2006). This drama tells the real-life story of Chris Gardner (Will Smith), a downon-his-luck salesman who ends up homeless with a young son. Gardner keeps his child fed by hitting the soup kitchen at Glide Memorial Church every night while he works an unpaid internship at a brokerage firm. Shoot the Moon (Alan Parker 1981). Albert Finney and Diane Keaton star in this strained tale of self-obsessed Marin County trauma and heartbreak that’s sadly about as affecting as an episode of Dallas. Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy 1986). In a surprising twist, this warm-hearted comic installment of the sci-fi series sends Kirk and company back in time to contemporary San Francisco in order to save some whales.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Aug 2020

The Institute for Educational Affairs, established the previous year by William Simon and Irving Kristol with gifts of $100,000 each from Bechtel, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Mobil, and Nestlé, began distributing grants to promising conservative undergraduates and PhD candidates, and subsidized conservatives to take otherwise unpaid internships at activist organizations, periodicals—and even unsuspecting federal agencies. Organizations for grown-ups were thriving, too—like the American Legislative Exchange Council, which, along with what New Right Report called a “coalition of pro-life, pro-Right-to-Work, pro-Defense, pro-gun, pro-free-enterprise, pro-balanced-budget, pro-tax-limitation, pro-farmer, and anti-left activists,” helped crush a constitutional amendment granting statehood to the heavily Democratic District of Columbia.