If you don't know, please shut up about it

I am soooooo mad, livid actually. I've been listening to the debates on CBC radio regarding internships, and I am becoming more and more frustrated with people offering their opinions who really have no insight on the matter. First things first, internships and co-ops are completely different and that should be clarified. Co-ops are organized through schools and you receive school credit for them. Credits are academic currency, and therefore you are getting paid in some capacity. Plus, obviously the work-industry knowledge you learn is very helpful.

Internships, on the other hand, you receive nothing for, aside from industry experience. I am not speaking down to industry experience, although not all internships do offer quality industry experience, especially when there are no school curricula monitoring what the intern is actually learning. Industry experience is important, but the time periods that businesses have placed on this learning period are unfair. The problem is we university graduates enter the industry sitting on top of thousands of dollars worth of debt, debt that we are expected to start paying back 6 months after graduation. The majority of us, however, can't even afford to pay rent and buy groceries for up to a year and a half after graduation and are still expected to happily sign on to 6-12 month unpaid internships and simply be happy for the work experience. And the people who keep telling us this are sitting on top of nice paychecks in their cozy homes with their yummy groceries and they keep telling us that this is just the way it is and to suck it up. I've done the run around and I'm sick and tired of it. I did a 4 year internship with a music magazine while still in school thinking it would give me a writing portfolio and experience to give me a leg up once I graduated; I’m still unemployed. I did a 4 month internship with a literary agency; I’m still unemployed. I did a 3 month internship with a PR agency; I’m still unemployed. I am currently half way through a 6 month internship with a fashion magazine, and yes you guessed it, I’m still unemployed. The industry keeps on spitting out this lie to us that industry experience is important and that internships will lead to a full time job. This is simply not the case, especially in my field of work. The majority of publications these days survive on free work done by interns and minimally paying for freelance work, very few actually hire staff writers. I can name at least 20 publications that I personally know don’t pay a cent for any of their content. How is that legal? To have an entire publication running and making a profit off of the free work of so many people? And the sad part is that if all of these people who are working for free decided to stop doing it, hundreds will come up out of the woodwork and take their places. It’s sick.

Possibly the worst part, on top of not being able to actually provide for ourselves, is being berated for not prioritizing properly at any point that we put our menial paid jobs that we HAVE to take on the side in order to live, above our internships. I understand that they want our absolute best work and our undivided attention, but you know what.....I’m sorry but unless you are going to pay me enough to make sure that I'm not homeless and starving, you don't get my best work or undivided attention because I HAVE TO WORK A REAL JOB TO SURVIVE!!! I am a very dedicated worker and I will always put forth the best work that I possibly can, but I can’t be in two places at once and it is unfair to be mad at me when I can’t be at your beckon call because I’m…..no, not slacking off…..at work! All I ever do is work and it seems to be getting me nowhere.  

What is more, I've had internship positions where I am doing way more than is part of an internship job description. If I am doing as much work as the full-time associates, I should be getting paid the same amount, or at least getting paid fairly, or at all. In this particular instance too, I knew just as much if not more than the people I was working for, so you can’t say that we are learning valuable skills from others who are more skilled than us, because sometimes that is just not true. All I learned from this particular position was that I would never be caught dead working permanently for this company or in this vein of work.

The bottom line is that unpaid internships are exploitation and you can't dress it up any other way. We can't get the internships without going to school first, and we can't get the job without going through around what feels like a million internships first, so what do you expect from us? We are angry and frustrated, living well below the poverty line, and drowning in debt that we can’t actually make a dent in. I can’t afford the basic necessities to live and I am working my butt off for free and then working myself sick at a minimum wage job that I am two university degrees overqualified for just to get by. I'm already in my third round of repayment assistance (which is a freeze payment on my student loans because I don’t bring in enough money to make the minimum monthly payments). You know what this means? It means that while I work my butt off doing two or three unpaid internships at the same time just to add work experience to my resume, and work my part-time minimum wage job, I’m collecting a crap load of interest on my loan balance. As if the original debt wasn’t bad enough, it just keeps on growing the longer I do this merry-go-round of unpaid internship after unpaid internship.

So please, I beg you, all of you who are sitting comfortably in your job and are essentially saying that we are just spoiled little brats who don’t see the value in what you are offering and only place value on dollar signs, please please please shut up! Or better yet, please take 6-12 months of your time working for free and then tell me that this is reasonable. And don’t give me the excuse “we all did it, that’s just the way it is.” I don’t accept that. It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve been out of school now for over a year and I have no paid job prospects. I’m sitting on a Master’s degree and have no paid job prospects. That tells me that something is seriously wrong with the way we are doing things. I got sick a few weeks back and had to pay for antibiotics that I couldn’t actually afford because I have no more school coverage and no work coverage. I had to dish out $150 that I didn’t have, just to be able to be healthy enough to go to work for FREE!!!!!! It is infuriating, it is debilitating, and it is down-right wrong and utterly depressing. I’m living off of credit cards, so just accumulating more debt, just to get by. So please, stop talking about us like we are lazy and entitled. We are just tired of being overworked and undervalued, and living from day to day wondering if we will be able to meet our needs. Some days we don’t even know if we will have enough money to get into work; the work place where we are expected to happily work for free. Maybe in your world where everyone is getting help from mommy and daddy people can afford the luxury of working for a year for free, but that is not my world, and I would argue that it actually isn’t the world that most of us live in. So, we are forced to make a hard decision: try to get by and work for free with the hope of getting a paid job somewhere down the line, or work instead two to three crappy minimum wage jobs. Both of those options sound pretty depressing don’t they? 

I haven't given up hope, but part of my new hope is that unpaid internships will be ruled illegal in Canada and we will be given a better shot at making a life for ourselves. I know that this means less internship work experience will be available for new graduates, but the way I see it is....if these current internship opportunities aren't doing us much good right now anyway, then they won't really be missed when they're gone. Something's gotta give.