Stringtern: springboarding or stringing along young interns’ careers?

ABSTRACT

Young people are repeatedly promised that internships will pave the way to the career of their dreams by providing the ‘hands-on experience’ necessary to differentiate themselves in a fierce job market. However, in many industries, internships – and increasingly unpaid internships – have become the obligatory norm. Young people quickly learn that the internship is not an opportunity, but rather a ‘necessary evil’ that, for many, strings them along in the hope that it may lead to a less precarious paid opportunity. In this article, our findings are based on 12 in-depth interviews with young female interns in the creative industries based in Toronto and New York City. Our participants recognise that in the current economic climate, they need to ‘pay their dues’; however, they often enter into a system of sequential – or string – internships, and become, what we label, a stringtern. In an evolving internship market in North America, we develop a typology of internships including (1) paid/underpaid/unpaid, (2) academic credit/not-for-credit, (3) for-profit/non-profit, (4) full-time/part-time and (5) on-site/off-site to develop a common language to critically analyse the culture of internships. By valuing young people’s perspectives as gleaned from our interviews, the typology aims to provide a more nuanced way to approach the complexity of unpaid internships and the transition from education to the workforce. Furthermore, three interrelated implications of the culture of internships are identified: internship as a free trial, internship as conveyor-belt labour and internship as displacing paid employment.

KEYWORDS:

• Unpaid internships
• young people
• creative industries
• labour
• youth unemployment

Notes

1. The focus of the subsequent classifications (2–5) relates to unpaid internships because paid internships represent fair labour practices, whereas unpaid internships necessitate further critical examination.

2. The Employment Standards Act in Ontario stipulates that in order for an unpaid internship to be legal it must meet all of the following requirements:

1. The training is similar to that which is given in a vocational school.

2. The training is for the benefit of the intern. You receive some benefit from the training, such as new knowledge or skills.

3. The employer derives little, if any, benefit from the activity of the intern while he or she is being trained.

4. Your training doesn’t take someone else’s job.

5. Your employer isn’t promising you a job at the end of your training.

You have been told that you will not be paid for your time (Ontario Ministry of Labour 2014).

3. See http://www.internassociation.ca/ and http://payyourinterns.ca/ .

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto [N/A].

Notes on contributors

Jenna Jacobson

Jenna Jacobson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ryerson University in the Social Media Lab. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Information. In her postdoctoral research, she analyses how privacy, ethics and data use are perceived by social media users in relation to their own data being collected and used by third parties. She is also a Chair of the International Conference on Social Media & Society. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @jacobsonjenna

Leslie Regan Shade

Leslie Regan Shade is a Professor at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research focus since the mid-1990s has been on the social and policy aspects of information and communication technologies (ICTs), with particular concerns towards issues of gender, youth and political economy. Shade’s various publications have drawn on a diverse range of topics from a political economic focus: media concentration in Canada; neoliberal tenets in Canadian telecommunications policy in Canada; community informatics in Canada; the revised discourse of modernisation in ICT4D (ICTs for development) and M4D (mobiles for development); gender and technological design; social media and social justice; privacy issues in Facebook; a feminist political economy of the internet; and the commodification of young people’s online spaces. Email: [email protected]