Are Unpaid Internships Exploitive?

I work free of charge.

Three days out of the week--25 hours out of my already hectic life--I sit in a cubicle in the downtown offices of a well-known local magazine, grudgingly saving someone else’s behind. Free of charge.

My title? Intern. More specifically, an unpaid intern. I am the only intern at the magazine. What do I do? A little bit of everything and a whole lot of something journalists call “fact-checking.” Simply defined, I make sure a writer doesn’t get in trouble for relaying wrong information. This happens a lot, even at a high-caliber magazine.

For those three days each week, I’m frantically trying to contact nuns, celebrities, Neiman Marcus shoe salesmen, Staples Center (not the Staples Center, mind you), even homeless people. I call them to check on the spelling of their names, to find out if they really said what the writer claims they said, and to confirm any other random bits of information filed by a writer.

I dissect the magazine’s internal database and scour older stories to see if a previous writer spelled it Nicholas Cage or Nicolas Cage or whether a 25-by-25-foot room in a boardinghouse in a 1930s tent city in Oceanside could indeed have been rented for $40.

There is never a moment’s rest during my days at the office. Today, seven orange-highlighted stories greeted me at my desk, plus three topics on which I had to do preliminary research before the assignments could be sent out to the freelancers. I didn’t take a lunch break. I called and talked and searched on the computer until my voice cracked and my vision blurred. I’m going to pass out the moment I get home, I thought. There’s no way I’ll be hitting my school books tonight.

I ask myself, why am I doing this? I put so much time and energy into this job, and I’m not even paid.

But wait, I am getting paid for my work; it’s just in the form of something called experience. Yes, the experience of knowing what a story goes through before it appears on the glossy printed page. From this internship, I’m gaining the experience of working at a prestigious magazine, short of really working at a prestigious magazine.

But experience doesn’t help pay the bills. It doesn’t pay the monthly rent faced by students who live near USC. It doesn’t pay for the overdue tuition statement that turns up in my mailbox every month.

To be sure, the internship has many perks. The publication’s name on my resume alone will be an asset, and I’ve had a couple of bylines. And there’s definitely a sense of accomplishment when I do find mistakes, as minor as they are sometimes: that the writer spelled Nicolas Cage with an “h,” or that the Original Pantry Cafe actually serves 461 loaves of bread each day, not 389 loaves.

Even so, the concept of working without pay sits on the fringe of discrimination. It’s great for those students who have family support to cover their tuition and living expenses. But many of us are not so fortunate. The more I think about it, the more it irks me. Companies, especially the big ones, should consider offering some sort of monetary incentive for all the time and effort that their unpaid interns invest in them. Yes, I’m here primarily to learn, and I’m learning a lot. But time is money and I can only subsist on a $0 income for so long before seriously considering a job at McDonald’s.

In this age of independence, even students often must make a living somehow. Not all of us are lucky enough to be able to work free.