What Happened to the Intern Revolution?

By J.C. Pan

“Do you think we’ll ever use unpaid interns?” a friend once asked while we were being used as unpaid interns. It was 2011, in the thick of the long slog of the Great Recession, and we were both working for no pay at different book publishers in one of the most expensive cities in the United States. A few months later, an encampment started in Manhattan’s financial district to protest runaway economic inequality, student debt, and the unfettered greed of Wall Street; sometimes we joined the marches or went to reading groups where we struggled through the first volume of Capital. It was also the year that Ross Perlin’s book Intern Nation was published. “Internships are changing the nature of work and education in America and beyond,” Perlin wrote. “A significant number of these situations are unethical and even illegal under U.S. law—a form of mass exploitation hidden in plain sight.”

The entry-level swamp of New York’s creative and white-collar industries during the Occupy Wall Street era was defined by these questionable internships, often the sole point of entry to careers in media or the arts. (Nepotism works, too.) One person I knew who was hoping to break into the art world worked as an unpaid intern to a Manhattan socialite with gallery and museum connections; she spent her days ferrying the socialite’s dry-cleaning and sorting her emails. Another friend, an aspiring journalist, interned at a weekly magazine fact-checking articles and editing videos for a sub–minimum wage stipend. At the publishing house where I was an intern, I read manuscripts from the slush pile, stuffed books into envelopes, and tried in vain to impress the people on staff into eventually paying me. None of us felt like we had a great many other options for upward mobility, but the longer we worked our internships, the less hope we had of ever transitioning to paid permanent employment. As college graduates from mostly professional-class families, we were simultaneously advantaged and taken advantage of; both displaced employees and our own scabs.

That fall, the collective unease growing within the vast pool of intern labor in creative fields seemed to reach a national boiling point. Two former interns who had worked on the set of the movie Black Swan sued Fox Searchlight Pictures, alleging that the company had violated labor law by not paying them for the work they had completed during the internship, which had included coffee runs, bookkeeping, and taking out the trash. (“The only thing I learned on this internship was to be more picky in choosing employment opportunities,” Alex Footman, one of the plaintiffs, told The New York Times.) In 2013, a judge ruled in their favor, determining that the internship had violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and that the plaintiffs were owed back wages. Over the next few years, that lawsuit precipitated a wave of others by unpaid interns—against Condé Nast, Hearst, NBC, and more—that, for a time, seemed positioned to upend the intern economy. During a small window in the mid-2010s, that is, the intern revolt appeared to be underway. But 10 years later, there are few signs that the entry-level uprising happened at all.

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