By Arthur Solomon
So a new semester is now under way, which means for many communications students they may soon have to start looking for a summer intern position at a PR agency, or other media firm, that may pay them nothing. Not exactly headline news. Is it?
I was once a university student. I always wanted to be in the news business. But when I was an undergraduate you had to major in English. Courses in communications were not available until my junior year and, until then, a traditional Liberal Arts curriculum had to be followed. Colleges also didn’t have intern placement specialists. Those of us who had to work during the summer for tuition money took jobs in businesses which had no connection to our aspirations. And we still got jobs in our chosen fields after graduation.
That was prior to the college-business axis, also prevalent in other for-profit entities, that today forces many communication school students to work for little or no pay. Or, as I see it, and so do federal and state governments, that is not the way America is supposed to work since the advent of fair labor laws.
Maybe in 1912, not in 2012.
My first PR job was with a small PR firm, (today it would be called a boutique). I was paid $50.00 a week. The owner of the shop was the most creative, caring individual I ever worked for, Earl Foreman. The company handled a variety of clients but it was best known as an agency for political candidates and campaigns. Importantly for me, Earl immediately gave me an opportunity to do account work, instead of relegating me to boy-Friday tasks.
Earl also published a weekly newspaper which, after a little while, he delegated to me. But it was during the political season, which had me working 16-plus hours a day, that he felt he was taking advantage of me. “I wish I could give you a lot more money,” he would often say. “But I just don’t have it.” Instead he would buy me lunch and dinner and wouldn’t think of letting me take public transportation in the wee hours of the morning. I lived in Brooklyn, he Long Island, and he would either give me cab money or drive me home. But his conscience bothered him, so he would delegate an account or two to me and let me keep any income it generated, in addition to what he paid me. And I could work on it on his time.
Prior to my first fling with public relations, I paid for my tuition by being a steady stringer for several New York City dailies, including the New York Times and the Associated Press. I was a senior in college when an editor offered me a full-time position. The editor insisted that I must finish college and said, if necessary, he would synchronize my work and classroom schedules.
How times have changed. Today, some colleges require students to become unpaid interns in order to get credits for courses. Thus, for many students, they are paying twice: once to cover their tuition, the second time by subsidizing some PR companies that pay them little or no money, which might be illegal unless specific conditions are met.
Some employees publicly say there is nothing wrong with having an intern help with cleaning the office, run errands or do other non-educational work. They said its part of the learning experience. Doing menial tasks might benefit students from well-heeled situations to have more empathy for those less fortunate. I’m not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I still can’t comprehend how it adds to an intern’s education (although it’s easy to comprehend how it saves employers money.)
To my way of thinking, that’s wrong. Students should not have to work for nothing. (Reuters reported on June 30, 2011, that 48 percent of interns are unpaid.) Schools should be ashamed of themselves to force students to work for nothing in order to receive credit for courses they have paid for. As for employers, need I explain why they like the intern arrangement?
The work-for-free relationship between communications schools and PR. agencies may be at its zenith today. But, in different ways, it is not new.
Working for peanuts, or just the shells, is not the only negative of PR internship programs. Especially important, the system is tilted to affluent students who can afford to work for nothing, lessening opportunities for more talented students who cannot afford to work in no-pay situations.
An op-ed article by Ross Perlin in the New York Times on April 2, 2011, titled “Unpaid Interns, Complicit Colleges,” said, in part:
“On college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law.
“Colleges and universities have become cheerleaders and enablers of the unpaid internship boom, failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers. In hundreds of interviews with interns over the past three years, I found dejected students resigned to working unpaid for summers, semesters and even entire academic years — and, increasingly, to paying for the privilege.”
Perlin, author of the book “Intern Nation,” was also quoted in a lengthy May 2, 2012 Time story, a follow-up story on May 21 and in a May 6 NYT story.
According to the Times item, the research firm Intern Bridge says that there are more than one million internships annually and about half are unpaid.
On March 8, 2012, the lead business story in USA Today was headlined, “Fewer unpaid internships in works,” followed by a subhead saying, “Many hope to avoid legal trouble as lawsuits are filed.”
On February 3, CNN did a feature about an unpaid intern who sued Harper’s Bazaar for violating Federal and state labor laws. The CNN legal analyst said that because of the poor economy there has been an increase in companies violating Federal laws regarding interns, and it will be difficult for the magazine to prove that they followed Federal guidelines.
Also, on March 8, in the New York Times, Charles Murray a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, called for an end to unpaid internships: “It amounts to career assistance for rich, smart children. Those from the middle and working class…can’t afford to work for free.”
On March 11, the Times Ethicist column devoted an entire article to the subject titled, “The Internship Rip-Off,” saying “the system as a whole is unethical,” rewarding students who can afford to work without a paycheck.
But the Big Question should be who does this symbiotic relationship between schools of communications and businesses benefit? We know it benefits the schools. We know it benefits PR and other communications businesses. It also might benefit some graduating seniors who have impressed agencies during their internships. What about the overwhelming majority of students?
My advice to those communication majors that are forced to work for nothing is the following:
• Don’t apply for an internship at a major agency.
• Try to hook up with a smaller agency.
• Small agencies are not as structured as the majors and you have a better chance of learning something.
•
But be weary of one-person shops. Often, the sole proprietorship agency, without any employees, is run by someone who may not be able to work well with or trust others, or is so certain that what they do is correct that they will not change their methods to meet changing media needs.
Strange situation: Many of the young wanna-be PRers are forced to work, and the proven, qualified practitioners who want to work, are often deemed too old. To paraphrase Yul Brynner in Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I: Is not puzzlement. We know why.
For decades, industrial America has shifted manufacturing jobs to foreign countries with low wage labor. But communications, entertainment, and other so-called glamour businesses have found low wage labor in the contiguous U.S. – in the college next door.
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Arthur Solomon was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, handling national and international sports and non-sports programs, including the Olympic and Asian Games organizing committees and sponsors. He can be reached at [email protected] |