#105 Unpaid Internships
July 20, 2008 by clander
In most of the world when a person works long hours without pay, it is referred to as “slavery” or “forced labor.” For white people this process is referred to as an internship and is considered an essential stage in white development.
The concept of working for little or no money underneath a superior has been around for centuries in the form of apprenticeship programs. Young people eager to learn a trade would spend time working under a master craftsman to learn a skill that would eventually lead to an increase in material wealth.
Using this logic you would assume that the most sought after internships would be in areas that lead to the greatest financial reward. Young White people, however, prefer internships that put them on the path for careers that will generally result in a DECREASE of the material wealth accumulated by their parents.
For example, if you were to present a white 19 year old with the choice of spending the summer earning $15 an hour as a plumber’s apprentice or making $0 answering phones at Production Company, they will always choose the latter. In fact, the only way to get the white person to choose the plumbing option would be to convince them that it was leading towards an end-of-summer pipe art installation.
White people view the internship as their foot into the door to such high-profile low-paying career fields as journalism, film, politics, art, non-profits, and anything associated with a museum. Any white person who takes an internship outside of these industries is either the wrong type of white person or a law student. There are no exceptions.
If all goes according to plan, an internship will end with an offer of a job that pays $24,000 per year and will consist entirely of the same tasks they were recently doing for free. In fact, the transition to full time status results in the addition of only one new responsibility: feeling superior to the new interns.
When all is said and done, the internship process serves the white community in many ways. First, it helps to train the next generation of freelance writers, museum curators, and director’s assistants. But more importantly, internships teach white children how to complain about being poor.
So when a white person tells you about their unpaid internship at the New Yorker, it’s not a good idea to point out how the cost of rent and food will essentially mean that they are PAYING their employer for the right to make photocopies. Instead it’s best to say: “you earned it.” They will not get the joke.
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There are worse things than unpaid internships..the kind where you have to pay THEM to work. When I got my commercial pilot license in the 90′s, the only kind of job I could find was the kind where they mentioned, “oh, by the way, there is going to be training costs while we train you to be a air taxi/banner tower/skydiving/traffic report pilot” I don’t know how common it is in this decade though.
The one thing white people like more than Unpaid Internships is learning sex secrets
http://sexed.wordpress.com
See what everyone’s talking about!
I honestly don’t get this. I paid for an education….I didn’t pay to work. If you got a good education, you should be able to find some in the area that’s paid.
well the idea is, yea youre working for free, but youre also building your resume. everytime theres an internship fair at my college, there are a whole bunch of unpaid ones but everybody still compete to get them thinking that theyll be more likely to work for that company and/or it looks good on their resume for other employers.
How come when it’s the white people working for free it’s called an internship, but if it is a colored person, it is called slavery?!? Always trying to keep the white man down… I demand my reparations!!!!!
Mine was paid. My edumacation was not.
Scoring the ultimate unpaid internship just got a bit more difficult – http://is.gd/2El0.
¿Come to think of it, doesn’t the Peace Corps deserve it’s own SWPL category? I mean, how often do folks stick with two-year unpaid internships without even an break for a costly trip home for Thanksgiving?
Wow. I am currently on my third unpaid internship. You really have white people down.
Damn! What are you, a trust fund baby? Put your energy into getting a real job! lol
I might be missing the point here, but shouldn’t this entire blog be renamed ‘What Middle Class People Like”?
As a (probably) middle class white Englishman, I certainly tick a lot of boxes mentioned here (playing children’s games, Wes Anderson Films, having an unusual bicycle, Apple products).
In Britain, most of the things listed here would be what distinguishes a person from Working Class people, not black or Asian people.
I find the comment in this entry that no white person would ever dream of training to be a plumber very odd. Surely there are white plumbers in the USA?
Well, yeah, but “Stuff white middle class liberal, primarily North American (and I don’t mean Mexico) and to a lesser extent West European people like” just doesn’t have the same ring to it
In fact the vast majority of trades people in the USA are white, probably far out of proportion of their representation in the general population, though hispanics are making headway in this industry. Part of the reason is that people like to choose an apprentice from within their own extended social circle (which usually means their own race as well) to train as an apprentice.
Incidentally, I myself am white and am training as a structural apprentice and have never had an unpaid internship.
Thomas, sadly, Dan is right. I became the “wrong kind” of white person myself when I passed up an unpaid internship in Washington to temp for a mutual fund company. It’s been downhill ever since – private sector job, church, suburbs…a real sob story. *sniff*
Yes, but see, you’re the “wrong kind” of white person.
Hilarious.
That must be why I never got a job in my chosen field — because I’m supposedly white (visibly anyway… genetically, it’s anyone’s guess) and have always absolutely refused to do an unpaid internship. I hardly ever have made enough money in my paid jobs to get by, so why the heck would I choose that route? When people tell me they are doing unpaid internships, I tell them to their face that they’re insane.
If someone were to tell me to take an unpaid internship, I’d remind them of the time I went to court to beg the judge for jail time over the $80 no-inspection ticket I got, since I had to choose between the ticket and having a place to live, and then about how, when the judge laughed at me, I had to beg everyone I knew for some money so I could somehow get enough to keep the fine from doubling… then I’d ask them to look me in the eye and tell me I should work for free again. If they had the cojones to do it, I’d tell them I’d do it if they gave me some health insurance.
If they said no, I’d tell them to kiss my white butt and walk away.
My friend is in Vietnam, he is white, and TRUST ME, he doesn’t like unpaid internships. He went to Vietnam with little money and no job and has been blogging about his experiences there. His blog is hilarious and he just added a new post today. Check it out:
http://www.garbarrassing.com/Bill.php
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