Ross Perlin. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2011; 288 pp;
ISBN: 978-1-84467-686-6, cloth $28.50 CAD.

Reviewed by Johanna Weststar

Ross Perlin’s exposé of the explosive rise of internships has a breadth of sources and coverage that paints a convincing picture of the intern landscape in the United States, and to an increasing degree, in other industrialized countries across the UK, Europe and Asia. The picture is not rosy, though the book is largely based on anecdotal accounts.

Of note to universities and the academics and career services personnel within them, is Perlin’s scathing critique of the academy’s role in the proliferation of illegal unpaid internships. He writes, “An overwhelming majority of colleges and universities, as well as some high schools, endorse and promote unpaid internships without a second thought, provide the lucrative academic credit that employers wishfully hope will indemnify their firms, and justify it all with high-minded rhetoric about ‘situated learning’ and ‘experiential education.’” (p. 83)

What Perlin reveals is a complicated re­lationship among employers, students and universities that fuels the intern boom. Employers want their internship to count as academic credit at a university or college. This gives them access to a ready body of applicants (not that there seems to be a shortage) and also pulls a veil of legitimacy over the enterprise.

As the author continuously reminds the reader, employers attempt to use internships as a legal loophole for paying the minimum or even the trainee wage. In the US there are six criteria for trainee exception from the Federal Labour Standards Act (FLSA) that dictates minimum working standards. Employers partner with educational institutes so that they can claim their internship has educational value and therefore should be exempt from the requirement of a wage.

In exchange, the educational institute can generate revenues from the tuition paid for the internship credit, increase their reputations and relevance among business elites, and allow exhortations of cutting-edge experiential pedagogy. In paying to work for free, the student gets a line on her resume.

Perlin never wonders if this line on the resume is enough or is a fair trade. Rather he decries the illegality of these unpaid internships and makes a strong case that paying interns a minimum wage, despite their growing numbers, will not greatly disrupt the capitalist order. His summary of the academic literature on raising the minimum wage is quite sound.

Conversely, he advocates that internships be made to meet to the letter the six-point test to be exempt under the FLSA. This would include a rigorous training component and would likely cost more in time and effort than paying the minimum wage.

To support these arguments Perlin provides an entire chapter tracing the history of apprenticeships and later includes a detailed discussion of the co-operative education movement. It is clear that he holds apprenticeship programs and co-ops in much higher esteem than vapid white-collar internships and mourns the “vocational stigma” that restricts these programs to blue-collar and technical work.

I found Perlin’s far left critique of situated learning and experiential education to be particularly thought provoking. Academics are susceptible in the age of National Student Engagement Surveys to pedagogical approaches that increase student learning and also increase the relevance of the subject matter.

Experiential learning, service learning and their variants are a large part of this discussion. They are bolstered by studies of learning styles that show the value of learning by doing. Yet, as any academic who has tried it knows, it is often harder to plan and execute meaningful active learning approaches than to simply stand up and lecture for three hours.

It is easy to pay lip service to the experiential model, but fall down with insufficient preparation, support or debriefing. Such is the case with internships. The idea seems sound — send students and recent graduates into a real workplace to get real experience. But, as Perlin hammers home again and again, in practice interns learn little as they complete largely menial tasks with almost no super­vision. He notes that only 27.6 per cent of colleges in the US require classroom expe­rience in granting academic credit for an internship.

Though his arguments are redundant by the end of the book, they are an important critique for employers, policy-makers, academics and students. Internships exploit the zeal of youth where “the burden of creating something meaningful falls squarely on the shoulders of the intern.” The masses of interns are yet another classification in the growing body of precarious workers; they are entrepreneurs of their own careers and bear all the risk of employment uncertainty. As well, internships perpetuate a credential arms race that is losing all meaning.

In economic terms Perlin says internships are broken “signals” to employers due to “systematic over-investment” and the “perennial glut of overqualified interns.” Yet unpaid internships seem to be the new entry level job and real work and real jobs are systematically devalued and eliminated as students and recent graduates clamour to do the work free of charge.

This book is very accessible with a dark humour and a host of interesting personal stories — even that of all-time famous intern Monica Lewinsky. As an assigned classroom reading it would provide for rich discussion on a range of topics across the disciplines of economics, sociology, business, labour studies and education.

In particular, Perlin makes salient points about the classism, elitism and discrimination embedded in the internship system, about the race to the bottom, about precarious work and about strategies for collective action. Given the age of most interns, this book is also highly relevant for university students who may be contemplating the draws of the internship world.

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Johanna Weststar is a management professor and vice-president of the faculty union at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.