From Precarious Workers Brigade & Sivlia Federici, 2017. bib⁄Training for Exploitation : Politicising Employability & Reclaiming Education. Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. 10-11:
There are still more women than men taking on unpaid internships. Research also indicates that female interns are routinely tasked with administrative work within their internships, while their male counterparts are more often afforded more content-focused roles. Likewise, students from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds find themselves more likely to be working un- or low paid. One could argue that both groups do so to compensate existing biases within the labour market.
As Marx reminds us, there is only one thing worse within a capitalist economy than being exploited: not being exploited. Some students’ class backgrounds, in addition to their gender and race, better prepare them economically and socially for the sort of individualising demands of the neoliberal economy. Not everybody is affected in the same way by the no/ low wage economy and some are even excluded from it. Students from traditional working class and/or migrant backgrounds from post-1992 universities report difficulties in obtaining internships in the first place.14 Most obviously this is because some simply cannot afford to work for free or must subsidise internships with other forms of low-wage exploitation, often in the service sector. Students’ concerns about not having the right social and ethnic ‘fit’ for internships point to the discriminatory processes at stake. Internships function as a ‘filtering site’ where graduates holding middle class norms, values and ways of being, who fit into the existing company culture, are privileged.
In the same work environment, but on the other end of the class spectrum, certain internships function as a luxury experience that allows for access to exclusive networks. Through auctions, for example hosted by Charitybuzz, one can obtain internships and ‘coffee dates’ if one bids the highest price. A six-week internship at the UN NGO Committee on Human Rights sold for $22,000.16 Meanwhile, a coffee date with the Apple CEO Tim Cook was priced at $610,000.