It's rather common among Canadians to define themselves in the negative: not rude, not imperialist and, above all, not American. This despite the fact that Canada tends to hold the bully's coat on most imperial ventures, and sustain a free trade bloc that makes them economically co-dependent (with Canada being perhaps a little more needy). So it's been interesting to see how Ross Perlin's Intern Nation, which focuses on the US intern industry, has been received in the great white North.
Let's start from the right with the National Post, that bastion of objectivity that was once nourished by former newspaper baron Conrad Black. The Post review finds some clear parallels between US and Canadian student interns:
Alice Clegg's Financial Times review of Ross Perlin's book includes a handy do's and don't s list for interns and, drawing on interviews with recruiters, interns and lawyers, discusses what makes an internship good, bad or downright illegal:
When does give and take tip over into exploitation? In the UK, it boils down to whether an individual falls within one of four exemptions to the National Minimum Wage Act: volunteers; voluntary workers; work-shadowing/work experience; and students on course placements. Simply labelling someone an intern is not a get-out, says Alison Clements of Lewis Silkin, the law firm. What matters is whether “they are performing real work” and are obliged to work fixed hours.
Angela Nagle reviews Intern Nation by Ross Perlin for the Irish Left Review. Nagle uses the book and recent action by groups like Carrotworkers’ Collective and Intern Aware as a starting poing to discuss how the internship pheonomenon effects Irish graduates.
Reviewing Ross Perlin's Intern Nation for the Sunday Times, Robert Collins picks up on Perlin's mapping of the history of internships and their proliferation today:
An intern, Ross Perlin points out in his eye-opening, welcome exposé of this rapidly expanding sector of the workforce, used to be someone in training for a particular profession. Before the second world war, the term meant only one thing: a trainee doctor confined, or interned, in a hospital for a year... since then the term has crept ever more ambiguously into almost every kind of field—"interns" are no longer just trainees, but used for whatever purpose companies see fit ...
They are, he reveals, often to be found doing what should be classed as normal, full-time jobs ... And yet, elsewhere, internships have come to be seen as the only sure way of getting a foot in the corportate door—91% of new employees at Goldman Sachs in 2009 were former interns of the company...
[Perlin's] call to arms is timely. This month, a London employment tribunal set a precedent by awarding back pay to an intern at the website MyVillage.com who, unpaid, had been responsible for running a team of writers—and hiring new interns.
In the Evening Standard Rosamund Urwin writes that "the plight of the office serf is currently a hot topic." Referring to the debate over internships, she suggests that they only benefit wealthy mediocrities. Mentioning Perlin's Intern Nation, she cites its subtitle, "How to earn nothing and learn little in the brave new economy," as the tag-line for the life of post-recession graduates.
Today's graduate —already bogged down in debt—is expected to play the peon to enter many of the plum careers. Take the not-for-profit sector. Amnesty's pledge to protect human rights apparently excludes the right of university-leavers to a salary. For Oxfam, being Humankind doesn't stretch to being Internkind. These organisations have always been supported by volunteers but there's a difference between giving them your Saturday mornings and spending three months working with no pay, no security and probably no desk for the mere pipedream of a job ...
Roger D. Hodge, former editor of Harper's and author of The Mendacity of Hope, delves into Ross Perlin's Intern Nation for the Summer 2011 issue of Bookforum. Describing the book as "vigorous and persuasive," Hodge is quick to locate that which most concerns Perlin, namely the state of labor rights in the US and beyond, and the "deeper class logic" inseparable from an internship model which reinforces "the overwhelming bias of our political system in favor of the wealthy."
The problems Perlin identifies go deeper than the failure of the Wage and Hour Division to do its job. The more fundamental issue, as he argues in his final chapters, is the growing contingency of the global workforce. Over the past decade, a loose coalition of labor activists, chronic interns, immigrants, downsized workers, migrant laborers, artists, and others trapped in temporary work arrangements have begun to define "precarity," the precariousness and insecurity of being without permanent or stable work, as the labor issue of our time ...