Anya Kamenetz in today's Times

By the same token, internships promote overidentification with employers: I
make sacrifices to work free, therefore I must love my work. A sociologist at
the University of Washington, Gina Neff, who has studied the coping strategies
of interns in communications industries, calls the phenomenon "performative
passion." Perhaps this emotion helps explain why educated workers in this
country are less and less likely to organize, even as full-time jobs with
benefits go the way of the Pinto.

Although it's not being offered this year, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Union Summer
internship program, which provides a small stipend, has shaped thousands of
college-educated career organizers. And yet interestingly, the percentage of
young workers who hold an actual union card is less than 5 percent, compared
with an overall national private-sector union rate of 12.5 percent. How are
twentysomethings ever going to win back health benefits and pension plans when
they learn to be grateful to work for nothing?

So an internship doesn't teach you everything you need to know about coping
in today's working world. What effect does it have on the economy as a whole?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not identify interns or track the
economic impact of unpaid internships. But we can do a quick-and-dirty
calculation: according to Princeton Review's "Internship Bible," there were
100,000 internship positions in 2005. Let's assume that out of those, 50,000
unpaid interns are employed full time for 12 weeks each summer at an average
minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. That's a nearly $124 million yearly contribution
to the welfare of corporate America.

In this way, unpaid interns are like illegal immigrants. They create an
oversupply of people willing to work for low wages, or in the case of interns,
literally nothing. Moreover, a recent survey by Britain's National Union of
Journalists found that an influx of unpaid graduates kept wages down and patched
up the gaps left by job cuts.

Kamenetz's points about the precarity and contigency of the internship economy are well taken and insightful, yet the unqualified statement that "unpaid interns are like illegal immigrants" leaves me uneasy. It ignores the racialized contruction of work and the very different class positioning of college graduates and undocumented, low wage service workers, even as she does note the ways in which unpaid internships require one to be "rich enough to work without pay to get your foot in the door." This is not, of course, to say that I disagree with much of Kamenetz's argument - I don't. Kamenetz does a fantastic job here of demystifying the pernicious and exploitative material conditions and ideological dimensions of unpaid work. But what this simile elides seems dangerous to pass over, something of a colonizing gesture which might yield greater value if unpacked and scrutinized further.