How to Change the World

Systems in Society

It is no secret that there are many structures in society that are in need of a massive overhaul. For instance, one such structure is the system of unpaid corporate internships. There is an inherent injustice in subjecting students to the lowest grade of work without compensating them a dime for their time. Most simply, organizations take advantage of students who want to gain real world experience by forcing them to work for free. Of course, the system justifies itself by providing students with school credit, but this only furthers the injustice done to students. Instead of simply working for free, students actually pay their schools for the credits they receive for participating in the internship. Certain educational programs even require students to engage in unpaid internships as a core part of their curriculum, further proliferating the problem. And the worse part of all is that students find themselves competing for the best unpaid internships, further empowering the structures that employ them.

Why Don't Changes Occur Often?

Changes don't occur often because change is constant. Your question would benefit from refinement. I think you are asking "Why Do the Powerful Win Almost All the Time When They Struggle with the Weak?" But perhaps that was not the question you meant to ask.

Despite the injustice of this system and many others like it in society, changes do not occur often. They are so established as “the way things work” that people buy into them and cause them to proliferate until they are so widespread that they become even harder to change. Do people not notice that systems are unjust? Do they notice but not care? Do they notice and care but think it’s impossible to change things, or are they too fearful to try? Or do people believe that is it easier to operate within a system as it is? Is it somehow easier or safer to adhere to a given system and play the game within it, according to prescribed rules, rather than uproot it and expose it for what it is? I came to law school to answer this question for myself.

Or was this not the system a little while ago? Perhaps the internship is a relatively recent development in the labor market? Perhaps the women with high school educations who used to be the poorly-paid literate administrative workers of the business world are being replaced, because of technology-driven change, with a much smaller number of tertiary degree-holders working in unpaid apprenticeships? Perhaps the right-wing economist is correct that people are presently paid zero who would be paid below minimum wage if we had no minimum wage laws, or had "youth wage" exemptions? Perhaps the left-wing political economist is correct who says that whether we call it apprenticeship, slavery, child labor, or internship, whether we pay it wages or withhold them altogether, is a detail of the underlying truth of exploitation, which is universal and remorseless, and which can only be slain and replaced, but which cannot be reasoned with or restrained? Could you be realizing by now the cumulatively negative effect of piling up rhetorical questions?

My Background

Before coming to law school, I was part of a system like this. Throughout college, I worked as an unpaid intern at a prominent sports agency, with the goal of working my way up within the organization. For a long time I was naïve. I did not realize that I was being taken advantage of and I was happy to operate within the system because I enjoyed the prominence and the perks of what I was doing. But when I finally figured it out, my attitude didn’t really change. I understood that I was part of a system and that there was nothing I could do to change things. All that I could do was threaten to quit if they did not start paying me. Knowing the departmental budget as I did, I knew that the company would rather hire another intern than pay me to be a full time employee. So when I was ready to leave, I presented an ultimatum to the head of the department: hire me full time or I have to quit. As I expected, he passed on the opportunity. As much as I had become a part of their business, there were a hundred people in line ready to replace me. But what if there weren’t?

Then you would be a temporarily advantaged worker, with a market anomaly working in your favor.

What Can be Done?

There is a way to change this system. For instance, if someone could unify all the college and graduate students of the world to go on strike against unpaid internships, the practice would end one way or another. Either organizations would begin to pay their interns for their work, or they would realize that they didn’t need their services and would adjust their business models. Then schools would not be able to force their students into unpaid internships. To most readers, this might seem like a completely ridiculous idea. But why?

The best way to develop an idea is not to argue in its favor against someone who dismisses it as completely ridiculous. Such a conversation is unlikely to bring out the best in any participant. The way to develop an idea is to respond to an imagined interlocutor who shows the places where the idea is undeveloped.

Here, for example, an economist interlocutor will object that your economic model of the employment market is too simple to account well for the consequences of imaginary collective bargaining by interns. He would suggest you model, for example, the possible effect in moving those jobs inside the vast business outsourcing world that used to be "temp agencies." They want to take over all forms of office-park apprenticeship. Many companies that had to compete with very worker-positive job terms in order to get skilled workers in a labor-constrained market, like Microsoft, responded by outsourcing every other possible job in the organization, so that their very costly employment policies affected only the high-value non-managerial employees.

The strategist will object that you are postulating an enormous organizing effort among workers who are for many reasons traditionally very difficult to organize. No one knows how plausibly to perform that effort, even with far more than anyone's best guess as to available resources. Having assumed into existence an immensely complex and far-flung organizing effort, you are then using it to demand as an objective that workers be paid. This is not a plausibly sufficient demand. Paid how? The whole point of the employer's effort is to deny these workers the status of employee. They will acquire protection under the Fair Labor Standards Act. They cannot possibly be managerial employees exempt from overtime pay requirements. If they are full-time workers, they are entitled to minimum benefits, including employer contributions to Social Security and Medicare. If performing work in represented bargaining units, they are within the scope of collective bargaining agreements. Of course the employer would not have created those jobs under those terms. No employer ever voluntarily will.

But your actual original complaint had less to do with the wage, which apparently you were willing to do without, than the security of employment that you weren't ever going to have. You wanted the right to be considered for promotion on the basis of seniority. A union contract might have given that to you if you came within its terms.

Is it because people don’t care about this particular “problem”? Perhaps it does not have enough support to stage a revolution. Is it because, practically, this is an admittedly bad plan and would never work because it would be impossible to rally an entire nation of interns? Maybe. Is it because there is no better plan that can be devised? Possibly, but I would imagine that a creative lawyer could figure out a way to take on the system by going after certain companies for unfair employment practices. Are they afraid to upset established power structures? Probably. Or is it simply that people see value in existing within a given system rather than challenging it?

The Lawyer I Want to Be

I know that I want to be a lawyer who is not afraid to challenge the dominant system and start a revolution. But at the same time, I am unsure of its practical effects. A revolution cannot be started on a whim. It obviously has to be readily thought out and executed, accounting for every contingency, with every move planned out five steps in advance. Realistically, radical change is probably not feasible in a majority of circumstances. There will always be dominant power structures holding systems in place, and some will be harder to bring down than others. Additionally, it might not always be necessary to provoke and completely overhaul a system. If a goal can be accomplished within a system, there may be no need to uproot it just for the sake of doing so. But if my objectives are directly at odds with a system, or a cause presents itself that I am truly passionate about, I want to be able to change things. I want to be okay with the proposition of upsetting the power and to know how to do it without getting crushed. This will take a great deal of strategy and even more courage. I need to focus my law school learning on acquiring the skills and strategies to be able to operate both when revolution is necessary and when it is not, and to know when it is appropriate to employ either tactic.

To me, this is what it takes to change the world.

-- ElieT - 25 Feb 2013

As I've noted, the process of developing your idea was cut short by the form in which you interrogated it. Taken a little farther, by asking not whether the idea is ridiculous but rather where it is underdeveloped, we can see other possibilities. It seems clear, for example, that a union workplace would not tolerate unpaid internships preventing the formation of real entry-level jobs. The aggregate level of employment isn't necessarily going to be higher—though critics will no doubt accuse the union of multiplying workers to multiply dues—but the quality of the jobs will be a union priority. So why would one try to organize a far-flung, transient, young, low-leverage workforce with only a sprinkling of workers seasonally present in any business, instead of organizing the business' workers, who are geographically compact, and have preexisting networks of social engagement through common employment, residence, etc.?

If one realized, then, that the rise of the internship structure of white-collar unpaid apprenticeship grew up in the de-unionizing US of the Reagan Era, might one become a labor lawyer?

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