The Internship Economy: Cheap Labor or Real Training?
The coffee machine at most tech companies sits right next to a cork bulletin board plastered with internship opportunity flyers. A recent graduate scrolls past them, pausing on one posting: “$0/hour, great for resume building!” — a phrase that’s become oddly normalized in an economy where we expect to exchange time and labor for, well, nothing but “exposure.” But here’s the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath the cheerful LinkedIn testimonials and carefully curated internship program websites: the unpaid internship market has quietly become a class-based sorting mechanism, and nobody seems particularly interested in talking about it....
