Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at the debate over unpaid internships. We’ll also find out about a celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary (a little early) and someone’s 85th birthday (a little late).
It’s summer, and in many offices, that means a wave of interns has come aboard. Some interns are paid and some receive academic credit, but more than a million students work as interns for free every year, hoping to make connections that will serve them well later. Unpaid internships have drawn criticism, because students who can’t cover tuition and living expenses often pass up internships for short-term jobs that pay. That heightens the sense of inequality.
I asked Troy Closson, a Metro reporter who covers young people, to discuss the debate over ethics and opportunity behind internships.
Unpaid interns have long been regulars in nonprofits, in firms connected to entertainment and in government. One labor expert told you it’s mind-boggling that not paying interns is so embedded in government. Has the City Council actually paid their interns? Has anyone else?
The City Council actually does already pay its interns who work in its central offices. They make $32 an hour, which is almost double the minimum wage. And there are plenty of other employers who do pay their interns. Most estimates say more than half of all internships in the country are paid.
But that also means many still aren’t. I talked to one expert who basically said, It’s been slow, but some places are changing. He pointed to the prestigious White House internship program, which started paying interns for the first time in 2022. I then had to break the news to him that this administration had reversed course and was not paying the interns.
So the City Council pays interns who work at its central office in Manhattan. What about interns who worked in the district offices of individual council members?
Many interns don’t make money, and the entire system is more ad hoc. A student who wants to work in government or worked for a campaign might email a council member’s chief of staff and ask if they can intern for them. The office sets up an interview and then brings the person on.
Some council members have two dozen unpaid interns. Some have a handful.
Things didn’t exactly go well for an intern who organized to win pay and health coverage, did they?
No, they didn’t. She was fired earlier this month shortly after the interns’ pay campaign went public. And she argues it was retaliation.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that even if it was, it’s not actually clear there are any anti-retaliation protections available to her. I talked to an expert on the law in this area who said that there’s legal ambiguity on this issue and that the public sector has a pretty wide berth to hire people as unpaid “volunteers” and let go of them on any basis.
In my reporting, I also learned that beyond New York City, many unpaid interns aren’t even covered under sexual harassment laws because of the way they’re classified.
And the Council member that intern worked for is — ironically — the chairman of the Council’s consumer and worker protection committee. What did he tell you?
He was pretty clear that his office disagreed with her account. The councilman, Harvey Epstein, represents parts of Manhattan like the East Village and Gramercy, and he’s in the progressive caucus. He said he wasn’t involved in her termination.
But a top deputy in his office told him that this intern’s organizing wasn’t the problem. There were performance concerns, like taking too long to finish tasks, and she was let go because of them. The intern described her work in the opposite way.
But in a city where affordability is part of the daily conversation, working for no pay instantly creates economic and social issues, doesn’t it?
For sure. The City University of New York is obviously the biggest university system here, and the numbers of CUNY students who complete internships have been stunningly low for years.
But if you talk to any student or career adviser at a CUNY school, they’ll tell you it’s because these students are generally working-class New Yorkers who already work full-time, maybe in retail or food service. They can’t afford to leave a job for a three-month unpaid internship. This becomes one of the biggest barriers for them in finding work that relates to their major after college. It’s a Catch-22.
Weather
Expect plenty of sunshine and a high near 89 today. There’s a chance of showers and thunderstorms tonight as cloudy skies roll in and temperatures slide to near 74.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Friday (Independence Day observed).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“What we’re trying to build is a really dense, amazing, exciting, only-in-New-York, only-on-Little-Island kind of experience.” — Zach Winokur, the producing artistic director of Little Island, the park in the Hudson River near the Meatpacking District that has scaled back its summer schedule.
The latest New York news
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Former N.B.A. players charged with gambling crimes: Malik Beasley and Ed Davis were indicted in Brooklyn, accused of collaborating to rig Beasley’s performance in N.B.A. games in the 2023-24 season, when Beasley was with the Milwaukee Bucks.
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Living tax exempt: Weixun Hu, a global researcher living in Long Island City, pays no state or local income taxes on the roughly $110,000 a year that he earns.
A Miss Subways turns 85
Not all the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary this week will feature people in hooped gowns or three-cornered hats. This morning there will be a reunion of women who won the city’s Miss Subways contest, back in the day.
The organizer is the restaurateur Ellen Hart, who had a moment of fame as a Miss Subways in 1959 and wants to celebrate her birthday (a little late) as well as the nation’s (a little early). She turned 85 last Saturday. She expects about 10 other Miss Subways to attend the gathering today.
The Miss Subways contest ran from 1941 — by coincidence the year in which she was born — until the mid-1970s. In the 1980s, when she arranged the first Miss Subways reunion, an official from a company that sold subway advertising said that the contest had lost social significance.
But back to 1959. “I went to Jamaica High School, and they all suggested that I should enter the contest,” Hart said. “At the time, I looked like Elizabeth Taylor. See my picture over there?” She was sitting at a corner table in her restaurant, Ellen’s Stardust Diner on Broadway, where Miss Subways posters and photos line the walls.
“It wasn’t a modeling contest,” she said. “I just wanted to be on Broadway. I wanted to be a singer. You know, a famous singer.” She got to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at several Knicks and Rangers games and performed in bungalow colonies in Rockland County.
“Once in a while” during her time as Miss Subways, “somebody would recognize me” when she rode into Manhattan. “Not always,” she said, “but once in a while, and that was a thrill.”
The fare then was 15 cents — $1.74 in today’s dollars, or 71 percent less than the current $3 fare. One of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promises last year was to make buses free. What about subways?
Hart said felt bad for people who struggle to “get their money together for a subway or a bus.”
“It’s very hard to make it in the city,” she said. “The prices of groceries are up. You know, gas is up. Everything is up, and it’s really difficult.”
METROPOLITAN diary
At the Strand
Dear Diary:
I was at the Strand, where I thought I might find a book a friend had recommended, the novel “Old God’s Time” by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry.
I looked for it along the alphabetically arranged fiction shelves on the store’s vast ground floor, but could not find a copy.
Just then, I saw three people approaching: a young man who was a sales assistant, and a middle-aged couple who turned out to be tourists from Ireland.
The Strand is one of the largest independent bookstores in the world, and the largest in New York City. Its four floors contain more than 18 miles of shelf space holding 2.5 million new and used books.
So how incredible was it to hear that the couple was also looking for a copy of “Old God’s Time.”
The men shared my amazement at this extraordinary coincidence. But the woman was not so impressed.
“Well, you know,” she said with a shrug, “in Ireland, this kind of thing happens all the time.”
— Sigrid Nunez
Ms. Nunez is a writer. Her book “It Will Come Back to You” comes out next month.
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Interns and Inequality in New York appeared first on New York Times.
