Mina Farahmand was tired of not getting paid while working 15 hours a week.
So Ms. Farahmand, who was a legislative intern for a city councilman in New York, joined a fledgling campaign for change: She and other young workers set their sights on $32 an hour and health coverage.
But less than 48 hours after the group took their drive public, delivering a petition and posting on social media, she received startling news. A supervisor told her to pack up her belongings at the day’s end. (She called it retaliation for her organizing activity; the councilman’s office denied those claims.)
Her summer job was over.
In the days since her dismissal last week, she and other unpaid government interns have described struggling to afford subway rides and skipping meals to gain experience at the dawn of their professional lives.
On Friday, the group of interns said they plan to rally outside City Hall, reigniting a debate over ethics, fairness and opportunity in one of the most expensive cities on the planet.
“This system doesn’t work for working-class people,” said Ms. Farahmand, a recent New York University graduate whose internship was for academic credit and slated to run through July. “You’re asking for their bank account to hit zero if you’re asking them to be an unpaid intern.”
More than one million students work for free each year, trading bank deposits for connections and a notch on their résumés in an ever more competitive job market. But for more than 30 years, unpaid internships have also drawn criticism: They may offer a controlled access door to a potential break but, at the same time, can deepen inequality.
Every summer, some students take jobs as retail cashiers or fast-food workers so that they can earn an hourly wage — and turn down 10-week unpaid positions related to their chosen field of study because they couldn’t make ends meet.
Working for free is especially common in three realms: at nonprofits, in entertainment industries and in politics, from Capitol Hill to City Hall. It was only four years ago that the White House — when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — opted to pay interns “for the first time in history,” calling the lack of wages a barrier for promising prospects.
(The paychecks were short-lived: The Trump administration reversed course. The internship remains “highly coveted and extremely valuable,” the White House said in a statement.)
In New York, where affordability has emerged as a political buzzword, the City Council offers paid yearlong fellowships and hires interns in its main offices at 250 Broadway who are paid $32 an hour, or $15 above the minimum wage.
But the council’s 51 members reign over what happens in their district offices, where many interns earn school credit and are sometimes regarded as volunteers.
“It carries real social class and mobility issues,” said David C. Yamada, a professor of law at Suffolk University in Boston and an expert on the legal landscape of unpaid internships.
Ms. Farahmand’s termination was first reported by the politics publication City & State.
The intern and the councilman for whom she worked, Harvey Epstein, offered conflicting accounts. Ms. Farahmand said that she was an efficient worker who was never reprimanded; Mr. Epstein said that the deputy who dismissed her related that it was prompted by performance concerns such as not completing tasks in a timely manner.
“What my team has said, it’s just factually different,” Mr. Epstein, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the consumer and worker protection committee, said in an interview. “I have to trust my staff.”
For all the rancor over America’s unpaid intern economy, some employers maintain that unpaid positions allow young people — who sometimes might be less qualified — to get a foot in the door.
There’s evidence, though, that not all experience is equal: Unpaid interns receive fewer job offers and earn 40 percent less in median starting salaries than paid interns, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
The Baffler, a leftist magazine, once wrote that “the kids are getting royally screwed,” complaining of glamour industries hiring students “as little more than clerical temps, paying them not a dime and disguising the whole operation as a ‘learning experience.’”
That was in March 1997.
Fifteen years later, a news station in northeast Florida ran a segment on the revenge of the interns, who were suing major media and entertainment companies over pay, with a provocative chyron: “The End of Unpaid Internships?”
Fast forward to today, and the end is nowhere in sight. About four in 10 interns still don’t make money, according to some labor estimates.
“It still feels kind of ludicrous in 2026 that we’re still having this conversation,” said Matthew Hora, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies the transition from higher education to the labor market.
Dr. Hora recalled repeatedly reaching out to the office of a top Wisconsin elected official a few years ago, asking why it wasn’t paying interns. “They never had an answer, and they just ended up stopping returning my calls,” he said.
“It’s something that is so embedded in government internships. It’s truly mind-boggling,” Dr. Hora said.
In New York City, council interns might find themselves tracking down policy details — or fielding calls from Chinese neighbors when no one else in the office speaks Mandarin.
Jessica Distelhorst, 36, a grad student at Columbia University, worked 21 hours a week as an unpaid council intern from September to May. She hit zero in her bank account, maxed out credit cards and couldn’t pay rent for months — taking on night shifts as a pedicab driver. Getting paid “would’ve completely changed my life,” she said.
Ashley Cerda, 21, a recent N.Y.U. graduate, said that even a $3 subway fare was a burden as a young adult who “comes from a life of poverty.” She loved her Council office and received academic credit for about 450 hours of work. But, she said, “credit doesn’t bring food to the table.”
Now, Ms. Cerda is trying to pay off debt and save up for graduate school.
“It’s realizing that if I had made even minimum wage, I would have gotten over $7,000,” she said. “I’m in the negatives right now.”
Georgia Gee contributed research.
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