they throw out the shah, they had to pick up and where they had liberals facing off with the extremists. and let me tell you, every time the extremists win. because the extremists are extremists and they will do think that the locals will not do to win. .. >> internships are overrated and

that they provide unfair profits to companies and universities who take advantage of students hoping to get ahead in the marketplace. this is an hour and a half. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much for that. and thank you all for coming out. i'm particularly pleased to be doing with this andrew. it's hard to think of a more appropriate person. in some sense, this book is a piece of what andrew does in nice work, if you can get it, which i highly recommend and just sort of a upon optic -- pan optic view of what's often called contingent labor or a state of precariousness that particularly people in my generation find themselves in the labor market. and it includes a whole explosion of roles from the rise of temps in the temporary help industry which has exploded over

the last 20 or 30 years to, obviously, to internships to various kinds of part-time arrangements, develop various types of independent contractor arrangements of all shades and colors which has made the sort of classic image of, you know, a 9 to 5, 40 hour a week full-time employee, that kind of person is actually in the minority these days. that is, you know, that's our stereotype of what work is, but, in fact, our conception has not caught up to the reality which is that people work sort of all over the place in patches. they're underemployed, they're intermittently employed, they're self-employed. so in some sense this book is just tackling or attempting to tackle one, one piece of the puzzle. the question of internships. and to some extent what kind of drew me into this or what i

found kind of particularly fascinating about the idea of the internship or the intern is that, essentially, a kind of undefined, undertheorized, unstudied kind of term or role. i mean, it's something that we're all familiar with. i mean, except maybe the sort of, you know, my grandparents' generation for whom the word "intern" still means kind of medical resident, right? in or at least a medical student in their first year of residency is what it had become. but otherwise, you know, most people are familiar with the term, probable among you all, you know, you've either been an intern, your child has been an intern or you know people who have done it, you've employed interns. it seems to be true of, you know, almost everybody these days. and yet no statistics are -- no reliable statistics have been collected. there's no commonly-accepted

definition of what an intern is, and it includes, you know, it includes things from people working in the white house, you know, unpaid right in the oval office to people, you know, working at disney world flipping burgers. so it seems to include all these different kinds of roles, and yet, you know, what does it actually mean? so to some extent the approach that i take in the book is kind of a small c catholic approach, just trying to kind of look at everything that is being called internship, look at all the places where this word is being applied and try to see is there a common denominator. and to some extent what i felt was, in fact, it was more of a kind of marketing term, more of a buzz word than actually a kind of real scriptor, not an objective, objectively-defined kind of term. that itself is interesting because, you know, traditionally speaking a job term is just sort of a descriptive sort of thing.

but this is a marketing term, something that is sort of sold to people. and that kind of speaks to a larger, larger ambiguity in the whole internship economy which is that, you know, this is, this is to some extent a way to get, to get young people to, you know, to naturalize the phenomenon of working for free. i think that, you know, my, my premise in the book and to some extent the thinking behind it was maybe a very old-fashioned kind of thinking that, you know, you get paid for work. that there is a basic kind of equation between hard work and then monetary compensation, that that was the way that modern, financialized, you know, cash-based economies worked. of course there are all kinds of different gift economies, and there's a lot of complexity to that. but, essentially, that notion has been very, very subtly kind

of undermined, and, um, and you now have as i estimate probably one-two million people working as interns in the u.s. each year, and as many as half of them working unpaid. so how did we get here? how did this happen? i'll just kind of try to provide a little potted history as i try to in the book. and, again, i was attempting to kind of piece this together because nobody had, nobody had tried to tell the story, tried to kind of draw out this genealogy. so if book kind of appears to be sort of an initial attempt, i mean, that's just what it is. it's, it's an attempt to kind of frame the question, sort of lay out what is known to build up a kind of empirical base and also a mental model for thinking about this issue. because my ultimate, my ultimate goal is just to make, it's to bring this question in some

sense out of the shadows, out of the kind of unconscious, the collective unconscious where we all know that internships exist, it's something we do, it's a reality we reckon with, but we don't think consciously about it, we don't think about how to improve the situation, the overall way things work. of course, people think about how to improve their own situation or improve things for their intern if they're an employer, perhaps, but nobody's thinking about it systematically, nobody's thinking about it as an object of rational, conscious public policy. and i think it's an important enough issue, and the core issue just to kind of pan out a little bit is how do you get young people into the work force, and in this case usually, specifically, into the white collar work force? how do you move students, especially, from psych 101 classrooms in a building like this into the office jobs where they will probably be in our service economy? what is that process, what's the best way to do that, what's the

most humane way to do that? and what's the way that insures the sort of highest level of social justice possible in terms of making that an equitable process? and i, essentially, find this current very haphazard, unregulated free-for-all system of internships that's grown up to be inadequate, to sort of fail our tests of what would be a rational, humane and even efficient way of getting people from point a to point b, just to kind of see it on a very macro level. but anyway, a potted history. so internships originate, the term "intern" originally from french, probably for several hundred years used in kind of french hospitals as a term for a junior doctor, kind of apprenticing doctors. and comes to the states probably sometime in the mid 19th

century. the word itself, at that time still spelled intern with an e at the end in a kind of french mode. and it, essentially, means a young doctor who has interned within the four walls of a hospital for a year or so, usually a couple of years, performing junior, junior sort of tasks; blood letting and applying leeches still at that point, whatever it was. some grisly things. probably overworked, possibly with some resemblance to today's interns. but in any case, working within a hospital before they get to become a full-on medical practitioner. and i think this is, this is kind of more speculative, but i think, you know, there are probably a number of workplace practices that you can trace to fields like medicine and law because these are prestigious fields that other fields want to copy. and that's certainly the case

with internships. you see it become common practice in the medical profession in the early 20th century just at the time when the medical profession is kind of rationalizing and modernizing itself, when they're shutting down. the country used to be full of kind of substandard medical schools, producing people of -- doctors of highly varying quality. and the american medical association in particular kind of steps in and says we need to, you know, we need to get rid of the quacks, we need to have certification, accreditation, all of these things which are arrive anything the early 20th century in lots of different areas. but in medicine one of the results is the internship as a period of applied postgraduate as it were kind of learning, a transition period between your school years as -- in medical school, essentially, and your work as a medical practitioner. so those are the origins.

and it takes, it takes a long time. it's, essentially, not until -- it takes several decades, not until the 1930s, 1940s that you see other fields, other industries kind of looking to this internship model and borrowing the word. and as far as i could tell, people may find a lot of examples. in the 1930s essentially just at the time when, no surprise, governments are vastly expanding because of the new deal and various social programs. and there's a push to kind of rationalize public administration. and one of the things you rationalized when you do your sort of standardization and rationalization of a field is the process by which people enter. so internships fill that role.

so it seems like public administration really -- not politics so much, not what you might think of as capitol hill internships which is a species unto itself, but the field of public administration is the first place after medicine that you see adopting the internship model. and after world war ii, it begins to go much more general, and you see corporate america looking to the internship. you see the growth of human resources in firms, you know, such that it becomes any firm of any size is going to have a human resources department, and a human resources department is tasked with having a rational means of recruiting and bringing in new, bringing in new employees. and they establish internship programs. so you begin to see it in all kinds of fields, insurance companies and, you know, large companies like general electric. at that time these were mostly paid situations.

they're paid, they're training-based. it seemed to be about recruitment. it's about, you know, going to the local, local colleges and universities especially and bringing in the best and the brightest and then, you know, paying them while you're training them and sort of drawing them into the corporate culture. and then they will work for you. and it's, you know, we take a certain number of interns each year, these were sort of very structured programs based around ideas about structured training. so a new thread kind of enters in the 1960s and '70s. and surface i can tell -- surface i can tell, this is where the academy becomes more interested in internships as a kind of applied learning, learning beyond the class room. it's not the first example of experiencial education. there is applied learning going

back 100 years, but, for instance, sociology departments in the 1960s and '70s, they begin to contact, say, a city planning department. i know this happened in new york. and say can you take a few of our students, you know, each year, each semester to, you know, show them how a city planning office works, that sort of thing. and so it's, you know, you see the academy begin to be involved. this is especially -- at this time this is also a very american kind of phenomenon, i should note on the side although i want to mention the kind of international dimensions of the internship explosion in a little bit. and, essentially, schools are saying that they're responding to student needs. this is the generation of baby boomers and universities saying we want to apply our learning and get academic credit for it. we want to, you know, go beyond the classroom and be, in a sense, active in the community.

and that it's seen as a kind of, you know, it's seen as an interest in the broader society, going beyond the ivory tower. so that's kind of another theme that enters the internship discourse. but what particularly interests me and what i particularly cover in the book is what i call the internship explosion which is really just three or four decades old, maybe really three decades or so. even in 1980 according to one survey only one in 36 students graduating from college had done an internship by the time they graduated. so it was still, relatively speaking, a minority experience. something you might have done if you were in particular departments, in particular fields or wanted to work for particular employers. now as the sort of best estimates that i know of, 75% of students complete at least one internship before they graduate. it has almost become the norm, the norm that's expected of somebody going at least to a

four-year college or university in the united states. how did that happen? how did this, you know, what's the process there? and i think that's where it turns more sinister. i think what you see is on the one hand you see companies figuring out that this is, this is an untapped source of cheap labor. and, you know, and looking to these students as a kind of, you know, sort of disposable work force that's always right there. you see many more companies getting involved in a whole range of industries who make no pretense about recruitment. they don't, they're not going to hire anybody, but they're saying we're offering you a line item on your cv. we're offering you a letter of recommendation. but to get that, you need to work for free for us for three months or six months, something like that. you see the growth of the academic credit markets. you see the involvement of schools which may have at first started as a kind of idealistic

idea about learning, you know, learning beyond the classroom, going beyond the ivory tower. you see schools having skin in the game. you see an academic credit market emerge where this is probably one of the cheapest ways for schools to deliver them. a form of kind of outsourcing a student's education saying you go work for that employer, you don't have to do anything on campus. we're not going to really provide much in the way of anything, maybe a couple of check-ups, a couple of meetings here and there, and you still pay us a few thousand dollars because we're issuing some credits for you. i mean, it's a great -- i'm not saying this is now a major source of revenue for schools, but it's significant enough that when i've written about this topic, schools and universities are in some ways the most rattled by the things that i'm saying. one of the things that i found most kind of, most shocking and interesting was that about a

year ago when the topic of unpaid internships -- specifically illegal internships which is another, which is another kind of topic to touch on -- that when that, when that issue really boiled up, bubbled up about a year ago, it was really schools that reacted most strongly. not employers, not the chamber of commerce, you know? it was schools that see this to some extent as their turf. which might have been true 30 or 40 years ago when this was a much smaller, much smaller playing field. but the other aspect of the internship explosion that schools don't seem to have grasped is that it's grown beyond their control. and you now have recent graduates, high school students, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s changing careers doing internships as well. specifically, in terms of changing careers this is now touted as one of the kind of major things you can do as more

and more, as more and more americans, you know, they might have what you might consider three or four careers during a lifetime where the whole notion of a career kind of disappears. internships are touted as the way to kind of transition between each of those pieces. and, again, the rhetoric is that it's a win/win situation. but the reality that i found through the research that i did was that it's often not, that it's just a system which is presented as take it or leave it, this is what you have to do. but it puts people through tough financial straits, and it leaves out whole groups of people who can't even participate, who can't pay to play. touching briefly on the issue of legality sense i raised it -- since i raised it, i think, you know, the -- there is no law of internships, essentially. i think that's fair to say. and that, again, is indicative of how completely unmoored this

whole thing is. the laws pertaining to internships such as they are don't include the word "intern." they were, they emerged in the 1940s out of a supreme court decision, and they're very little applied. in theory, the department of labor is responsible for determining whether an internship can be unpaid or whether it simply is real work that needs to be paid. but the reality is that this almost never happens, that the tests they have almost never applied and that the test itself was not, was not designed with internships in mind because internships didn't exist at the time. so i estimate that there are tens of thousands of, essentially, illegal unpaid internships in the u.s. each year. and although there's a growing awareness about this, it's a massive, a massive labor violation in plain sight.

and major companies engage in it without a second thought. small companies engage in it. so it's, it's a strange, it's a strange situation. and i don't know, i don't know what parallels there are really. um, so to speak about one more aspect of the internship boom is the globalization of it. which i think is also, links to many, many issues. really i think we are living through it right now, the last ten years or so. this american business practice, essentially, which carries with it the prestige of american business around the globe is spreading to -- has already spread to most developed countries and is spreading to places like china where i've been living. and as i document to some extent in the book. and seeing how it spreads, it's fascinating. because, you know, on the one hand it's multi-national.

american companies going to, setting up in a new country or a new city and simply bringing the internship concept with them. and then, you know, and then there's a kind of rush to determine, well, what's our word for that? lots of languages, you know, even in chinese still there's no distinction between, you know, trainee and intern, essentially, in that word. and the word intern itself as being borrowed into various languages as a kind of, as a kind of solution to this. but it's also, it's spreading as well as people just sort of see, oh, this is what's done as schools embrace it. as schools in the u.s. go abroad, they bring the concept with them as well to their overseas campuses or to their overseas programs. and, you know, you can literally see, you know, people showing

up. sometimes students themselves showing up in a city in china, and they go up to employers and say can i do an internship here? the reaction is what's an internship? and then, you know, you explain, well, i'll just work for you for free for a while, and they say, all right, come on. for sure. [laughter] it's a really interesting example of the kind of globalization of a business practice and the kind of a social phenomenon with no one single actor pushing it. nobody is, you know, nobody is, like, you know, behind the whole internship boom. it is to some extent a kind of fascinating confluence of forces all coming together. um, so that's the kind of, that's the kind of big picture of what's been going on but -- over time. but in some sense what the book mostly is about is taking a kind of contemporary slice. this is meant to be a book about the way the world works, about -- just one of those books that tries to explain one thing

that's going on. how did this come to be the way it is? what is this all about, and what are the broader ramifications? and to some extent this is where, this is where it gets interesting. this is what's at stake. why does this matter? and i think there sort of, the challenge here is that there are kind of two closely-interrelated arguments that need to be made at the same time and in tandem. i saw a quote recently, i think it was in a michael denning article, saying that under capitalism the only thing that's worse than being exploited is not being exploited. and, i mean, that's, you know, it just gets to the point of is this really about internship sob stories? you know? that's one thing.

and the sob stories are real, and i document them, and i talk about them. but to some extent it's also about what the whole system brings with it. so on the one hand you've got people doing internships. most, you know, three-quarters of students at four-year colleges. that's still a minority of people in that age bracket. that's still a minority of people from age 16-24. you know? the majority, the majority of americans do not graduate from a four-year college. so what about everybody else? in an economy that's becoming a service-based, white collar economy, this is the gateway into the white collar work force, how do you get in if you don't do one? if you can't afford to do one? if you don't go to a four-year college that supports, that supports and kind of enables you to do this? um, so on the one hand you have an internship system that is

very, that is very haphazard, that is unfair in a lot of ways, that doesn't, you know, adhere to the basic ethics of fair pay for honest labor. and on the other hand, you have people who can't even break into that system and are, essentially, locked out of the white collar work portion. and the broader -- work force. and the broader social ramifications of that, i think, are arguably deeper than the stories of, you know, i had a bad internship. so to some extent that's, those are the two kind of intertwined arguments of the book. on the one hand, a bad system. on the other hand, those outside the system are in even worse shape in the long run, potentially. so that raises, i mean, that raises a lot of complex questions in itself. but, um, another aspect to touch on, this probably sounds very

heavy so far and kind of, you know, about changes in the work force and policy issues, but i tried, also, to kind of have a bit of a light touch in the book as well because it's also kind of a cultural phenomenon. this is not just a political, sociological question, this is also, it also speaks to our, to our kind of cultural moment, the internship, the intern. and in some ways i think pop culture kind of is ahead of the game, is ahead of academic scholarship, is ahead of colleges and human resource professionals in terms of kind of understanding what the internship kind of mentality is all about. so interns are, you know, all over, all over reality tv, for instance. there are lots of movies. probably my favorite is "the life aquatic," the portrayal of the team interns. it's great. i mean, it's care rick tour, and

it's -- caricature, and it's comedy. you know, to some extent, yeah, it's mean-spirited, but it's also, it's felt that, you know, the intern, being an intern is a temporary, temporary situation. it's not like making fun of somebody on the basis of, you know, permanent characterization of themselves if they can't change. so, you know, the intern is just kind of, you know, a bit of a laughingstock in a kind of light-hearted way, i guess. but i think that in itself is interesting in a culture that is proclaiming kind of flattened hierarchies in the workplace and, you know, and interns are -- and has a kind of cultive use also in a lot of respects. interns are in this kind of very interesting, interesting position. so it's a kind of cultural dimension to it also that i try to, i try to bring out a little bit in the book.

but, um, in any case i -- yeah, i hope, i'm interested to kind of hear all of your thoughts, and i'm sure andrew will have some tough questions for me. but that's a general, general introduction. the one last thing i might mention is just that the genesis of the book was my own unpaid internship about five years ago or so, five or six years ago. and it wasn't some horror story, it was just kind of four months of not doing much for no pay. [laughter] and not very, not very, not very exciting on any scale. but, but it just -- i met a lot of other interns, and i saw that we were sort of kind of a world unto ourselves, in some sense. and i began to talking to various friends and people i knew, and i saw this was a kind of strangely-shared generational experience, and to some extent, yeah, a marker, a marker of

certainly people under about 40, i would say, have, who have gone through this experience. so it's a kind of curious rite of passage. that's kind of how i got into this. but this is the first, this is the first at all lengthy attempt to grapple with the issue. so there are bound to be, bound to be flaws and oversights, etc. but in any case, i hope, i hope it kind of gets a conversation started. [applause] >> oh, sorry. do you want us to use these mics? yeah?

well, thanks very much for that, ross, and i wanted to really congratulate you on a terrific piece of reporting in this book, and it really couldn't be more timely, especially if you've been following the very high-profile spat between david cameron and nick klike in britain on who placed the phone call at some point in the early point in their career. it's, basically, a disagreement about nepotism in very high places, in the upper reaches of government and industry. and that's a very traditional obligation of, of the upper classes, you know, to place their relatives in those positions. and, um, so that's very visible right now, and i think your book is partly to credit for driving an even greater wedge between these two parts of britain's ruling coalitions.

[laughter] you're playing your role at least. but, of course, your book is much broader in scope than that particular haven of class privilege, and in a way i found that you're really arguing that this experience of working for nothing or in many cases paying for the right to work for nothing because a lot of the book deals with what is developing this trend of actually paying for internships, paying for the right to work for nothing. so this has become a very routine part of almost every middle class employment process pebt. and i think for me it raises the question of fair labor. in this a stratified way. and this is the question i have for you. it seems that today we have a fairly broad agreement on what constitutes fairness or fair labor in a blue collar

workplace, the sort of 9 to 5 workplace. there's a kind of consensus, agreement or let's say a limit to the range of disagreement over, say, what a sweat shop is. and we can all agree more or less that this is wrong, this is unfair. by contrast, there are no yardsticks at all for measuring what fairness is in the kind of employment landscape that you are dealing with, you know, the middle class, the white collar, the professional or most specifically in those, the most deregulated parts of the economy, the most precarious parts of the economy. so i wonder what you make of this conundrum that we have some kind of agreement over what constitutes fairness in working class workplaces, but none whatsoever, apparently -- according to your book -- for these middle class occupations. doesn't that strike you as something of a conundrum?

what can we make of that? >> yeah. i think that is strange, but it gets at a lot of different things. you know, part of what, um, part of what helped end child labor, for instance, which not incidentally was ended by the fair labor standards act, the same piece of legislation that should be protecting interns as well in theory, but part of what brought that on were a photograph of these, you know, so-year-old children in coal -- 10-year-old children in coal mines that were shocking to people. they could see this with their own eyes, and they could feel the injustice of that. whereas something about the white collar workplace kind of flattens everything out. everything looks kind of the same. everybody is just sort of stationed at a terminal doing, doing whatever. and you don't really, you know, the whole quality of labor is much more, is much more invisible. and this, i mean, not incidentally in an environment where in general the issue of

labor and laboring is much less in people's consciousness. of course, the other point to mention is that much of our definition of what is fair in the blue collar work force came out of, came out of unions saying, you know, on behalf of their, behalf of their members, you know, what constituted kind of what they considered constituted fair, you know, fair arrangements. my favorite kind of slogan for the labor movement is, you know, labor, from the people who brought you the weekend. i think, you know, it's -- and, of course, organized labor has never really made inroads into the white collar work force with some exceptions. so i think that, yeah, the white collar work force is this kind of a nebulous zone where we imagine that everybody is a kind of independent, you know, rational actor with a fair amount of capital behind them. you know, even if they're working without pay for extended

periods, there must be some, you know, they must be all right. of course, if you see the pursuit of happiness with will smith based on a real story, he's homeless. but he manages to put on a suit every day and go in. you know, you don't see the reality. lots of interns go on, go on food stamps. but these things don't appear in the public consciousness. it's hard to photograph them, it's hard to see them, and i should say that, you know, in developed n developed countries and people who can do internships, there are support network that do kick in and allow people to maintain a standard of living so it's not immense suffering like you saw in the late 19th century coal mines or anything like that. but i i thit f think it gets very strange qualities which make it harder to analyze and understand. we have a basic kind of conception of what it is, but it's a mirage.

>> uh-huh. good points. um, so another question i had was about, you know, when i read your book and thought about this explosion of unpaid internships, i wanted to place it alongside a number of other trends that we've seen in maybe the last decade or so that are related to the development of free labor or unpaid or discount labor and very much associated with the rise of amateurism in the new economy. volunteer content, for example, that is edging out, seems to be edging out a whole generation of professional pay-scale careers in journalism probably most visibly, but in many other creative sectors. it's a phenomenon that is often associated with digital technology, you know, the

transition to online expression and production seems to have obviated the need to pay for content. and, also, the development of digital techniques like cryosourceing basically if sill tates -- facilitates a task master from the crowd, as it were. i think it's a mistake to associate it only with digital technology because you can really see it everywhere. even in old media and especially in tv where you mentioned reality tv, the rise of reality tv and challenge game shows has really put to bed the old business model of scripted tv drama produced by professional, union-wage employees. and that business model has been thrown out of the window almost entirely. so i wonder whether, whether you

see the phenomenon you're describing as on that landscape which has, really, should be accentuated during the great years of the recession but, secly, is about a decade old. or what you see in terms of this much longer conversation about how to ease entrance into the white collar work force and professions which you mentioned in the beginning of your comments you see as, essentially, a failed, a failed project or a failed attempt at this point. or is it both? is it part and parcel of both? >> probably part and parcel of both, but it's interesting to kind of pick apart which pieces belong to which. i think in terms of the last ten years, you know, the kind of discussion in the book "free," about, you know, everything should be free, and somehow

it'll all work out in the end. i think that does get at the generational mindset of people like me in our 20s who, well, we're used to getting certain things for free, you know? digital music or something like that which is, you know, assumed -- there are certain things that are assumed to be free that we used to, you know, pay for. but i think the fact that there is a kind of -- there are more and more business models seemingly based on free, you know, huge companies like google and facebook that have grown up, you know, seemingly offering these free services and now making money through the back door or later on, i think that's influenced the generational mindset a lot. but i think it is part of a larger, continuing struggle between, you know, employers trying to keep, trying to keep costs down and then or, you

know, or towards zero and, you know, what people feel like they can ask for. so in the larger, in the larger story -- and this often comes up when you talk to people about southwesternships -- is that it's kind of, you know, an american response to global competition or something like that. of course, now it's a global response to global competition. but the idea you have to work for free because, you know, somebody in china's going to work for two cents or something like that. so, you know, it becomes part of this larger story about intense competition, or maybe it's just competition between people at your own university, you know? if you underbid them, you will be taken for the internship, and then you will eventually get the job. i think it's part of both stories, both the kind of longer, you know, longer theme going on since probably in the 1970s or 1970 of, you know, increased competition and

increased this, you know, the sort of flatness in real wages and a sense of less and less negotiating power on the part of workers in the economy. but, also, yeah. i mean, there's a whole sort of ideology of free that's come along to kind of justify it and has helped, has helped kind of ease, ease the transition and change people's mentality to think, oh, i'm doing something virtuous here by working for free. i'm doing what the economy demands. you know, this is the correct procedure. >> uh-huh, i -- uh-huh. well, why don't the older components of this challenge of easing people into a skilled work force is the tradition of the trade apprenticeship which, like the medical internship, in which you deal with at some length in the book. and it's a very interesting conversation in the week about that. in the book about that. finish and i was reminded in

thinking about that how much of a male stronghold the trade apprenticeship is. still to this day i think only about 10% of apprenticeships in the u.s. are occupied by women. and so i wanted to ask you a little bit about gender differences in play here. you mentioned at one point in the book that, you cited one study that found that 77% of people doing unpaid internships are women. and probably overall it's fair to extrapolate that the number of interns are female, on balance, and so i wonder whether it's useful to talk about the intern economy as part of what we off refer to as the femme any cyst of work? not simply because in a very vulgar way these are mostly

women doing unpaid work, but also because it seems that the intern economy tends to blur the line between task and contract, between duty and opportunity, between effective labor and instrument allay boar -- instrumentallabor. and when you blur those boundaries which is what i think the internship does, traditionally, it has put a disproportionate burden on women. the kind of, you know, the sacrifices, the trade-offs and the humiliations that are part and parcel of an internship really hark back to what's traditionally been considered women's work whether in the home or what used to be called the secondary labor market, you know, a opposed to the family wage at the primary labor market. >> so i wonder whether you think

it's worth pursuing that line of inquiry. >> yeah. very, very much so. if i'd had more time, i would have liked to write a chapter on this issue. and it's only really, this only really came to me towards the end of my research on the book because it's not a theme that had ever really been out before, and this study that andrew just cited is relatively new. i think with paid internships it's more, it's still more female than male, but that's not nearly as skewed. and i think, yeah, the reverse mirror image of what goes on with trade apprenticeships. i think, yeah, this raises a question about contingent labor, precarious labor as well and whether as you point out, work if you can get it. in some ways the historical norm may actually be this kind of

contingent, uncertain sort of labor and that really there was maybe only this period from, you know, the 1930s to the 1970s where you had the, you know, sort of predictable lifelong job at a single, you know, maybe even as a single employer, you know, with health insurance and all these sorts of things and a fair amount of job security. speaking of the u.s., at least. but that for women it's always been a contingent. it's always been a kind of contingent relationship to work and that even in that period, even in the 1950s and '60s where you had the, you know, the male breadwinners with their secure jobs that, you know, at big corporations you still had, you know when there was, when a war was on or something there was a temporary need, women were sort of brought into the work force for a certain period. and, you know, usually aside from getting lower pay also had much more kind of contingent terms of employment. so the gender dimension is huge,

and, i mean, the way it's usually -- the way it would be most easily justified is in terms of the fields that women study versus men and their career interests. and that in general the world of scientists, engineering, computer things, computer programming, that sort of thing, um, you know, maybe as an issue of supply and demand, maybe for other reasons as well. mostly it's still about paid internships, mostly it's still about, you know, about recruiting talent. it's, you know, there's still a sense of traditional skills building and training whereas, you know, the majority of women in universities are studying humanities and social sciences topics and entering fields where the skills are supposedly more nebulous, more affective, maybe. and that's used to justify this

idea that, well, we don't have to have structured training here because it's really about, you know, take your pick. it's really about interpersonal relations. it's really about communication. it's really about connecting with people. all these sorts of things. and they say, well, that's a matter of, you know, personality development. it's not a matter of skills training, so we don't need to train you. and, you know, also, we don't have to pay you either because, you know, these fields aren't press juice or maybe it's an issue of supply and demand. that's how it's justified. but i think there is a kind of, there's a clear double standard. even with government internships looking at government, you know, federal, state, city levels about 50%, approximately 50% are paid, 50% are unpaid. and it's a complete double standard. it's based on, you know, what fields these are in, essentially. and if you're an agron mist or a

soil science person, you're going to get paid $15 an hour with a good internship, and you're going to, you know, probably be hired and move up. and if you, you know, study communications or something like that, you know, you're not going to get that kind of good treatment. but exactly why is kind of a deep -- exactly why that has evolved, you know, whether it's a matter of, whether there's a kind of discrimination there or something else, it's hard to say. >> uh-huh. well, perhaps lastly i can draw out some comments from you about david cameron and nick. not for purely entertainment purposes, but also so you can tell us about some of the policy framework that has really gone into the book itself. because, you know, it's primarily an expose, but you do end the book with some, with some policy proposals or

propositions. and in britain at least the high-profile nature of this disagreement between these two leaders has raised, has raised the ante on the possibility of some policy consequences. for this expose. >> yeah. i'm glad to kind of raise the issue of what's going on in the u.k. because i think it provides, you know, possibly the best or closest parallel for the u.s., a place that we can look to to sort of learn about our, learn about ourselves or come up with some solutions. it's been a very entertaining kind of mud-slinging battle between the two, the two leaders. but, essentially, what's interesting, most interesting here is that in the u.k. i think there is a kind of very clear compass about, you know, the sort of unfairness of this practice.

and there's a clear -- of unpaid work which is also, to some end r extent, perceived as a more recent introduction from the u.s. and i think there's, yeah, there's a sense that it's connected to the issue of social mobility which i tried to, that was one of my two kind of intertwined arguments, that essentially your access into whole fields and some of the most prestigious fields and most influential fields in the economy, the commanding heights of the economy. if you want to be making, if you want to be the next, you know, steven spielberg, if next george lucas, or if you want to be, you know, rise up to the, rise to, you know, the high ranks in politics or in the media, you have to do these things. and so it kind of, it strains out people from particular classes, people from -- you know, who don't have the resources and the connections to kind of make their way up. so you have key professions dominated by a kind of, you

know, the same people who did it in the last generation, essentially. so in the u.k. that's the argument, that's the understanding. and so i think, you know, what's interesting now is that nick clegg, who's making the idea of this question of social mobility a kind of keystone issue, has seized on internships and the tag line, i think, is to make it about, you know, make it about what you know rather than who you know. and for internships that's a new idea, generally. i mean, there are some internship programs in the states that have very clear, open, you know, application is out there, and, you know, it's very clear what it's, you know, about, and anybody can kind of comply. but the majority of situations connections play a much bigger role with internships than they do with regular jobs. there's a much more casual economy of favors surrounding

internships. and it's just, it's just the social practice. that's just what goes on. and then compounding that is the fact that you have to be able to to work for free or at least be able to support yourself, usually in expensive cities while you're doing this for prolonged periods of time. so in the u.k., yeah, what clegg is talking about is, you know, a much greater transparency. basically, making all internships kind of work along the transparent kind of model which we at least try with, you know, with a lot of jobs. connections are always going to play, always going to play a role in kind of any economy, but i think with internships it's sort of crossed a line. and, yeah, i mean, and he's talking about, essentially, what i had sort of hoped for when i started writing the book, making this an objective, conscious, rational policy, something that is studied. if there are statistics on, if

it's something that's talked about, that people -- a system that we work to try and improve and understand in our society as opposed to just a free-for-all, something that happens sort of willy-nilly to us sometimes, you know, in spite of ourselves. >> all right. maybe we should take some questions from the floor. do you want to -- >> thank you very much. thank you for the book. [inaudible] um, i'm asking this question, i'm making a comment then asking a question from the per spctive of someone -- perspective of someone who's been working in the internship field since 1973 doing research since '79, so i have a stake sort of in this. i really appreciate and agree with most of your critique of college internships. i think a lot of them are bogus, i think a lot of them are highly

exploitive and should be rethought in the ways you talked about. on the other hand, i also want to question one of the premises you offered at the beginning which was that, basically, the fundamental issue here is getting youth into the work force. in other words, that the assumption is that the internships are all about getting jobs, getting careers filled, exploring careers, developing skills and so on. and i want to challenge that a little bit. in the ideal sense, i think that internships can be education in the best sense that they're not just career preparation, they're helping people learn about the world in ways that you can't necessarily from books. and, i mean, there's an example i use sometimes imagine a student taking a course in organizational sociology and reading on bureaucracy. and at the same time she's doing an internship at the new york city department of education which is one of the world's great bureaucracies. what's the connection between

those two experiences? and i think there are people in the world of higher education who are trying to exploit that. this department teaches courses that look at issues like that. and i'm wondering -- so i think that's a possibility that's not developed quite enough. there are people in the experiencial education world more broadly in service learning in particular who really try to build on that. i'm wondering if you ran across examples of programs in the universities and colleges that do that kind of work at a level that you find find compelling enough to say, well, this is something somewhat different from -- i'm not critiquing those in the same way. you make brief reference to that possibility in the book toward the end, but you don't develop it much. i'd like to hear if you have run across examples of programs you find have integrity and educational quality. >> um, i think the basic issue you raised is a huge one and one

that i probably insufficiently, insufficiently thought out. partly because i think it may get back to an older idea of what internships should be about which has been obscured more recently by the kind of frenzy to enter the work force. i especially read a lot of accounts from the '70s and the '80s talking about interns as participant observers, as being anthropositions embedded in some particular work force, and it's an understanding that work force culture in a kind of disinterested, almost kind of academic way to broaden their understanding of how the world works and of how these places work. in terms of specific examples of places, i ran across, you know, i ran across some programs in the washington, d.c. which was a huge intern house with a lot of abuse, but where they still talk about, you know, they still talk about the idea of participant

observers and of a kind of disinterested, disinterested model. and i think people who are in the, people who are in the academy, i think, i think the difficulty is that, you know, it's one thing to kind of, it's one thing to kind of say that, but it's another thing to really imbue, it's going to be relatively rare students who i think will take on that full mentality of being a participant observer unless they themselves want to become an academic sociologist, for instance, because i think they can't help but see this as a potential employer, it seems like in most cases. they can't help but be, you know, but be invested and wondering, you know, will they hire me after this? will they give me a good recommendation? and so i'm, my answer would be that i would support -- and i only talk about this briefly in the book -- but i would support more job shadowing as that is traditionally understood.

more relatively brief much sort of, the parameters being much clearer where you literally, you know, these opportunities do exist. and i know high schools actually, in some cases, do more of this than colleges, you know, a week or two where you just sort of learn about what it's like to be x. you know, what it's like to be a nurse. and you follow that person around, and nothing is expected of you. it's very clear except maybe to -- well, to reflect on the experience afterwards. i didn't do enough research on job shadowing as it's done to know how well is it working. but my sense is you might need a more radical separation like that to say this is job shadowing, this is an internship. because the idea of an internship now is so closely tied to career advancement that people have skin in the game. and job shadowing, i think, might represent a more, more of a chance to do exactly what you're talking about which is, you know, which is wonderful. basically, to extend more, you know, bring your daughter to workday kind of, you know,

which, i mean, is wonderful stuff. i think people need kind of connections to the work force. they need to understand how work works from an earlier age. they need to see what it's about. but i think it's the very rare internship program that does that, that's my sense. ..

>> at those particular workplaces you are, quote-unquote, just the intern. so a very low status of being the intern in that particular workplace. so -- and yet it goes back to the other side is usually people say an internship is what you make of it. so can we also talk about how -- [inaudible] >> for the fact we're having -- [inaudible] >> yeah, that's a huge -- that's a huge point with a lot of -- a lot people could say about that. on the one hand there's studies by various psychologists showing how -- we were just talking sort of the free economy and free business model, et cetera, how -- when things are free, you after a while you see the value

of them. and so at first here's a huge uptake, i'll take it. but if you haven't paid it you're much more likely to drop it at the next corner. you grab the flier and the free chocolate and you drop it in the garage as you walk down the street. on the other hand, part of not valuing interns is because you got them for free. or you got them for almost nothing, so, you know, you don't -- it's not like something you invested in. you might be paying more attention to your investments. yeah, of course, there can be costs with an unpaid intern so that would be -- that would be one thing. the second point is that -- and that valuation is also on the part of the intern also, interns don't value their own labor and their own contributions because they're not receiving any pay for it. i heard many, many stories of transition which is they went from an paid or unpaid to paid or an intern went from a paid to

unpaid, et cetera, and it always involved a real kind of change in mentality and the quality of work and the type of, you know, applicants who are attracted in the kinds of things that could go on. pay is a central issue. it may be $10.29 an hour we're talking about even minimum wage -- it makes a huge issue in this whole discussion and the whole psychology on it. but on the other hand, there's a question well, into the interns really do anything? is it really work? and my basic answer is there usually is work, there's usually real work happening. there is -- of course, there's coffee-getting and xerox-getting but that stereotype has obscured a lot of the real work. i mean, the interns were working on literally and doing the kind of things. i'm not saying they're the ones who will find a cure for cancer but that would be a huge boost

for intern morale. [laughter] >> something like that happens. but i think what happens -- it becomes a vicious cycle where that's the stereotype of interns. they seem to be just doing that and in reality maybe in reality they don't -- they're not given any tasks. and people say, why should we pay them and they don't do much and you don't pay them and they don't do much. it kind of has a life of its own, that cycle. i think the low status -- yeah, kind of the invisibility or the interchangeability of all these interns who are shuttling coffee is part of why it's been a nonissue for so many people. >> can i just add that one of the consequences of the low worth is that -- and it's something that is charted very well in the book is the rise of the internship as a commodity market, the degrees at which

people are not willing to pay a lot of money for a particular internship. the university of the dreams in california -- >> yeah. >> basically you're guaranteed an internship if you pay so much money but there's also these auctions now. internship auction where is people bid for highly valued internships and i think i remember the $50,000 that someone paid for a week at vogue to be anna wintour's peon. that's one of the consequences and increasingly i think the most valued ones are also in the creative sector in industries like fashion. you can see the evolution of what the tea party crowd referred to the culture of elite. and there is some -- clearly, there's some substance to that

criticism. these are professions that are exclusively opened to moneyed people. when you have that kind of, you know, paid internship paying to have an unpaid internship as the ladder into the profession. >> yeah. hi. i've introduced myself to ross before. i work at an industry that's rife with unpaid interns. it's television and film production. i was one of 20 unpaid interns. and i hope you don't mind first of all if i plug -- have a facebook group called internships for education. so if anyone is interested, please go there because i would really like to address this. i would really like to get a dialog to address it. one of the points that i've struggled with is the fact that the department of labor really doesn't go after these. they are right there out in the open and i wonder if you believe one of the reasons is that the government itself relies so much

on unpaid internship isn't it so and the degree to which people who are accepting them, the people who are in a sense being exploited feel that it's been against their interests to take recourse to the law to protect their rights? >> yeah, definitely the latter definitely explains some of the inaction of the department of labor, but it's also a larger story of the department of labor with the capacity or the lack thereof. the statistic is in the book somewhere but since the 1970s, the number of workplaces that they are responsible for -- this is specifically the wage and hour division which to make sure people get paid a wage if you are not one of the exempt employees. the number of workplaces that they're responsible has grown

100% and the personnel has gone down 15%. so there's been a systemic. the sort of -- in the department of labor, the history of the department of labor was sort of at its peak really in the 1970s as far as i understand, you know, as a relatively active body. but now the enforcement capacity is dismal and it's just -- it's simply underfunded and inadequate for the task. and whether there's also a kind of reluctance -- well, the reluctance on the part -- on the part of interns themselves to bring complaints is another huge issue as you say because -- i mean, people -- people do usually know what they're getting into. of course, they know that, you know -- they don't necessarily know what the content of the internship is. and they're doing it usually because they couldn't get a paid uninternship in what they wanted to do and they're saying well, i'm going to make this tradeoff. and so that allows people to

say, oh, well, it's a tradeoff. it's a win-win. but it's not really an open choice in the sense there's really no other choice if you want to enter that profession, but, you know, once you're at that level, you just do it. so, yeah, there's a huge reluctance to kind of report anything. if people -- you know, if you go -- if you go to the hurdles and go to the department of labor and tell them about your situation or have documentation and willing to burn bridges with the employer, you can do it. and i have information in my book for people to do that and if there were enough of those situations, it's not kind of big courtroom kind of things it's an administrator kind of thing but one could go through the courts as well, since that doesn't happen it doesn't read the media awareness. but in terms of proactive capacity, i think it's not just an issue of interns, i think in general the department of labor

has very little proactive capacity. you know, there's sweat shops in los angeles, new york city, and they don't -- you know, they don't go find them. researchers or journalists, you know, dig up all the evidence and hand it to them, they might do something but my sense they don't have the capacity. >> thanks. as i've been listening to you and thinking about who was probably the most famous intern in the united states is monica lewinski. and i'm wondering how does monica lewinski -- does she fit into the paradigm -- how does she fit into the paradigm that you're describing? how -- what kind of power is there in an intern that almost brings down the government of the united states? l[laughter] >> and where is the piece in this mosaic. we have an idea of the intern that we're working with. so that's what i wanted to ask

you about. >> thank you for that. that's a great question. i think it's really telling that she's the most famous intern and to some extent it was around the time of that whole scandal that i think the idea of what an intern was with the term "intern" like fully entered the public consciousness at the time of that scandal. but her actual story which i just discussed briefly in the book also fits the model quite a bit. she was on her second internship in the white house. she got it through family connections, to get to work in the white house. and she was able to live for free at her mother's appointment at the watergate. so there were no financial issues. she came from a very comfortable background. and then this is the most telling part of all. the incident, you know, that almost brought down the country happened during the government shutdown during which regular employees went home because they

weren't being paid and who filled the role? the interns. that's why there were interns in the oval office filling out paperwork and running the government, fulfilling the functions of government. because interns are there as a kind of, you know, sort of a quick -- a quick time select labor force that you can move in, even in government. i'd be interested to see if there was a government shut down, bring in the interns. supposedly if it hadn't been for that, it would have been unlikely that monica lewinski and bill clinton wouldn't have had such close contact. who knows? but that's -- you know, it was a particular situation in which interns were filling vital functions in the government. it kind of fits the story all too well. yeah. >> thank you. i wanted to press a little bit

on the issue of the kind of hollowness of this experiences. and you started to talk about it earlier in responding to a different question, and that is we've been using at least mostly concerns about justice, social justice, global justice to point to the sort of wrongs or shortcomings of the current -- the current slice of the intern nation as you put it. >> it's just bad business. it seems that's true there's next to no training. it's not merit crattic. it's who you know. it does seem the quality of the

work is going to go way down. we care of the medical care that we're getting. we're really not going to let physicians start, you know, performing heart surgeries without having had some serious training, without paying them whatever. even if you translate into the trade apprenticeship. we got, this is a bad vase, or whatever, there's easy metrics to determine. it seems even if you're on the creative side of things. if you're more on the effective -- actually, people should -- it seems like you need some training to be good at being affective.

and the quality of work has to be going down. and i wonder in your research -- it might be hard as you say, it's nebulous. it might be hard to have a real metric but it seems like it has to be coming out that the quality of the work is actually bad. and in the long run, bad for ge, right, or whoever to have -- we have these interns. we don't pay them. they do bad work and so we're choosing from people not because they do the work well but because they know people and -- >> ah, absolutely. i think there's a strong business case to be made against unpaid internships and unpaid work in general. i think, though -- i think that it has to do with the rise of more and more short-term business models. and i think a very short-term perspective by which as you say this is more abstract work to begin with. so you can't count exactly the widgets the paid intern is

making an intern versus the unpaid employee. lots of employers said it to me. when you have a paid internship you have a much wider applicant pool because you have all those -- all those people who couldn't work for free -- everybody is applying. it's just like a job. when it's an unpaid internship you've automatically reduced and afford those who can do this who has the family money or the particular circumstances where they can afford to go do this. and unpaid work and i have no connections to this. i think, you know, businesses that sink long term are still businesses that feel like they will be around for the duration or thinking long term are often the ones with the best programs because they're thinking about, yeah, the next generation of employees that they're training, that they're bringing in and the

real problem often seems to be in -- you know, in places where there's really kind of a short-term mentality about it. so i do think -- i think it is pad sense, you know, it's literally like -- sometimes it's literally like, wow, we have a lot more work coming up over the next couple months. let's go ahead an ad on craigslist to carry this burden. there's no sense where it's going to go beyond that. and, yeah, sometimes, you know, the intern will screw up in a big way and it will cost the company, you know, a lot but that calculation is not there. companies are trying to be more and more nimble and be flexible and change with the tides, but, yeah, it can cost them. the other issue you mentioned is a huge issue that the places where unpaid internships show up are in these more abstract -- these fields with product which is a lot more abstract and a lot

more harder to calculate and yeah, that's a fundamental issue and figuring out what this training means for these more kind of abstract white collar professions is often quite difficult. if there's not a clear body, you know -- a cannon of stuff to master. one quote the man john ladd who runs the federal apprenticeship program that i hold up something as a model in the book but it really applies to the trades and blue collar apprenticeships. you don't want the next builders of the nuclear factories to be unpaid internships. you want these people to have the gold training in training but figuring that out for everything is not easy. i think nobody has the answer to that. [inaudible] >> i think the earlier point about accessing the central

part, i'm wondering the extent to which people who are stuck in bad internships or unpaid internships generally are people attempting to collectively negotiate that condition or their attempts by interns to organize themselves? do people just -- are people resorting more to kind of floating with their feet to a kind of, you know, politics of exodus of getting out of the situation? and i wondered also to what extent whether an internship is paid or unpaid might affect the kind of way that people attempt to negotiate the conditions of their work as well? >> i should say that there's a whole spectrum of paid situations. there are various stipens and you don't get any salaries and

there's some who pay quite fairly generously. there's a whole kind of range and in general, i think, the dividing line is somewhere around minimum wage and above. and those function, you know, a lot of ways -- i talk about them in some extent in the book. they function like regular jobs and don't face these kinds of issues. but the sort of lower end of the spectrum, these various low paid stipend expenses and completely unpaid or the ones you have to pay for, that whole range, the short answer to your question is voting with their feet. but that's what people do. nobody knows what the rates of intern attrition are. but, you know, informally talking to employers, yeah, they lose, you know -- i mean, a huge percentage, a quarter, a half when they have unpaid interns of these people before the agreed-upon -- you know, whatever the end date was agreed upon. in many cases they don't even

bother with an agreed-upon end date because they know the intern will scram at some point. as long as you can have them around, you have them around and it's not even a fixed -- it's not even that fixed of a term. it's kind of a loose idea. so there's a huge amount of people voting with their feet and a huge kind of churn, a sense of churn. a lot of interns they just stick with it long enough to have a respectable reference or a line item on their cv and then they get out because, you know, it's costing them and often it's not the situation that they thought it was, not what they wanted. in terms of any kind of organizing, very little, unfortunately, that i know of, that i was able to find in the u.s. there was some stuff in france a few years ago of interns kind of, you know, gathering around the time of the -- generally, there was a huge thing of youth

labor in france. but in the u.s., you occasionally have collective -- kind of collective actions like i mentioned one of the more notable cases, a public relations firm in atlanta several years ago already was -- they had all these unpaid interns. they were all college graduates already and there were about 52 of them over a couple-year period and the firm was actually billing their clients for the intern hours. it was on paper. it was all clear and the interns learned about this and said you're not paying us but you're collecting our wage for us essentially. and they banded together and got their back wages. you usually get more than your back wages as well. so there are examples of kind of interns coming together. maybe a single employer; otherwise, it's such a relatively transitory stage. people might stay in the intern stage for two or three years, maybe they're studying part of

the time and they're moving between different, you know, different internships the right of the serial intern, i talk about people doing that six, seven, eight, nine, ten of these things, truly. but i think it's too transitory identity for people and it's something they want to shed as well. i talk to a lot of people their cv doesn't say intern. they describe what they did but they don't want to use that term because it has negative connotations, you know, often. yeah, unfortunately, i don't think -- i mean, the difficulty in general in organizing or having some kind of organization of workers who are on a contingent basis who feel it's a jungle out there and it's for every man and woman for themselves, you know, i think has -- it's not a problem just with interns. it's a wider issue of how do you kind of get any forms of collective action going with these people who are so kind of

mobile and fluid. >> there is the one historical precedent that you do discuss in the book, which is the medical intern union. i mean, it may surprise a lot of you the medical interns in this country do have a union and affiliated with? do you know that? >> is it at the iu? >> yeah, it's a highly banded workplace unlike the poorest situation that ross has been describing. can i just mention one counter-example, i think, in response to this gentleman's question about good business practices and it's a very chilling one and i want to you mention it because it was one part of the book that really stuck with me. it's the chinese example in foxcon which has been in the news a lot recently because of

the employee suicides. and that involved interns, college-educated interns, in an industrial business model, right. could you talk a little bit about that. >> yeah. i don't think -- i don't think it was a completely isolated case but this one was actually reported in the media in china which is how i picked up on it. which is interesting in and of itself that it was being reported on. in this particular case, i think it was -- i think it was hunan province, a province in the interior, relatively less industrialized than the coastal provinces where foxcon makes most of its ipods, kindles. it's the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. a contractor for apple, all these sorts of -- major firms that you've heard of. and hunan in a bid to kind of please foxcon and as part of its luring fox con to set up its

factory in its own borders, essentially ordered -- i think it was 100,000 students -- this is kind of china's take in the way it works. ordered 100,000 students from vocational and technical schools, saying you will -- you cannot graduate unless you go to the southeast. unless you go -- unless you go to the coast and work for foxcon as interns for -- whatever it was, several months because foxcon was complaining they had a labor shortage and with the bad press with suicides and people voting with their feet as you describe in fast votes, you know, voting with their feet is a huge strategy in china and kind of dissent against labor conditions. so, yeah, that was case of the government essentially mobilize ago huge number of interns to go work for companies that they were trying to attract. a very like striking and strange

case. i mean, it attracts chinese particularities and it's kind of an interesting nexus of education and government in a company and interns again as a flex time labor force when all else fails, you've got these young people who are less aware of their rights, less aware of what work is all about and are feeling vulnerable essentially, you know, don't know how they're going to get into the workplace necessarily or in this case whether they'll be able to graduate. >> it is china-specific, although china sets the norm for industrial business models. in a way it was very striking to me because there's this very high rate of graduate unemployment in china. and the need really for the government to fill that in order

to stave off insurgencies of all sorts. rising discontent and a need certainly within within business industry to fill the cheap labor supply in all sorts of ways. you said that was probably the only reported incident you'd see but you suspect -- i wouldn't say a business model but a trend in certain industries? >> i don't know if i could -- i don't know if i could say it's a trend or know where it's going. but there's definitely -- it's not the only case i've heard of the provincial or a city or county government essentially kind of again in a somewhat-specific way. students of a population which can be mobilized to go work somewhere and that has -- that has historical precedent in china as well. but a kind of larger issue

that's relevant in different parts of the globe is sort of government -- government interest in using internships as a way to kind of -- i don't know, sort of take the labor youth market that has been proposed in the dismal youth markets maybe in a developed world where 20% youth unemployment, you know, across-the-board. governments proposing well, there aren't jobs but we'll have a intern scheme and we'll have a very low stipend. the government will provide the stipend. the employer will provide the desk to sit at but also get free labor. and the young person will have something to do so they won't kind of, you know, hang out in the streets and cause trouble or whatever it is. this kind of thing is being kind of enacted in several countries

or attempted through government-run internship programs to try to do something about the youth labor market problems. but i don't know what will come from it. this is a relatively new trend. >> thank you for the speech. it was very interesting. i'm from france. i've been in this situation to be an intern in the u.s. and in new york maybe four years ago, four or five years ago. so during six months i've been an unpaid intern so i know how hard it was. every month it was zero and every day i was very happy to have that opportunity to be in the u.s. and to learn a lot, et cetera. so two years ago i created a website to help french people to

find internship in new york and, you know -- we try to give them internship opportunities and advice, et cetera. but since 2009, 2010, they said if you want to do an internship you have to be paid if the internship exceeds two or three months. and it has to be paid of 300 or 400 euros. so now i would say 20 emails a day from students from france say i would love to do an unpaid internship in new york but i can't because my school doesn't want because it's unmaid so what's your opinion about that? >> so the school -- the school said even though -- even though it's outside of france, you should not be doing unpaid internships? >> yeah >> that's an interesting problem when different countries have different legislative stuff.

i think that -- yeah -- i mean, another interesting dimension on exactly what you're saying of the opportunity that internships can represent is allowing people from another country -- it allows you to go to another country and, you know -- you say, you know, i'm new here. i'm not familiar with the way things are done but i'm willing to work unpaid, so that makes it a lot easier for you to kind of get in and at least have some opportunity. yeah, that is -- that's another species of this -- the way that internships can -- yeah, they can be a foot in the door when there's really nothing else. i guess i would still -- i would still support the french -- the french legislation as it stands. i think having a time limit as they do where they basically say once it exceeds a certain number of months, then it definitely -- you know, it looks a lot more

like work. it's like could it be work and it should be paid. and i think the overall systemic issues don't go away for a french student to be able to come to new york and live in new york and do an unpaid internship, they are going to have to have some resources behind them and have support or have savings from another job. so it still excludes -- it excludes a lot of people. but, yeah, there are situations where unpaid internship, especially from an individual perspective can be the only way in. and the kinds of things i'm proposing in the book as kind of policy proscriptions -- one thing people ask is, well, would this lead to a dramatic decline in internships. will the internships will go go away? i'm interested about in france, whether the internship opportunities have dried up.

i've never seen any concrete evidence for that worry. i do think the lowest level of internships would -- some of them would go away. some of the lowest quality ones at, you know, at often more fly-by-the-night operations that are just looking for some cheap labor -- if they knew that the law -- that they would get in trouble with the law, they might stop doing that but i think a number of employers would also start playing and would start valuing their interns more and improving their programs. so i don't think it would lead to a dramatic drop and i don't -- this is a controversial question. i think that people to some extent should have the ability to negotiate their own arrangement and be able to get into the work force how they can but i also think there's a serious real reason to have a minimum wage.

and most countries agree in the developing world to have a minimum wage. because when you start allowing people to work for free and a substantial longer term way in just a brief period of job shadowing, once you start allowing that it exchanges the whole shape of the labor market and it prompts the race to the bottom and that work should be paid is something that needs to be protected; otherwise, it's going to -- it's going to hurt the labor markets. >> we've pretty much run out of time. [inaudible] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> nathan hostage the rise of the nation builders.

mr. hostage, describe nation builder. >> it's a tricky term that no one really wants to own and that's one of the reasons why i chose to write about it. i'm not using it in a political development sense. i'm using it like george w. bush or barack obama or dave petraeus would have used it. this is a way of describing this kind of mission of armed nation-building that we're involved in. the sort of -- it's been described in some ways as armed social work. and i'm trying to really describe this phenomenon to the ordinary reader who might of this idea when they look at the news and they see what lots of journalists call the bang-bang like in iraq and afghanistan and show them another picture of what goes on. the three cups of tea side of the war. that is what the military calls the nonkinetic side of things. and what i really wanted to get at was the experience of people who are really kind of getting their hands dirty doing these kinds of things. rebuilding schools, digging wells, building roads. fundamentally nonmilitary missions in places like iraq and

afghanistan. >> so is the u.s. military currently building schools, building roads, doing nonmilitary functions? >> you'd be surprised to see the extent to which they've embraced that mission especially in places like afghanistan where doing this missions are the cornerstone of the exit strategy. creating a capable local governments that's capable of delivering things like criminal justice. the big complaint is the taliban could outgovern the coalition and that's really where civilians who have nonmilitary expertise need to be able to step in. >> where did the term "nation-building" come from? >> it's woolly, sort of very unsatisfying term and something that i really wanted to dig into it. back in the 1990s there was a lot of hand-wringing that the united states military was tied down and the fact when he was running for office in 2000, george w. bush said he didn't

believe that we needed a nation-building cadre that the u.s. military shouldn't be involved in this kind of thing. by the end of his term, he had embraced it to the extent to which he had even called for the creation of a civilian nation-building response corps in a state of the union address. so it was a dramatic turn-around and part of it was just because this kind of sort of armed humanitarianism was seen as a way of getting out of the mess that we had gotten into in iraq. >> how is it that nation-building became a political term where george w. bush in 2000 said, we're not -- we don't nation-build? >> or barack obama in december of 2009 saying that he wanted to send more troops to afghanistan but with the caveat that the nation that he wanted -- the nation he wanted to build is our own. you know, nation-building in some circles is kind of a dirty word, you know, it's sort of -- it's not what the military is supposed to be doing. they are supposed to be training this high end force on force

conflict. the kind of conflict in a lot of ways that the military organized trains and equips on. and in some ways, well, i'd say pines for in a way because it's as simple as direct. your opponent wears a uniform. they've got formations that you can count. this is a lot more difficult. and it involves navigating a lot of sort of, you know, tricky cultural differences, linguistic barriers trying to get at these problems has proven a lot harder in practice than it is in theory. >> so what's been the reaction of the pentagon to its new role? >> interesting, if you've seen some of the more recent remarks by secretary of defense robert gates, he talks a little bit about his worries that the military could become this sort of 19th century victorian constableary it's not at that point yet but the military is trying to master those chores, those fundamental nation-building tasks. but there's a worry, i think, within sort of the military establishment that the pendulum may have swung too far in that direction.

there's a need to come back and get the basic fundamentals. but there's a reasonable argument behind that which is that fundamentally or not military missions. i mean, these are missions for the development agencies of development. they are there for diplomats. but part of the problem is that diplomats, aide workers aren't necessarily trained to operate in a hostile environment where basically they're doing development work while being shot at. and there's been this sort of very difficult transformation for agencies like the department of state, for usaid to try to send their people who are sort of built around, you know, the embassy. that's kind of these organizations and to get people be willing to go out and volunteer, you know, on the frontier in afghanistan, for instance. >> so nathan hostages, did this diminish our role in foreign policy? >> really what i try to raise in the book there's a kind of

fundamental disconnect between the ambitions that is to send a sort of -- put more wing tips on the ground so to speak. and the ability of, you know, agencies like the state department to do it. it's a simple little matter of math. the department of defense at this point spends somewhere north of around $700 billion a year. it's got the -- if you just look at the japan relief operations that are going on right now. they've got the personnel, the equipment, and the training to get to places in a hurry. i saw it and i describe it a little bit in the book what the haiti relief operation on the military side looks like as well. and part of the effort underway -- and it sort of puts it in the bureaucrats because we need to fix the interagencies. we need to get these diplomats to get out there and we'll all be together jostling around back in the humvee. well, it's not as simple as that because what happens when you're getting shot at along the way.

it's a contradiction. and it sends a signal, you know, for instance, if we're talking about -- in parts of the developing world, that we think that an important principle of civilian control of the military yet, it's our military people who are doing it, who are doing the training. it says something a little bit -- well, interesting about kind of who we are. and i worry as well especially when it comes to operating in places like this that we adopt a little bit of a kind of fortress of america mindset. i talk a lot in part what they call force protection in the military. because of the risk in some of these situations putting barriers between you and the people you're trying to reach out and helped >> you've referenced greg mortensen three cups of tea a couple of times and you reference in the book thomas

barnett, who's he? >> thomas barnett in a lot of ways was the guy who's best known for a briefing called the pentagon's new map. he in the early 2000's was really kind of a guy who captured the zeitgeist of the department of defense and he had a couple of famous briefings, a powerpoint briefing that he would go out to deliver to the military audience which really explains how the post-9/11 world has shifted. but i go a little bit more into what he was arguing and also what he was getting at was that there needed to be something like -- kind of a nation-building cadre available on ready and oncall to address these gap states, these failing states. i think he called it the force. and his idea was you've got, you know, the army -- you know, the big forces that go in and kind of do regime change. they go knock over, you know, nations if called on to do so. but then you need people who are on call and there's kind of a

mix of diplomat, aide worker boy scout u.s. marine, sort of this mish mash of different things. but he was one of the early people who kind of articulated it in a lot of ways and sort of explained what the new reality was to people in the department of defense. so he's a character definitely in the book. >> how does the center for a new american security play into your book? >> well, they became the locus of the -- they sort of became the home for the counterinsurgency set. really, the counterinsurgents in washington started as insurgents in a lot of ways. it was a rebellion of the rank-and-file within the military establishment. an intellectual rebellion, not anything more than that. by people who had experienced, you know, their first tours in iraq and afghanistan and came back and were gripping for intellectual answers as to why the u.s. military failing. why were we losing in iraq? and they reached back and