Listener Call 1

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory and we’re talking about the historical debate over fair wages for American workers. A number of listeners have already weighed in a BackStoryradio.org. And we have invited one of them to join us on the phone.

PETER: We’ve got Ben on a line from Richmond, Virginia. Ben what do you got for us?

BEN: Well actually my question is I’m a college student and I’m going to my second summer now. I’m looking for an internships. And most internships, I assume you’ve heard are unpaid, and so I’m wondering how this system of unpaid internships become so prevalent in America? I know apprenticeship was a big part of American education in early America, but that’s not really a big factor nowadays. And even then apprentices were expected to be fed, and clothed, and provided for by their masters, which doesn’t really happen with interns nowadays. So I was wondering if you could enlighten me about this.

PETER: hosts, what do you think?

BRIAN: Well I’m interested in hearing about what apprenticeships were really about, Peter.

PETER: Right, well apprenticeships have to do with acquiring skills, as Ben suggested, and upkeep and becoming a member of a guild. To achieve the level of craftsman–

BRIAN: And didn’t people actually pay a bounty of sorts in order to apprentice with a master?

PETER: Think of as the price of admission. I think the constant over time is that you become embedded in a social situation. You have a social capital, as we now say, that’s nothing like the kind of skill that an apprentice would get it in a craft. But it does give you the kind of social experience and skills that might pay off. You know people.

BRIAN: When I think about apprenticeship in Peter’s day, I think of artisans, craftsmen. When I think of apprenticeship, or the beginning of internships, I begin to think about the professions. I think about people apprenticing in law firms. I think about doctors having internships. And you said socially embedded. We associate the modern 20th and 21st century internship with white collar, middle to upper middle class employment instead of those artisans and those workers.

ED: Here’s the thing Brian. I think that what you actually described was more of the model in the earlier period. I think that it actually fades away after the Civil War. And that what replaces it are professional schools. That before, Abraham Lincoln learns law just by hanging out with other lawyers. In the model that Peter is talking about. But doctors and lawyers, in the decades after the Civil War, are no longer permitted to do that. They have to be sanctioned, licensed.

BRIAN: But Ed, think about it. When that doctor gets her M.D., she then goes and does a residency somewhere. And they’re doing it to learn their specialty.

ED: Yeah but they’re doing after, and Peter talking about, the entry into the world. They have already earned entry into the world through the meritocracy of the educational process. Right, so, I think that what we’re seeing, and I think this is what Ben is experiencing, is that there has been a speed-up on the line. It’s both. We require, now, the formal education and the in-formal education of internship if you’re going to get a job.

PETER: Well I think you’re right, Ed. And it’s because for the first time in American history, well educated people like Ben are a glut in the market.

BEN: Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it.

PETER: Thank you very much.

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BRIAN: If you’d like to be a caller on the show visit back BackStoryradio.org to see some of the topics that we’re working on. While you’re there, you can listen to interview about how Americans in the 20th century called giving your waiter tip evil and un-American.

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ED: You are listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

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