Below you will find a new article to read. It's about the unemployment problem in the United States, with a focus on recent college graduates. These are qualified, willing workers, but they are still unable to find jobs.
Read the article, and when you finish, complete the tasks below and send them to us at tutor@virtualingua.de
1. List any words that you found in the article that are new to you and define them. (Learning tip: Keep a vocabulary notebook, a vocabulary file on your computer or vocabulary cards with any and all new vocabulary words that you come across and quiz yourself regularly! It might seem elementary, but it really helps!)
5. Have you ever done work like that described in the article? What was your experience?
Confronting the worst job market in decades, many college graduates who
expected to land paid jobs are turning to unpaid internships to try to
get a foot in an employer’s door.
While unpaid postcollege internships have long existed in the film and
nonprofit worlds, they have recently spread to fashion houses, book and
magazine publishers, marketing companies, public relations firms, art
galleries, talent agencies — even to some law firms.
Melissa Reyes, who graduated from Marist College with a degree in
fashion merchandising last May, applied for a dozen jobs to no avail.
She was thrilled, however, to land an internship with the Diane von
Furstenberg fashion house in Manhattan. “They talked about what an
excellent, educational internship program this would be,” she said.
But Ms. Reyes soon soured on the experience. She often worked 9 a.m. to 9
p.m., five days a week. “They had me running out to buy them lunch,”
she said. “They had me cleaning out the closets, emptying out the past
season’s items.”
Although many internships provide valuable experience, some unpaid
interns complain that they do menial work and learn little, raising
questions about whether these positions violate federal rules governing
such programs.
Yet interns say they often have no good alternatives. As Friday’s jobs
report showed, job growth is weak, and the unemployment rate for 20- to
24-year-olds was 13.2 percent in April.
The
Labor Department says
that if employers do not want to pay their interns, the internships
must resemble vocational education, the interns must work under close
supervision, their work cannot be used as a substitute for regular
employees and their work cannot be of immediate benefit to the employer.
But in practice, there is little to stop employers from exploiting
interns. The Labor Department rarely cracks down on offenders, saying
that it has limited resources and that unpaid interns are loath to file
complaints for fear of jeopardizing any future job search.
No one keeps statistics on the number of college graduates taking
unpaid internships,
but there is widespread agreement that the number has significantly
increased, not least because the jobless rate for college graduates age
24 and under has risen to 9.4 percent, the highest level since the
government began keeping records in 1985. (Employment experts estimate
that undergraduates work in more than one million internships a year,
with Intern Bridge, a research firm, finding almost half unpaid.)
“A few years ago you hardly heard about college graduates taking unpaid
internships,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic
Policy Institute who has done several studies on interns. “But now I’ve
even heard of people taking unpaid internships after graduating from Ivy
League schools.”
Matt Gioe had little luck breaking into the music and entertainment
industry after graduating with a philosophy degree from Bucknell last
year. To get hands-on experience, he took an unpaid position with a
Manhattan talent agency that booked musical acts. He said he answered
phones and looked up venues. Although he was sometimes told to make
bookings, he said he received virtually no guidance on how to strike a
deal or how much to charge. But the boss did sometimes ask him to run
errands like buying groceries.
“It was basically three wasted months,” he said.
Mr. Eisenbrey said many companies were taking advantage of the weak
labor market to use unpaid interns to handle chores like photocopying or
running errands once done by regular employees, which can raise sticky
legal questions.
Eric Glatt, who at age 40 interned for the movie “Black Swan,” is one of
the few interns with the courage to sue for wages over the work he did.
With an M.B.A. and a master’s in international management, Mr. Glatt
wanted to get into film after a previous job overseeing training
programs at the American International Group, the big insurance and
financial services company. For “Black Swan,” he prepared documents for
purchase orders and petty cash, traveled to the set to obtain signatures
on documents and tracked employees’ personnel data.
“I knew that this was going to be a normal job and I wasn’t going to be
paid for it,” he said. “But it started kicking around in my mind how
unjust this was. It’s just become part of this unregulated labor
market.”
Mr. Glatt filed suit,
accusing Fox Searchlight Pictures of minimum wage violations. The
company says it fully complies with the law and provides interns with a
valuable, real-world work experience.
“The purpose of filing this case was to help end this practice,” said
Mr. Glatt, who now plans to go to law school. “That was more important
than my working on the next blockbuster.”
Ross Perlin, author of the 2011 book “Intern Nation,” said postcollege
internships used to be confined to a few fields like film but have
become far more common. “The people in charge in many industries were
once interns and they’ve come of age, and to them unpaid internships are
completely normal and they think of having interns in every way, shape
and form,” he said.
Some interns say their experiences were quite helpful. Emily Miethner, a
fine arts major at Hofstra, took an unpaid position at Gawker after
graduating in 2010, doing research and social media for the news and
gossip site. After two months, she moved to an unpaid internship at
Flavorpill, an online cultural guide.
The knowledge she gained at those places, she said, was crucial to her
landing a $35,000-a-year job as social media coordinator at Sterling
Publishing. “More than just the individual tasks that I did, it was
being in a great company culture and meeting a lot of people,” she said,
noting that she was able to work without pay partly because she stayed
at the home of her boyfriend’s parents.
Xuedan Wang, known as Diana, did not have such a positive experience.
Ms. Wang, who graduated from Ohio State in 2010, interned at Harper’s
Bazaar, working 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. overseeing eight other unpaid interns
who ran around Manhattan picking up items from various fashion houses
and showrooms.
“Harper’s Bazaar was my favorite magazine growing up. I was dazzled that
I was going to be working there,” she said. “But it was real grunt
work, lugging things around.”
Hearst Magazines, which owns Harper’s Bazaar, said its internship
programs enhanced students’ educational experience and fully complied
with the law.
Some people end up on an internship treadmill. Joyce Lee, who received a
film degree from Wesleyan in 2010, moved to Los Angeles and did six
unpaid internships, including one for Scott Rudin, a top Hollywood and
Broadway producer.
Her duties included reading scripts and picking up the mail. To pay her
rent, she worked at a coffee shop and handed out fliers for a taxi
company.
“Scott Rudin is made of money,” she said. “I don’t think it would be so
hard for him to pay five interns the minimum wage.”
A spokesman for Mr. Rudin said he could not be reached for comment.
Ms. Lee, who is now in New York making her own film and supporting
herself by again working at a coffee shop, said interns deserved better.
“If I ever become a famous filmmaker,” she said, “I promise I will pay my interns.”
