Interns

Today’s Today show job search lede: “Starting over at 40 – The New Interns.”

Now, I’ve worked a lot of places, and very few of them – including places like unions and union pension funds that had no money to call their own – ran on such a tight budget that they couldn’t dredge up a couple of hundred a week to give someone a “job” instead of an “internship” if they needed something done. Today, it’s like, “hey we have a new client, let’s hire some interns.” Or “Wow, that filing’s really piled up, let’s hire an intern.” The executive assistant at one of my clients is an “intern.” He’s been an “intern” for, like, two years. I’d like to see them try to hire an executive assistant for the barely-over-minimum-wage salary that kid is making.

So, further to, and in honor of, Keith Olberman’s “special comment” last night about the excesses of contemporary corporate culture – which was itself in response to news that Citicorp just redecorated its senior executive offices to the tune of $10 million (quick: how many $100,000/year jobs is that?) – enough with the internships, guys! In the old days we had a name for these kinds of internships: They were called jobs. (A nice Anglo-Saxon four-letter word that, “jobs.”)