Unpaid internships are exceedingly common, especially in the political world. Teams of organizers need young, ambitious college students. It’s the anomaly, not the standard, when a national or state congressional internship opportunity provides funded opportunities for students.

Julia Greensfelder, a current senior, has worked in various intern positions in both the United States government and the United Kingdom parliament. Under these internships, she learned how to hone in those research skills to make deliverables for a boss instead of a professor, a tool which has served her well as she looks for opportunities after graduation. But the most important thing she learned in any internship, she said, was how to advocate for herself. “I was neglected in a ton of my internships, like, I was not given substantive work,” she said. “Internships are there to teach you what you don’t like, and to teach you what you do like, and to teach you how to advocate for yourself within a working environment.”

Certainly, these are important skills, but it’s also important to consider the costs that they come at: namely, the inequity of providing opportunities for people who already can afford to forfeit pay for experience. Arik Wolk, a senior who has worked on a senate campaign, acknowledged that when considering what he’s gained from his work experience. “I don’t want to discount the value of the experience that I got working or that anyone would get working on a campaign. But I don’t think that that outweighs the necessity of creating a more accessible entry into democratic politics,” said Arik Wolk.

Paid opportunities, while hard to find, incentivize employers to be more intentional about the work that they’re giving their employees. Senior Noah Finkelstein is an intern for the special projects on the community engagement team at the Center of Policing Equity. While he was given significant responsibility from his position, he also gained both experience and fulfillment from being part of the larger conversation about racial justice. While originally he was in the position as an unpaid worker, the organization has since compensated him and organized for the internship to be paid. “But I was happy to be doing it for free, because it felt like really important work.”

Ultimately though, that shouldn’t have to be a stipulation. We should be moving towards a work environment where students and young people should be paid exactly because they’re doing such important work. Students are helping to make campaigns successful, make nonprofits successful and make people money. So why aren’t they themselves compensated for the substantive work that is pushing these projects forward?

Many students simply cannot afford to work for free, and the gap that is created between students who can afford to work for free and those who cannot can have far reaching effects on who is involved in our political system. “Internships, unpaid internships, on principle, I think are exploitative and wrong. I don’t think they should exist, because they create these vast inequities,” said Greensfelder. She continued on a hypothetical, stating the possibility that someone could qualify for an internship simply because their parents could afford the opportunity.

It’s especially ironic granted the push for a higher minimum wage that’s being promoted by the same senators and house members who didn’t see the need to pay their own interns, the people who helped these officials reach their positions. The hypocrisy of this is staggering, especially with the funds that are accessible to recent campaigns.

For example, the three most well-funded senate races in the 2020 election cycle raised $408,450,819 dollars in total, yet none of them paid their field interns during the cycle. Wolk introduced an important point­—that some smaller senate campaigns, like Deb Lavender’s campaign in Missouri, paid canvassers fifteen dollars an hour to work for her campaign, according to a College Democrats newsletter. “Deb was advocating for a higher minimum wage and was living up to that. So I think if you can do it with a state senate campaign—obviously, you need a great finance director—but I think it shows that it can be done.”

Campaigns do have financial constraints which differ dramatically from race-to-race. Those operating on a shoe-string budget without a lot of capital to start with benefit especially from hiring unpaid interns. At the same time, Finkelstein thinks it’s a tradeoff that campaigns make consciously. “Those campaigns know that math, and yet they still buy the ads anyway. There’s a certain point at which they’re not getting anything else for ads in a meaningful way, and they could be using those millions to pay their people.”

Lavender’s congressional campaign raises an interesting question: where will the transition from unpaid to paid internships come from? There is very little incentive for organizations and campaigns to pay their interns, as they will undoubtedly have applicants either way. One approach is to advocate for change in the legislative system. Capitol Hill allocated a budget for members to pay interns in 2019, but those interns compose a very small fraction of political employees at large. Not included in that legislation are incumbent candidates or even state senate office interns, so it’s clear that there are still major steps to be taken in terms of legislative action that would ensure that interns were paid a livable wage. Wolk believes that the push for legislative change is going to be hard to accomplish, which is a very valid concern. “I think realistically, the way it’s going to come organically [is] from just becoming standard practice on democratic campaigns,” he said. Instead, he sees increasing the public profile of the issue as a path to a solution.

At the very least, there is a major need for transparency. There is no current report or record system to view information regarding either national or state level interns. Public knowledge about which candidates or incumbent members pay their interns would force politicians to be accountable for their campaign’s financial decisions and expose those who are benefitting from the unfair system.

As a student, Vice President Kamala Harris interned in the California Senate office that she held thirty years later. And while she is a high-profile example, the reality is that making thousands of phone calls and working in any political position is guaranteed to get young Americans engaged in the political process. Today’s interns are tomorrow’s politicians, so politicians need to be much more intentional about promoting an inclusive environment.