Epilogue

0.75 EUR.

Not enough for a train ticket. Not enough for my building’s laundry machine. I’ve been stuck in my room for five days straight because going outside means spending money. And I have 75 cents.

When I accepted a year-long internship at an international organization, I was told that the stipend would be more than enough to cover living expenses and that I would gain valuable professional skills in our specific industry. So I worked 40 hours per week, often more, got physically sick from stress several times, and slowly took on more and more tasks until I was doing the vast majority of work for my team mostly consisting of older men patiently waiting for their retirement. All of this while being told that I should be grateful for the priceless opportunity that the organization gave me. Although most of us weren’t unpaid like at other organizations, we made far below the minimum wages for any full-time position in our city. Sometimes it was hard to reconcile whether my wage wasn’t a reflection of my own professional worth and the value of my work. I remember my self-esteem became so low at some point that I effusively thanked my supervisor for letting me put my name on an article that I wrote.

Despite finding subsidized housing, using every low-income benefit offered in my city, and avoiding spending whenever I could, the internship had a heavy negative impact on my financial situation, forcing me to dip into my savings from other jobs, which was originally intended to pay for the remainder of my education. My coworkers and peers kept reminding me that other people must have it much worse, so living in a historical, beautiful European city while working at one of the most prestigious organizations in our field should be enough to keep us pleased and satisfied with the state of our lives.

To date, I have spent nearly three years of my life doing internships, still worrying whether it will be enough to eventually gain an entry-level position in the current job market. My conclusion from these experiences is that the main concern of companies and organizations is whether the work gets done and whether they continue to function, naturally paying little regard to who is actually doing the work. After all, why should well-paid, permanent staff do their tasks when there is an eager student or recent graduate, desperate to gain work experience so they one day too can earn enough to stop skipping lunch? After working at an international organization, all hope of the existence of high-quality internships – fulfilling their original purpose of teaching and benefiting the intern rather than representing cheap labor for the organization – has left me. In this modern age, any international organization solving their need for additional labor by replacing permanent staff positions with an abundance of unpaid, or even underpaid, interns does not deserve any authority on the topics of exploitation, labor, or youth empowerment.