Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy

By Ross Perlin

Millions of young people—and increasingly some not-so-young people—now work as interns. They famously shuttle coffee in a thousand magazine offices, legislative backrooms, and Hollywood studios, but they also deliver aid in Afghanistan, map the human genome, and pick up garbage. Intern Nation is the first exposé of the exploitative world of internships. In this witty, astonishing, and serious investigative work, Ross Perlin profiles fellow interns, talks to academics and professionals about what unleashed this phenomenon, and explains why the intern boom is perverting workplace practices around the world.

The hardcover publication of this book precipitated a torrent of media coverage in the US and UK, and Perlin has added an entirely new afterword describing the growing focus on this woefully underreported story. Insightful and humorous, Intern Nation will transform the way we think about the culture of work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781844679065

Ross Perlin

Ross Perlin is a graduate of Stanford, SOAS, and Cambridge, and has written for, the New York Times,�Time magazine, Lapham's Quarterly, Guardian, Daily Mail�and Open Democracy. He is researching disappearing languages in China.

Reviews for Intern Nation

[gdemange_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I highly recommend this book for anyone who has a student who is about to go away to college. It was a little late for me, but I gave it to my oldest grand-daughter upon graduating from college with the following note. May, 2012Intern Nation is sort of a fun book – loved the sub-title. As noted by the author there was a time when only doctors served in internships. You may very well be aware of present internship opportunities, but some of these stories were new to me. The one story I found most intriguing was about colleges that create a required course that mandates an internship for a particular degree. the college happily provides one for the student in this way. The college works with a company that can use free labor. It encourages the company to create an internship position. Unbeknownst to the student the company kicks back a sum to the college for supplying the intern while the internship pays nothing to the student. The college therefore gets to collect tuition from the student and a fee from the company while the student is made to work for nothing. The company now has a supply of free labor and the school a new source of revenue. In most law classes that would constitute fraud, but then many things about internships always have been illegal as the author points out."