Exclusive free labor: voluntary unpaid internships of white collar candidates

Abstract

This thesis examines voluntary unpaid internship system, and the profile and the motivations of those who participate in this form of internship in Turkey. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with totally 30 students and new graduates from three universities (Boğaziçi, Bilkent and Marmara Universities) who do at least one voluntary unpaid internship. These interviews are very significant for this research because of the inadequate voluntary internship research in academic literature. This inadequacy stems from both the lack of academic resources about unpaid internships resulted from being a recent debate and the lack of internship categorization. The need of doing an internship which results especially from the harsh competition among peers, the desire of expanding choices and having a strong network increases the number of interns all over the world that also make internship types vary. It is a fact that not every student has a formal internship (academic or optional) at school. At this point, internship categorization is important to differentiate academic, optional and voluntary internships, and paid and unpaid forms of internships from each other. This thesis categorizes internships and presents “voluntary unpaid internship” as the most vulnerable internship form. Then, it analyzes voluntary unpaid internships by drawing on the analysis of the precariat of Guy Standing and the forms of capital of Pierre Bourdieu. In doing so, it claims that even though voluntary unpaid interns require higher level of the forms of capital in order to construct the intern identity, the need of doing internship usually results in white collar candidates’ free labor in precarious working conditions. In other words, despite of their powerful cultural, economic and social support, voluntary unpaid interns are still a part of the process of precarization.