Every Sunday Gothamist opens up and lets our friends and readers express themselves in opinion pieces, in this case the views shared are those of one Phoebe Maltz.

What are interns? I've been an intern, but never an unpaid one, although I could imagine circumstances that would make taking such a position seem reasonable. The justification for an internship being unpaid is that the position is an educational experience for the intern; the transfer of goods is from the organization to the intern. While both a paid internship and a traditional job also serve as learning experiences for the employee, an unpaid internship ought to differ from these other situations in that the help provided by the intern to the organization is negligible. Which is what makes this ad so odd. How could an unpaid intern be "needed ASAP"? Here's a clue: "Duties include filing, setting up new filing system, creating and editing org charts, updating 401Ks and other files, assist Human Resources Director in all duties, etc." In other words, a job, a rather dull-sounding one at that, but with the special quality of not paying anything at all.   This is just wrong.

I did plenty of filing--along with its cousin, book-shelving--during college, and the primary motivation to keep moving during a day of that sort of work is that, every two weeks or whatever, you will have money. You will also learn about the organization you’re working for, make contacts with those who do something other than file, help an organization whose mission you have some affinity for, but more importantly, you’ll learn what it’s like to work. You will experience that unique situation in which you are forced to do things you don’t feel like, to take everything from criticism to crap with a smile, when in all other conditions you’d respond indignantly, simply because your paycheck depends on it. Not all jobs require the taking of crap, but this is nevertheless a lesson worth learning, as a good number of them do.

The unpaid internship has expanded to encompass all manner of jobs formerly known as “secretary” or, more recently, “administrative assistant.” Don’t have much work experience? Want a foot in the door? A new, lower, yet somehow more respectable level of labor has been created just for you. Also important to note—the unpaid internship is not merely a summer-long or part-time position for a student who may not be expected to be bringing in much in the way of income—unpaid internships also exist for college graduates, including Harper’s Magazine, where college and post-college interns “work on a full-time, unpaid basis for three to five months.” (For what it’s worth, I’ve never applied to Harper’s, thus my comfort in using this magazine as an example).

The problem with unpaid internships is many-fold, but aside from the obvious—they screw over those who cannot afford to take them—their presence has warped the mentality of recent graduates. It now seems almost greedy to expect compensation, any compensation, for work. Not just non-profit work, but any work with even the slightest potential to be interesting, or to lead somewhere, or in a pleasant location, or… anything, really, that doesn’t involve a McDonalds uniform.