Your last comment about unpaid internships being an attempt to keep lower class people out of the industry seems pretty tinfoil-hat-ish. It's a much more logical conclusion that companies want to save money by not paying interns. They're able to do this outside of STEM because of the lower barrier to entry in these fields and thus larger surplus of potential candidates. Basically, companies do it because they can.
I doubt STEM companies are abnormally altruistic in this sense. If they could get away with it, they would. Unfortunately for STEM, hiring low quality engineers is much higher risk than hiring low quality marketing interns.
From what I understand, it is the common explanation of unpaid internships in particular industries, particularly fashion and Hollywood. I've often heard that working in these unpaid internships is seen as "paying your dues"; some sort of artificial hardship that you must be able to endure before you are considered to be "in".
Whether or not it is the intent (difficult to prove, to say the least) it is the effect.
I think it's less of an explicit class warfare type thing and more of an implicit one, but it's not just unpaid internships:
- Afterschool classes and clubs require parents who are free after 3.30pm to drive you there and back.
- That spring break trip to Rwanda to help underprivileged youths would look great on your college application! Too bad it costs $500 to join the mission.
- You're not taking 4 AP classes and volunteering on weekends? You must be lazy, and its certainly not that you have to work 20 hours/wk after school to help put food on the table.
- etc. etc.
(I say this as a very privileged person who was fortunate enough to have two full-time parents -- but also as someone who knew people who weren't.)
I can attest to the after school thing. It was basically impossible for me to do any after school clubs or activities because my parents couldn't afford a house in walking distance to the high school, and they had to work and couldn't come home before 7 PM.
You're completely right. My girlfriend had two unpaid internships, and will have another before she graduates college (her college mandates her last semester be entirely a documented unpaid internship). She described it exactly as you just did - "paying your dues."
She has a dual major in business and arts, and wants to work on Broadway doing marketing or production work. I find it sickening, and it saddens me the way interns are considered a completely free, fungible, and exploitable resource just so they can get phony career advancement "at some point."
I don't doubt that it may be a residual effect, but to say that it's an attempt at class warfare is to imply intent. I simply don't believe that intent is there. Then again, I generally err on the side of assuming people are acting somewhat rationally rather than maliciously irrationally.
That's not an entirely fair perspective. We're not just talking about aspiring actors and models. People with legitimate business degrees are forced into (frequently unpaid) internships just so they can work in the less glamorous production/marketing/financial arms of the entertainment industry - the parts that they won't get famous or rich for, but which they want to do because that's their dream.
My significant other will be graduating college soon in exactly that predicament, she wants to work on Broadway.
I doubt STEM companies are abnormally altruistic in this sense. If they could get away with it, they would. Unfortunately for STEM, hiring low quality engineers is much higher risk than hiring low quality marketing interns.