THE ECONOMIST
“DON’T talk to the press. Have a good attitude. Always say yes. You are not here to change the world.” And ladies, please, “Do not put us in a position to remind or suggest what qualifies as proper attire.”
These are among the instructions given to interns in the office of John Boehner, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, in an 80-page manual accidentally left at a Capitol Hill house-party last summer and then posted online. Interns in “Boehnerland”, as his offices are known, spend their time answering the phone, sorting through the post and giving tours of the Capitol (“Do not make something up.”). They are instructed to point out a photograph of Mr Boehner with his high-school friends, “illustrating [his] humility”.
Boehnerland’s Washington offices are employing 24 unpaid interns this summer. The 534 other members of the House and Senate have many more—no one knows exactly how many, because Congress is exempt from freedom-of-information laws, but perhaps 6,000, with more in spring and autumn. Down the Mall, the White House has employed 429 unpaid interns in the past year. The Supreme Court has its own programme. In all, each summer between 20,000 and 40,000 interns work in Washington’s government departments, lobbyists, non-profit groups and firms.
The internship—a spell of CV-burnishing work experience—is now ubiquitous across America and beyond. This year young Americans will complete perhaps 1m such placements; Google alone recruited 3,000 interns this summer, promising them the chance to “do cool things that matter”. Brussels and Luxembourg are the summer homes of 1,400 stagiaires, or embryonic Eurocrats, doing five-month spells at the European Commission. The “Big Four” audit companies—Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)—will employ more than 30,000 interns this year. Bank of China runs an eight-week programme (“full of contentment, yet indescribable”, according to an intern quoted on its website); Alibaba, a Chinese online-retailing behemoth, has a global scheme. Infosys, an Indian tech giant, brings 150 interns from around the world to Bangalore each year.
From here to internity
The term has different meanings in different places. In Japan, for instance, an internship tends to be a three- or four-day assessment of potential recruits. DeNA, a Tokyo-based software company, runs a four-day internship of this sort, for which participants are paid ¥100,000 ($950). Sometimes the term is stretched. For Foxconn, which runs electronics-assembly lines in China, students toiling away alongside other workers have on occasion been labelled “interns”—at times they have numbered up to 150,000.
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