Roundtable

In the English-speaking world, a typical term of “indenture” lasted seven years; the (mostly male) apprentices usually took up their indentures, with a nudge or a shove from their family, when they were around fourteen years old, the common-law “age of discretion.” These indentures spelled out mutual obligations, more or less formally—the apprentice would work for such and such a period, at tasks relevant to the craft. (There were sometimes specific prohibitions against an apprentice performing grunt work considered the preserve of servants). In return the master was obligated to teach the apprentice his trade, while also providing housing, meals, clothing, and so on. Numerous other kinds of stipulations also commonly bound both parties—that the apprentice should not marry during his term, for instance, or that the master should provide bedding or clothing of a certain quality.

In Britain, the Elizabethan-era Statute of Artificers enshrined this basic setup until 1814. In the US, it began to come apart during the American Revolution, ironically enough since almost all of the Founding Fathers had started out as apprentices. Apparently, the revolutionary spirit broadened the discourse of freedom in a way that threw indentures into a bad light, and runaway apprentices became an intractable problem. “Go West, young man,” the Industrial Revolution, and the spread of mandatory schooling put further nails in the coffin of apprenticeship until the early twentieth century, when a coalition of enlightened employers, unions, and progressives managed to carve out the current, impressive niche.

So what about interns? In the late nineteenth century, the medical profession, eagerly standardizing, started pushing aspiring doctors to endure a year or two of purgatory between medical school and professional practice, “interning” them within the four walls of a hospital. Only after World War II did the model spread decisively to Washington, D.C. and corporate America. Yet the real internship boom is only three decades old—a sprawling, unstudied, unregulated mess gone global, allowing companies in every industry to save on costs and cut corners while millions of college students (and their families) scramble and sacrifice.

Every society has its gift economies—you probably don’t pay a relative for babysitting, for instance—but young people working for free en masse is something new and frightening. What’s amazing is how quickly we’ve become inured to it, how naturally we’ve accepted the idea of “investing in ourselves,” bartering for connections and resume line-items. It’s a useful reminder that the notion of work is hardly an eternal verity—more like a shifting, uneven landscape, fought over and redefined in every culture and in every age, in spite of hallowed old chiselings in stone.