Diana Wang doesn’t want her college internship at Harper’s Bazaar.
That’s fine. I’ll take it.
Fashion is a difficult industry. Everyone in New York knows it. Ask the guy selling reheated halal chicken out of a dirty cart with a flashing LCD screen. He’ll tell you he prefers dragging a hot cart down 9th Avenue in 100-degree weather to working as a fashion merchandiser. At least he gets a lunch break.
According to my friend who used to work at a company that shall remain nameless except to say it liked rhinos:
“I’ve worked in the fashion industry for 4+ years. My first job was at a small fashion brand and the workload was brutal. On most days I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at my desk. A few times a week I’d end up working from home after a long train ride, making updates to their Ecommerce site remotely, usually wrapping up at around 2 or 3 AM. There was hardly a moment when the office was empty. If you left on time, you got dirty looks from people.”
Wang either couldn’t cut it or didn’t want to cut it, or she just didn’t like fashion or fashion just didn’t like her, or—who cares? Whatever the reasons, it didn’t work out for her. That happens.
But instead of cutting her losses and moving on to another career (or starting a blog to blow the whistle), she decided to sue. Because a lawsuit is the best way to forward your career…as the manager of a Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin’ Donuts in the back of a gas station.
By the way, she’s also suing Fenton Fallon because the whole world just doesn’t appreciate her shoe-counting, phone-answering genius.
In the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, one of the apprentices explains how he spent 10 years working with Jiro (who is recognized as the world’s greatest sushi chef) before he was allowed to make the egg sushi. He made an egg 200 times before Jiro finally told him it was good enough. When the apprentice describes the feeling of finally having his egg accepted, he is practically crying. It’s an emotionally charged scene, and you feel both empathy and jealousy for the apprentice. You wish that someone cared about you enough to be that hard on you.
In America, would the apprentice sue?
How is it that we appreciate movies about people being worked hard, but it doesn’t actually translate into working hard?
Anyway, here’s a list of a few of Wang’s grievances about her traumatizing wartime experience during her third tour of Harper’s from which she has no doubt had to seek pulsating light therapy to deal with her PTSD flashbacks.
“It was very belittling.”
Well. Hello and welcome to having a job on Earth.
“I was so uncomfortable and stressed out.”
Tell me about it, girlfriend! Stress! Time for some CHOCOLATE THERAPY!
She managed as many as eight other interns, sending them on 30 to 40 errands a day, and helping them file expense reports.
Actually, that sounds like great experience to put on your a resume. Try not to fuck it up.
She answered the accessories director’s phone, writing the caller’s name and holding it up, so her boss could decide whether or not to take the call.
Well, I have never heard of such a difficult job in my life! What if there’s no piece of paper? What if the pen stops working? This gal was like a 9/11 first responder!
On hand-delivering new outfits to editors between Fashion Week shows: “It kind of felt like you were working in shipping and receiving….”
Did you not hear me the last time, girl? CHOCOLATE THERAPY!!
Also, she worked from 9 am to 8 PM. In fashion. Which means she probably left four or five hours before everyone else in the office did.
Also, she’s a fucking pussy. I’ve gotten phone calls from UNICEF at 2 AM on a Sunday to edit a photo because someone in an international breastfeeding society called from Geneva to say they were offended by a picture of a baby bottle on our home page. Yes, that happened. And no, I wasn’t late for work the next day.
Anyway. That is the difference between having a job and a career. You do stuff.
Should companies stop taking advantage of interns? Probably. Should companies be nicer to everybody? Sure, that would be nice. It’s nice to be nice. I think all bosses should be nice! How about you? Yeah! Let’s sue!
Companies should also hire full-time employees instead of the “contractors” they hire to get out of paying their health insurance. They should hire based on experience rather than the boss’s friend’s niece. And they should not judge you based on where you went to college. Companies should do lots of shit.
Basically, Wang took an unpaid internship and then, four months later, decided it was so hard that she deserved to be paid for it. But it doesn’t seem she is suing for money. She’s suing because her boss wouldn’t give her a recommendation.
Well, I cannot for the life of me imagine why.
She tried to get a job, but her supervisor at Bazaar said he wouldn’t give her a recommendation. “He said, ‘“I don’t think you’re ready and you should do another internship,’” she says. Still, she interviewed for some magazine and public-relations positions but wasn’t offered any of them.
I don’t know the particulars of this case, but unless there was some Machiavellian plot to fuck over the best goddamn fashion intern in all of New York, it certainly seems like she is suing because she refuses to accept that she’s bad at her job.
Sure, companies do hire too many interns, and yes, this is a real problem. But it’s the employees who are getting fucked over because of this, not the interns. Interns are getting paid in experience. If they had experience, they wouldn’t have to take an unpaid internship, would they?
My friend who works in fashion had this to say about the practice of hiring too many unpaid interns:
“One of the more annoying moves my previous employers made was replacing half of my department with interns so they could cut the budget in half. You know what you have to offer when you’re an intern? NOTHING. You have zero experience. The gaggle of interns at my last job actually made my job harder because they were constantly fucking things up and I had to fix their mistakes to keep them from getting fired.”
For a large part of my childhood, my father worked the night shift polishing supermarket floors. He did not get to sue “supermarkets” because the job was hard or belittling. There were no internships. There was no college. I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to clean houses.
You may be wondering how a high-school dropout ended up publishing a memoir with Simon & Schuster or working as an editor for the main UNICEF.org international website, which, at the time, had something like 19 million views per month.
The answer is simple: I worked harder than anyone else wanted to.
I started working at UNICEF doing the 7 to 3 shift as an HTML lackey.
I sent my resume cold, on a whim. They called me immediately for an interview. An hour after I left the interview, they called to offer me the job. I was the only skilled candidate who was willing to work a shitty shift.
By the time the mass layoffs came, I was getting paid twice what I’d started at and now had experience as an acting senior editor at a major United Nations agency. Not bad for a high-school dropout.
So to the Diana Wangs of the world, thank you. Thank you for the yoga class in the top floor of the United Nations secretariat. Thank you for the two-hour lunches at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. Thank you for the opportunity to work. You have college degrees that you don’t appreciate and internships that are too hard for you to do and lawsuits that are apparently more important to you than getting your career off the ground. This is where I come in. This is how I got experience. I did the shit you didn’t want to do.
Thank you for not working.
You better have gotten paid for this article, Kyria!!!
What time should I pick you up in the Lexus my parents gave me for college graduation, so we can skulk off to the Midwestern state of our choosing to badmouth the organization who gave us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
Great piece.
Why are you such a neocon?
Thanks. But if five more people don’t compliment me, I’m suing the internet.
Yes, I would like fries w/ that shake.
ok. wang’s a puss and you’re a badass.
i can do ten 15′s in a row and not bat my eye.
commercial production flat rate shite. but this is all i will ever say about it. have some tact. you ain’t that hard sitting at a desk.
Kyria for the win over this entire generation! Wang should thrown in every self esteemer, trophy for participation parent’s face, as to how nonfunctional they’re making their kids in the face of life on their own
i wanted to read this but it seemed like a lot of work
so good. what a godawful whiny brat – i do love the irony of her moving back to ohio.
Fuck, yeah! This is like an IRL She’s All That, only the smart plucky chick who wins doesn’t look like Rachael Leigh Cook when she takes off her glasses and GOOFY hat. Still go, gurrrlll, WORRRRKKKKKKK!!!!
Bam! Fuck yeah.
A huge sense of entitlement and a shitty work ethic are the two giant wheels on this girl’s loser bicycle. May she ride that thing right into perpetual unemployment.
You get what you pay for in any business.
Regardless of tradition, it’s fucked to expect the legitimate discovery of talented job candidates based on their achievements as unpaid employees in a city like New York. Extreme hardship is not a good indicator for determining talent or moxy – more likely, it dilutes the pool with trust-fund kids and casting couch audition winners.
One single full-page ad in any of the referenced publications could fund a legion of interns able to scrape by on $10-15/hr, allowing them to pass or fail with some dignity and dinner.
Massively profitable media companies have no excuse for exploiting free labor.
I think you are right in every way, great post Kyria.
@chewey it’s also fucked to go through life expecting to be discovered, without paying any dues and working to be ready for opportunities that cross your path. You got a better chance at winning lotto than someone just out of the blue saying they’ve waited for someone like you to fall out of the sky for no reason on your part.
@M. David Enriquez, “A huge sense of entitlement and a shitty work ethic are the two giant wheels on your loser bicycle” should come in a fortune cookie!
There are some good points here, Kyria. Specifically, you make the distinction pretty clear between having a career and doing a job. It would be interesting to go into greater detail about the power dynamics at hand, though.
It is also great that you shared your UNICEF experience. However, comparing your own positive experience to that of Wang might be somewhat unfair. Good for Wang’s internship boss for suggesting that Wang might put in more effort before taking on more responsibility. Good for Wang for standing up for herself by expecting to be treated like a human being while working, and not a fucking machine. Employers who treat college interns like robots, or like shit, frankly, probably should have zero contact with college students.
There is another argument, here. It is, that hard work toughens up spoiled little college brats, and yes, there is truth to that. But your essay does not account for the darker side of interning . This would be the side where people in charge of young, impressionable adults, abuse their power. But really, you don’t even have to be young to be in an exploitative work situation. You just have to be on the bottom of the totem pole, so to speak.
But then again, that is the real world, and universities that send people to these internships would be wise to prepare students for the downside of working for some of these famous companies, just so that students can know what to expect. In fact, that’s the root of this issue. It is not that Wang has entitlement issues, it seems more like she was unprepared for what she might experience in the labor-heavy fashion/publishing industry. That’s a fault of the educational and the employment systems, and of course, Wang might have had a different experience had she done some preliminary research, too. But maybe she did do the research.
Wang’s shock is as much a fault of the educational system as it is the industry itself. Kids today are not so wise to the world of on-the-job hazing, threats of a losing a non-paid internship, or low-paying entry-level position due to not pleasing employers (and/or co-workers) in ways that have nothing to do with the the work at hand.
Where are these super-cool, and super generous, and talented employers who honor the art of apprenticeship? That is the flip-side of this internship discussion. Maybe time have changed, but it used to be that the quickest way to getting an internship at a prestigious place in NYC was to be “known,” whatever that means. And universities would steer students away from places that were legendary for not respecting the integrity of the human beings working for, said big-name company.
And do not for one second think that this exact same problem is not endemic in the highest levels of other types of institutions, either. Power corrupts. Interns exist because those in power feel entitled to exploit those with little power. Period.
It is simply too simple to slap a Puritanical “no-work-ethic” label on Wang. To me, the issue has less to do with her feeling entitled to file a law-suit. Instead, the law-suit is more about reforming the system. Isn’t she entitled to promote change, irrespective of her location in Ohio?
Finally, how do I get paid to write for this website?
I agree that these interns end up being entitled rich kids. That’s why you end up with an intern suing you because the job was too hard. If they chose from a pool of interns based on talent and experience instead of the college pedigree, they’d end up with better workers. In that way, it’s their own fault they are getting sued. They hired this idiot, after all
Everything that happens in Manhattan and London is the stupidest, most boring, bull crap to have ever happened on Earth. Rich people are horrible human beings. The kids that can afford super expensive private schools, or college in general, are mostly the worst people you’d ever want to be around. The word “entitlement” isn’t strong enough. Seriously, have you ever hung out with Pre-Med students on the East Coast at a school like Brown or Johns Hopkins? It’s like being in a vewy vewy special social club of A-grade assholes. And then these tards end up being our physicians. They hate their jobs. They just want to play golf and be dicks with their fratenity bothers. And they especially hate the poor and working class people that come to see them to be healed. They take as much of their patients’ money as possible and offer no advice or treatment. This is what I find lacking in Gavin’s ideologically based love of butt fucking Pig Capitalism. And the Repuglicans and Tea Party scum have earned these results for this shitty nation.
fucking.slow.clap. this is greatness.
@McJibberish I don’t disagree that she could try to reform the system. I think one way you do that is by getting into power and then being nice to people. She could pay her dues and work her way to the top and then be really cool to her own interns. I say this because I don’t know how you could change someone’s personality via a lawsuit. We’ve all had crazy bosses or those that lean towards the sociopath spectrum.
I didn’t go into detail about UNICEF’s practices in this piece, but they hired a bunch of contractors and interns to staff the department and it wasn’t very ethical. I actually ended up changing my tax filing status just so I could stay past five years. Anyway, it wasn’t important to me because I enjoyed the job, even though I wasn’t treated like a princess. I think they should have done things differently, but I also think that every person who worked there got something out of it. We were hardly slaves with nothing to show for it. In fact, I later got hired at another similar non-profit because of that experience… and the last two candidates up for consideration were me and a retired diplomat! And I got the job, which is completely insane. I could have sued UNICEF for their weird practice of hiring contractors, but it’s served me better not to. It’s one thing to be “right” and it’s another thing to be smart and take care of yourself. Diana Wang had better change her name if she ever wants to get a job again… she’s a liability now.
@McClintock and @Kyria, this entire situation is like the snake eating its tail. It will be interesting to see if Wang wins her suit, regardless, (and Wang, I hope you are reading this) Wang could go on to become the next big website/blog/youtube channel, etc, star. Or she could wait tables, or become a doctor, banker, lawyer or financier. At any rate, publishing is an industry that, depending on your point of view, may be becoming less influential. We can agree that the industry is changing so rapidly that the big names are becoming dinosaurs. I’ve run into a few ex-interns from well-known pubs whose job as an intern failed to translate into a successful career, and sadly they could care less about reforming the system from within. (Some have truly perfected the art of world-class navel gazing. Others have perfected the art of giving back to their communities.) But it would be interesting to know how success is defined in publishing/glamour industries. What is also true is that the industry leaders could take a hard look at their own practices and think twice before repeating the same practices that may likely get them sued by the so-called “entitled” bunch that they usually draw from. @Kyria, I admire your talent, your experience, and your enthusiasm. And I also have a question for you. In the last example you gave, you stated you edged out the competition, and you believe it was because of your work experience, and your commitment to working hard. However, I also noticed you said your competition was a retiree, presumably with even more experience than you, perhaps due to age. If that is true, could another reason that you were hired over the retiree be due to the possibility that the company preferred to higher a young person? If so, is that not age discrimination? If yes, what is your thought on age discrimination? Are you willing to reform the system from within if you have been a beneficiary of potentially discriminatory practices? Or, do you believe in age discrimination when it comes to hiring? What I am suggesting, here is not that you are in the wrong, but that it is important to take into consideration other factors that might be at play in the hiring process other than demonstrating the ability to work like a Puritan. This is not a critique of your work ethic, which I admire. This is a critique of your analysis. To which I restate – do you know the process by which one gets hired to write for this website, and its affiliates? To conclude, I used to think that education, experience, politeness, and a competitive streak were the great equalizers – but now, I would add self-reflexivity to the mix. I look forward to your next post. And to more comments from the commenters.
Unpaid internships are bullshit. If someone’s capable of “fries with that?” then they’re capable of delivering minimum wage value to the company and ought to be paid as such.
On the other hand, the law says unpaid internships must deliver educational benefit. And in Hearst’s defense, I think Diana the Noob *has* learned a thing or two about business, don’t you? So as much as it pains me to say so, “Not Guilty. QED”
Thanks McJibberish. Well, what they told me was that they hired me because I was a better writer and had more experience doing the actual job. This particular person had traveled the world and was far more educated and experienced than me, but when it came to rewriting the articles they needed, I had more experience than him. If it was age discrimination, I would have no idea. I don’t know at what age someone retires from travelling to another country, or what country he was in. He could have been 50 and just burned out from being in Sudan.
As for getting onto Street Carnage, I was personally asked to submit because they are familiar with my writing, so I guess they knew what kind of piece I would give them. Honestly, I’m the wrong person to ask about that (you’re not the first person to ask me), but, I would say that if someone wants to be a writer, they just need to write. Have a body of work and have it all be in a consistent voice. And do that for a long time, seemingly for no reason and for no pay. That would be my advice to anyone who wants to write. Prove yourself and keep being visible.
“Are you willing to reform the system from within if you have been a beneficiary of potentially discriminatory practices?”
I didn’t answer this because it was a leading question. I was the more qualified candidate. I could certainly talk about things I WOULD do in various situations, but why bother?
Brilliant piece.
there’s a difference between training and regular work right? an internship presumes a learning/ mentoring process, the fact is many places simply use interns as free labor and others don’t. i’m all for dissing the non-hard workin’ girl, but there’s no comment anywhere in here regarding learning to evaluate. did she actually get good training? i’ve worked in labs where kids were expected to do the copying and other bullshit tasks. or even important tasks, but no one gave a shit what they thought about anything. i’ve also worked in labs where we let them observe interviews, attend conferences, had a weekly meeting to discuss ideas for their own papers etc. guess who worked harder? just saying it may not be as cut and dry as you’re insisting.
people who train for years to make a fucking egg are kind of outliers. not sure we should be using them as a baseline.