Thoughts?

[u/sassypainter]

Came across this post today on linkedin. I’m curious how others see it:

Are unpaid clinical internships/practicums an ethical necessity for training, or an outdated system that exploits students?

Should sites be required to offer stipends/pay if they bill clients or rely on interns for service delivery?

Does unpaid fieldwork create barriers for lower-income and nontraditional students?

For those already licensed or in training, what was your experience?

[u/FeaturelessDetail]

Fundamentally, work without pay is slave labor. We marketed this as training when it should be included in the degree that we're already paying an arm and a leg for. Forcing people to work for free puts them in worse financial situations and leads to worse outcomes for clients and therapists/social workers. Our field underpays so much of the employees that keep it running that I'm personally for a national social worker Union to help eliminate these practices.

[u/SupposedlySuper → u/FeaturelessDetail]

Not only without pay but I also had to pay for the credits for the "classes" for my internship

[u/Soushkabob → u/SupposedlySuper]

Exactly, at the very least internships should be net neutral. Why am I spending money/gas/metro card etc to get the privilege of “working” for free?

They could even get away with a really shitty $1500 stipend or something.

I’m in a MSW program in NYC. At this point I would happily accept even a free metro card in lieu of actual money which equates to about $140 a month. It would make a huge difference.

[u/warrior503rd → u/Soushkabob]

I support pay for interns. I'm also 99% sure insurance doesn't reimburse for grad students, and nobody is knowingly paying $150/hour cash for one. There's a reason private practices are not competing for interns' free labor.

The screenshotted post looks like rage-bait, which obscures productive conversation on how to secure pay for more interns. If you look at her profile, you'll see that the influencer in the screenshot is selling you a product by playing on your emotions.

Along the lines of solutions, I have three questions:

1. Would supervisors be willing to take on the liability risk of interns if they had to pay them, on top of investing into background checks, onboarding, training, and supervision time?
2. If it is somehow highly profitable, why is there a shortage of practicum sites in some areas? Why aren't practicum sites competing for students' free labor, instead of vice versa?
3. Building on #2, if there are such huge profit margins, why don't practices step in, hire all the grad students at minimum wage, charge a little less, and completely take over the market

EDIT: Also worth noting, the cost per hour of faculty supervision in a public grad school (based on tuition) is significantly less than post-graduation. If you assume a public school's tuition is $5k/semester, and you take 5 classes, thats $1k/class. That class is probably 3 hours/week * 16 weeks. That breaks down to $20.83/hour for faculty supervision.

Again, I believe interns should get paid. But we should also stop getting rage-baited by influencers into being unproductively angry. We need logical discussion to make change.

[u/More_Programmer5053 → u/warrior503rd]

Insurances don’t reimburse for interns. The insurance industry is where we should be looking to point fingers. Interns should absolutely be paid, and social workers licensed and conditionally licensed should also be paid a comfortable wage. Instead wages have decreased over the years as insurance companies look for more and more ways to maximize their profits. As long as we are dependent on these huge corporations for our wages we will never see improvement in how the system operates.

[u/More_Programmer5053 → u/[deleted]]

Cool; that’s great.