The Internship Program

 

Something was stirring in Jakarta that September, and if you’d asked the bureaucrats shuffling through the government halls—their shoes squeaking against linoleum floors that had seen better decades—they’d have told you it was progress. Plain and simple. Nothing more sinister than that.

But hell, when had anything ever been plain and simple?

The program had a clean name: the National Paid Internship Initiative. Twelve million dollars earmarked, they said, like money was just another commodity you could stack in warehouses. Twenty thousand college graduates—kids who’d spent four years believing their degrees were golden tickets—would get six-month placements. Real wages. Real work. The Indonesian Chamber of Commerce was practically salivating over it, their press releases thick with words like “partnership” and “opportunity” and “the future.”

The future. Christ, wasn’t that always what they promised you right before the hammer fell?

But let’s back up a minute, because this story—like all the stories that matter—doesn’t really start in Indonesia. It starts in the dim, cobwebbed corners of history, where apprentices lived like indentured servants under the thumbs of guild masters who held the keys to everything that mattered. Medieval Europe, when the world was smaller and meaner, and a boy might spend seven years learning to work leather just for the privilege of not starving in a ditch.

Those apprentices, they knew something modern folks had forgotten: that every skill worth having came with a price, and that price wasn’t always money. Sometimes it was years of your life, bent over a workbench while your master breathed down your neck, his breath reeking of yesterday’s ale and this morning’s disappointment.

The system followed the colonists across the Atlantic, naturally. Even Benjamin Franklin had been an apprentice—though most people forgot that part of the story. They preferred the kite and the lightning and the witty sayings. But young Ben had served his time, just like George Washington, just like thousands of others who’d traded their youth for knowledge in a country that was still figuring out what it wanted to be.

America, though—America was different. It was hungrier. The guild system, with all its rules and rituals, couldn’t survive in a place where fortunes could be made overnight and lost just as quickly. Apprenticeships became something looser, more transactional. Less like adoption, more like employment.

Then the machines came.

The Industrial Revolution swept through the country like a fever, transforming everything it touched. Suddenly, you didn’t need seven years to learn a trade—you needed seven minutes to learn how to operate a lever or tend a loom. The masters became supervisors, the apprentices became workers, and the whole ancient dance of knowledge passed down through generations crumbled into dust and factory smoke.

The unions tried to save what they could, fighting for the skilled trades, for decent wages, for something resembling dignity in an age of mass production. But the old ways were dying, and everyone knew it.

That’s when the doctors stepped in—though they probably didn’t know they were changing everything.

By the late 1800s, young medical graduates were doing something called “interning”—living in hospitals, working ungodly hours, learning their craft through exhaustion and repetition. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. The model spread like ink in water: law firms, advertising agencies, government offices. If you wanted the good jobs, you had to prove yourself first. For free, more often than not.

Universities, sensing opportunity the way sharks sense blood, began offering internship programs. Two hundred schools in 1970. A thousand by 1983. The numbers climbed like a fever chart: 3% of students doing internships in the 1980s, 62% by 2017. What had once been unusual became mandatory, and what had once been entry-level jobs vanished entirely, replaced by unpaid “learning experiences.”

The Supreme Court, in 1947, had given companies a gift that kept on giving: as long as the intern learned more than the company gained, the labor could be free. It was a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, and drive they did—corporations stuffing their offices with bright-eyed college graduates who worked for nothing but the promise of future consideration.

Which brings us back to Jakarta, where the ghosts of medieval guild masters might have smiled to see their ancient system reborn in a new form. The Indonesian government was trying to thread a needle that had been giving America fits for decades: how do you train workers without exploiting them? How do you give young people experience without stealing their labor?

Their answer was simple, almost naïve: pay them. Real money, not promises. Minimum wage, but wage nonetheless.

The Impact Internship program was already building momentum, allowing students to convert work experience into academic credit—an echo of America’s cooperative education movement that had started at the University of Cincinnati over a century ago. But even with good intentions, the old problems persisted. Reports had surfaced of Indonesian interns working full-time hours for part-time pay, of companies treating them like employees without the benefits of employment.

It was the same song, different verse. The same dance humans had been doing since the first apprentice picked up the first tool under the first master’s watchful eye.

Because here’s the thing about internships, about apprenticeships, about any system where the young serve the old in exchange for knowledge: they’re mirrors. They reflect the values of the societies that create them. Medieval Europe valued hierarchy and tradition. Industrial America valued efficiency and profit. Modern Indonesia was trying to value fairness and opportunity.

But mirrors have a way of showing you things you don’t want to see. And sometimes, late at night when the office buildings stand empty and the echoes of unpaid labor haunt the hallways, you might wonder if all these programs—well-intentioned as they are—aren’t just new ways of doing very old business.

Twenty thousand interns, walking into offices across Indonesia, carrying their hopes and their degrees and their trust that this time would be different.

God help them all.