On Nepal's Internship Culture..

Exploring the plight of Kathmandu's interns

“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

-Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

A spectre haunts Kathmandu- the spectre of internships. Recent years have seen a surge in the number of teenagers entering the workforce early on, getting exploited and facing burnouts under the guise of pedagogy, owing to the pseudo-capitalist culture I will attempt to exorcise throughout the course of this essay.

Preface

A few weeks ago, I saw a post on LinkedIn with an attached poll asking whether or not interns deserved to get paid. The spur that post caused in me transpired into me creating a survey and ergo writing this essay inquiring Nepal’s internship culture. 

“Doesn’t matter what they make you do, just do it if you want to get into a nice school” I heard my friend’s mom talk about internships the other day. There is a lot of fixation with the culture of internship among teens my age, especially those that are going through the college application process. I remember feeling overjoyed when I first got selected for an internship, even though it was unpaid. Partly, it was the feeling of getting to do something meaningful which made me feel like I was finally growing up but also largely the thought of how good that would look on my CV which would later on enable me to get into a good school, get a job, etc etc. School/Work spaces like to portray internships as a didactic force i.e one whose primary purpose is to train young workers vocationally thereby making them “ready” for the workplace (which isn’t always the case).

My aim with this essay thus is twofold— 1) to deconstruct and redefine the dominant narrative surrounding internships and 2) to examine the factors that coerce teens into pursuing internships through the lens of cultural hegemony/ideological state apparatus. Survey data will be incorporated throughout my analyses where necessary.

I will divide the essay into three segments:

1. Anecdotes and Epiphanies

2. Deconstructing Internships

3. Ideological Control & Extortion

Anecdotes and Epiphanies

If you know people working internships at Kathmandu or have worked internships yourself, you probably know about the type of toxic work culture that exists here. From getting underpaid to getting rebuked and reprimanded by your boss, it really is abominable. One of the workplaces I worked at is arguably the worst out of the lot; in the 5 months that I worked there, 4 interns were fired and more left of their own accord. One of the ex-interns begrudgingly deleted some of the work files which just goes to show the extent to which the workplace traumatised them. But out of all the problems I can point out, what I found to be the most pervasive was that they barely ever hired a grown up; virtually everyone who worked there was an intern. I want to highlight here how dispensable intern labour is to these corporations because firing one employee on average every other month is by no means normal. The fundamental problem here is how easily accessible intern labour is because everyone is looking for internships which is why even when the internship is unpaid, people tend to get excited about it. 

The boss at the same workplace would often boast about how at one of his previous firms’ unpaid interns would do a better job than the current interns. And this is when I started noticing the most glaring contradiction between what internship culture ought to be and how it exists– if you deem internships as a learning opportunity (as opposed to real labour that deserves real pay), the treatment of interns should also be as such. Instead of getting them to work extra hours, instead of rebuking or firing them, they should be corrected on their errors and be taught to improve. But at a point in which intern labour comes so easy that almost the entirety of your team is made of interns, profit-driven businessmen tend to care really less about their workers.

On one occasion, my co-worker who worked part time was required to come in full time for days because the employer wasn’t satisfied with their work- this workplace only paid NRS 8,000 per month.

And this also weirdly seems to be the case for about 27% of the survey sample (most of whom worked unpaid internships)

On another occasion, they fired an intern at the end of the month and didn’t pay them either just because the boss had a beef with the person whose son’s picture he had clicked at an event. The most infuriating part is that it was because of unfamiliarity and not even a purposed vengeful desire to take that picture.

Another thing I realised is that there was an active effort during every meeting to tell the interns about how great of an opportunity it was for them to be working there, saying things like “interns at my other business work for free”, “you should be grateful to get this opportunity so young”, “you can’t perform well at an actual job if you don’t do well here” and other things along those lines. This was usually coupled with condescending some of the interns because they weren’t living up to the boss’ standards.

I would not be exaggerating when I say that I haven’t met a single person so far who has been happy to work as an intern there, most of the people have a hostile attitude towards that company years after having worked there. Some have even made posts asking their social media mutuals to not intern at that company. 

And this is not just true for one workplace, it is the culture almost everywhere in the internship market or at least in the media industry which is where I have experience. Most media outlets that I know of either don’t pay their interns at all or pay a salary as low as NRS 5000 or NRS 8000. Even at my previous workplace, there were serious discrepancies in terms of the payment different employees received based on how much they could negotiate. I got paid NRS 8000 while some of my coworkers got NRS 5000 or 6000. This is outrageous when you know that the boss earns over NRS 200,000 a month. 

To put in context how sparse the interns’ salaries were, a two way ride from my home to the workplace and back costs around NRS 350 so if you multiply that with approximately 26 working days, the ride alone costs NRS 9100. As I stated earlier, some interns get paid NRS 5000 which also is the average salary for most working interns at other workplaces I know. This doesn’t even suffice for commuting alone if you live more than 2-3 kms away from your workplace. Most workplaces require you to come to the office for work instead of allowing you to work from home and if you work at media outlets like I did, odds are you have to travel a lot for the stories you will be writing so you will easily spend at least twice your salary on commuting alone. Most workplaces also do not provide you with lunch so that is another cost for which you will have to spend your own money and even if you spend Rs 100 a day on food– and I am being extremely charitable here because that amount doesn’t even get you a plate of mo:mo in most restaurants– you will end up spending NRS 2600 on lunch alone (for me that amount was/is much higher). So from my experience, even if you work internships that pay, you would need one that pays at least 12,000 if you wanna balance all expenditures and maybe save a thousand or two.

I want to introduce one of the most important data from my survey here

Out of the sample of 40 people, 45% work/worked unpaid internships while 35% get paid less than Rs 10,000. This serves as proof that internships in Nepal aren’t even able to facilitate the most basic of prerequisites of stipend vis-a-vis commute cost and lunch.

It is time for us now to enter the theoretical realm and take a look at what internships really are

Deconstructing Internships

The best critiques of internship culture can be derived from the Marxist school of thought which I will be exploring here. But before delving into jargons, I want to make it clear that neither Marx nor Marxists are against the culture itself inasmuch as the worker isn’t exploited. The critique is not of internships but of how internships currently exist within the political economy.

During Marx’s period internships weren’t a thing, apprenticeships were. Apprenticeships are akin to internships insofar as both seek to provide some form of training to a young worker before they enter the workforce. On one hand, Marx saw apprenticeships as a way for young workers to gain first hand valuable skills and knowledge while on the other he saw them as a leeway for capitalist employers to exploit and oppress workers. He argued that apprenticeships often involved long hours of work for a low pay, and that apprentices were often subject to harsh treatment and abuse by their employers.

We have established the low pay part to be true from the previous section of the essay so all that’s left to prove in order to show the Marxists critique’s relevancy to Nepal’s context is the point about long working hours and harsh treatment.

I want to now introduce another chunk of data that I got out of my survey. 

We can see here that a majority of the interns worked 4-8 hours a day which is the average working hours for an adult except most of the people that work internships have other commitments too because the sample for this ranges from 15-25 years old, 60% of whom are either 17 or 18. At this age, these teenagers have either high school or college which– by the virtue of the interns’ age if not their commitments– should warrant less working hours. I also want to strongly highlight that a good 30% of the sample worked 8+ hours a day. This is outrageous and should amount to child labour. Teenagers who aren’t even financially independent should not bear the brunt of the stress that comes with working more than 8 hours. Less than one-fourth of the sample works between 0-4 hours which should be the ideal working hours for interns– this shows just how exploitative the culture is.

But any scrutiny of Internship that sees it as labour would be incomplete without addressing why it amounts to labour, given that mainstream discourse depicts a stark contrast between actual labour and the learning-by-doing type of labour (apprenticeships, internships, etc). The idea that internships are not labour but rather a way to impart values and skills doesn’t address the following questions; why aren’t these values acquired through other means? Is it really necessary that a child work 8 hours a day for 5 months to pick up on skills vocationally? Why can those skills not be learnt during the process of work itself or through education?

Let’s take a small theoretical detour now before looking at what internships really mean.

In Marxist Theory, surplus value is the difference between the value of a product or service and the cost of the labour and materials that go into producing it.  Surplus value is crucial for Marx's analysis of capitalism because it represents the source of profit for capitalist enterprises and is therefore a key driver of the capitalist system. Marx argued that surplus value is created through the exploitation of the working class, as workers are paid less than the value of what they produce and are therefore unable to reap the full benefits of their labour. He also argued that surplus value is the driving force behind the accumulation of capital, as capitalists reinvest their profits in order to increase production and further increase their profits. Because capitalists are driven by profit, they will want to increase the surplus value as much as possible; in simpler words, it means that they would want to cut down on costs even if that means underpaying their workers or hiring unpaid labour. Similarly, Marx defined Surplus Labour as the labour performed by workers in excess of what is required for their sustenance or more than the value of their wages.

But again, when it comes to internships, it supposedly isn’t about earning as much as it is learning. So let’s take Marx’s analysis of Surplus Value and Surplus Labour and contextualise it in terms of gaining skills and values instead of earning wage to subsist.

If I worked to acquire “skills and values” instead of to earn a wage, and if the “skills and values” were to be acquired in a shorter duration than my allocated interning period, it would mean that any output I produce after having acquired those skills or values is output I am not gaining anything out of. Thereafter, the only thing I am doing through my internship is creating surplus value for my boss with no returns. If an intern, without learning anything new, is still working that internship (which was the case for me and probably is for most interns) - it contradicts what internships are supposed to stand for and the didactic notion of internships thus falls flat.

This is where my previous criticisms of internships also come in; there is no need to overwork your interns if it really is just a learning opportunity to you. Low wages and high working hours just hint towards the bourgeois’ opportunistic nature and wont to exploit labour.

Another thing I want to add here is that the whole “learning opportunity” notion is devoid of any nuance whatsoever as to why it is an excuse to exploit intern labour given that they are creating value for your company. Internships should always be paid.

It is thus necessary to redefine what the culture of internship today stands for, your answer; to serve the interests of the ruling class. Internships should not be conflated as a part of learning because if that were the case, interns would not be subjected to such harsh treatment.

Internship also delays the point in time when the intern gets paid with good worker wage and as such also caters to the interests of the ruling class by cutting down on production costs.

We can hereby conclude that the culture of internship is in actuality a tool of exploitation that functions under the guise of pedagogy and generates surplus through free or cheap labour. 

But like Surplus Labour derived out of adult work, Internships should also have an element of extortion if they are– as I say they are –inherently exploitative. In order to understand how intern labour is extorted, it is first necessary to understand how labour– or anything that requires a person to be docile towards the political economy, really –is extorted. 

Ideological Control & Extortion

There are many marxists and neo-marxists with different analyses of how this extortion takes place but for the sake of this essay, I will be talking about the ideas proposed by Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. 

Cultural hegemony (proposed by Gramsci) refers to the dominance or rule of a particular group or culture over others. It can be thought of as a way in which the values, beliefs, and practices of a dominant group are imposed on other groups, often through the use of power and coercion.

Cultural hegemony can manifest in various ways, including through the media, education, and other forms of socialisation. It can also involve the exclusion of certain groups from participating in the dominant culture or having their cultural practices and traditions suppressed or marginalised.

Let’s now contextualise these in terms of internships in Nepal. There is a push towards internships from education because your college counsellor is constantly pestering you to pursue internships as they’re supposed to help you with your college applications and things as such. In terms of media, hustle culture plays a big role in making people conscious about not being productive. Despite what Tate and them say, it really is okay for a 16 year old to relax instead of working 8 hours a day. There are several nuances to hustle culture that I will talk about later but on exclusion— when you do not intern, you are less likely to get a job, you are less likely to get into a good school (also can be perceived as a push from education) and your cv is smaller. At this point, even if you do not want to intern, you do it under duress because you do not want to be considered a failure. This is how your consent is manufactured through extortion to serve the interests of the ruling class. 

Gramsci believed that cultural hegemony was largely maintained through the spread of ideology, which serves to naturalise and legitimise the dominant group's values and beliefs.

But before moving on to the Althusserian paradigm, I want to talk about another another agent of control i.e workforce. This is something I found from my own experiences but approximately 43% of the survey sample also seems to have faced this– companies themselves also tend to overplay their networking value and institutional recognition by highlighting constantly how great of an opportunity it is for the intern to be able to work for them. (I also talked about this in the anecdotes section)

This creates a false sense of significance for the internships you’re working which makes you want to keep working longer to get that experience on your CV.

The concept of the "Ideological State Apparatus" (ISA) refers to the various institutions and practices in a society that serve to reproduce and reinforce the dominant ideology. The concept was developed by Althusser, who argued that the ISA plays a key role in maintaining the power and dominance of the ruling class in capitalist societies. Ideological State Apparatus is an ensemble of agents of socialisation that seek to push the ideology of the ruling class with the intent of not only maintaining the status-quo but also reproducing it. (Read Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser for a more nuanced account)

Following are what Althusser lists as Ideological State Apparatuses (in no particular order)

• the religious ISA (the system of the different churches)

• the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private ‘schools’)

• the family ISA

• the legal ISA

• the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties)

• the trade-union ISA

• the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.)

• the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports, etc.)

Althusser argues that ISAs operate through what he called “interpellation” where those following the dominant norms are hailed which causes the broader society to internalise the same values and aspire towards the same goals. 

The ISAs that would be relevant to Nepal’s internship culture or the global internship culture for that matter are the educational ISA, the communications ISA and the cultural ISA. 

Earlier, I talked about how there is an ideological push from the education system for the youth to pursue internships. Now I will focus more on the media/culture side of it all and explore how those forces seek to legitimise this culture.  

I previously talked about the LinkedIn discourse on whether or not interns should be paid, this is the exact type of shit (what use is making a Substack instead of writing a research paper or an article for a publication if I don’t get to swear)  that legitimises the exploitative culture. It would be wrong to assert that everyone just believes that interns should not be paid because of such posts but the fact that the poll had negative votes shows that the discourse still affects a certain portion of the populace.

I don’t think many people believe in the efficacy of internships because almost half of my survey sample believed that they were as good at their work as their coworkers but still got paid less by the virtue of their internship.

This demonstrates some level of consciousness among interns about how exploitative internships are.

There is a lot of overlap between the communications and the cultural ISAs because of how embedded into popular culture media is. I am specifically talking about hustle culture here but this also applies to anything that depicts the culture of internships even if it's just a Netflix high school drama where the protagonist is going through the college application process. 

Hustle Culture can be seen through the lens of ISA insofar as individuals that “succeed” (work day in and out as opposed to relaxing/resting) are hailed which, for obvious reasons, befits the capitalist class. 

The culture is embedded into the media because of how much importance we have prescribed to productivity, it would be foolish to deny this because all of us have at least on one occasion experienced productivity guilt. 

For me personally, it was also interactions I had on an individual level with people my age who were working internships that pushed me to intern. This can be seen as a by-product of hustle culture because I hailed the person working the internship over another person who was not. 

While cultural and Ideological control is all very real, I do not want to downplay the level to which coercion, or what Gramsci called exclusion, plays a role here. Even when you do realise the manipulation and the exploitation that come with internships, you end up doing internships because that is the best alternative to get you into a good school or help you ultimately get a well-paying job. 

At this points we have established two things:

1. Internship Culture serves the interest of the Capitalist or Ruling Class

2. Interns are forced to participate through extortion (cultural hegemony and ISA) 

But to address the most significant problem of all- it is virtually impossible for us on an individual level to bring change in the internship culture. The problem and the solution are both systemic. Interns are only exploited because they are so easy to find; jobs, by contrast, are much harder to find. The high supply and relatively lower demand of intern labour is the precondition manufactured through class reproduction and manufactured agency that has made intern labour easy to come by for the capitalist while internship is indispensable to the intern because of the value it holds as a result of cultural hegemony. The urgent solution to this then would be for the state to intervene and enact welfare policies that would befit interns. UK is a great example here because they have a National Minimum Wage for interns. Amidst the massive influx of teenagers joining the workforce, it is high time the Nepalese Government embraces a similar minimum wage policy for internships or at least sets a limit to intern working hours. The problem with this is that getting Government to enact such policies is a herculean ordeal especially at a point in time where all of the major media houses feed off of underpaid or unpaid intern labour.

So to sum up my almost 4000 words long essay in three words- FUCK THE SYSTEM!