Dear Lindsey LaPointe,
My name is _____ ________ and as an aspiring social worker I am writing to ask for your support for the urgent need to transition all social work internships from unpaid to paid positions. This change is not only essential for upholding the social justice principles at the heart of our profession, but it is also a vital step toward strengthening the future social services workforce. I will be addressing three key points such as student debt, financial inequity, high cost of living and how they affect interns, and why it is good to have paid internships. Please oppose the continued practice of public universities in Illinois charging social work students tuition for their field placements and assigning students to internships and field placements where they work without any pay or compensation because it creates financial inequities and leave unpaid interns without essential labor protections.
Using the “principal beneficiary test,” police internships are assessed under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to see if interns qualify as employees who need to be paid. Although “for-profit” businesses must pay their employees under the FLSA, interns may not be considered as employees and are therefore not compelled to receive payment for their work. The FLSA principal beneficiary test applies to social work interns, because their placements are unpaid because they occur in non-profits and government agencies, which are generally exempt form FLSA wage requirements. I am advocating for the Fair Labor Standards Act to be changed so that it will classify interns as employees and be entitled to minimum wage.
As a State Representative, I know you can't change the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, but Illinois should have a state-level law that does what I propose, and if agencies and universities cannot afford to let social work students do their field placements without paying tuition, nor can they pay stipends to those students, then I would like the state to provide funding to universities and agencies that help social work students gain expertise in field placements to reduce these costs for Illinois social work students.
Unpaid internships create financial hardships for interns in the real-world by requiring them to work for free while still needing to cover basic living expenses, and sometimes even pay for college credit. For example, I attend the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) as an undergraduate student majoring in social work. In addition to the internship credits (for which I must pay tuition), I’m taking out extra loans to pay for living expenses in a new city. Since I have an internship from Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 4:30 pm and class from 6:00 pm to 9:30 pm, I am unable to work part-time. This has created significant financial hardship for a position with no income. I continue to struggle with financial support for housing, food, transportation, and other expenses.
I have also spoken with peers who graduated with a Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) and Master of Social Work (MSW) who are still in debt for more than $70,0000, which is made worse by hundreds of hours of unpaid labor. According to the news article by Metz & Bonila, “MSW students graduate with an average of $68,0000- $76,000 in student loans, burdening social workers and their families for decades after graduation.” Metz & Bonila also disscused how social work education in the U.S. is experiencing a decline in student enrollment across all degree levels and believe that paying social work students for their mandatory internships could help reverse these issues.
Research has also shown that social work interns in the U.S. are not the only ones who face difficulties with unpaid internships. In the article, “This Unpaid Placement Makes You Poor,” Morley et al. (2023) argues how field education costs are also a burden for international social work interns. According to a study done in 2023 by Morley et al. Australian social work intern’s face financial difficulties during unpaid placements. The Morley et al. (2023) gathered data from 372 interns about their financial situation, income, and how they managed to support themselves during placements. According to the findings, 66% of interns are worried about their financial situation, 17% of interns go without food and other basic necessities, 50% of interns have a weekly spending deficit, and 25% of interns must work at least 20 hours a week to make ends meet (Morley et al., 2023). This demonstrates how the current placement structure is not financially sustainable for many students, potentially affecting their well-being and ability to complete their studies.
In order to implement a change where social work internships are paid, we need to find a way to secure funding for these positions. We could start by getting various stakeholders, including academic institutions, government officials at both state and federal levels, and organizations that benefit from social work interns, to agree to contribute financially. Sources of funding could include public grants, funding from universities, or policy changes that mandate or incentivize paid internships. In the U.S. and Australia, Metz & Bonila, discussed how they are forming groups like “End Placement Poverty” and “Payment for Placements (P4P)” movements to demand that universities, government agencies, and internship sites start paying social work interns for their labor.
While internships serve as educational opportunities, paid interns would not only help alleviate financial issues but also improve the quality and future of the social work field by valuing student labor, attract a wider, more diverse pool of talent to the social work field, and address the long-term workforce shortage in social services because interns are more motivated and invested in their work, leading to better outcomes for clients and agencies. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Jasmine Gaines
References
Metz, E., & Bonila, P. O. (n.d.). Can paid internships save social work? Global Social Service Workforce Alliance. https://socialserviceworkforce.org/blog/can-paid-internships-save-social-work/
Morley, C., Hodge, L., Clarke, J., McIntyre, H., Mays, J., Briese, J., & Kosleck, T. (2023). This unpaid placement makes you poor: Australian social work students’ experiences of the financial burden of field education. Social Work Education, 43(4), 1039–1057. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2022.216150
US Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division. (2010). Fact sheet# 71: Internship programs under the fair labor standards act. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-internships
This is an example of issue advocacy, where you bring a problem to the attention of someone in government and suggest why the problem must be solved and make some general recommendations of how the problem might be solved. The problem of unpaid internships and tuition expenses for students who must do field placements or practicums in non-profit or government sectors (including social workers, school teachers, and most nursing students, but also some political science and exercise science students) could be addressed at the federal level or at the state level. You have decided to write your letter to a person in the Illinois General Assembly, so it's appropriate for you to emphasize the importance of state-level interventions to solve the problem. Also, you wrote to a member of the state General Assembly who is herself a social worker, and that makes sense. Maybe you could have written this letter to all three of the social workers in the General Assembly.
I think you make a good point when you highlight declining numbers of students earning social work degrees just as the demand for qualified social workers is increasing. You also make a good moral argument about the unfairness of the situation. Although Representative LaPointe is a liberal (a progressive), so arguments based on care and justice ethics are likely to work best, if you included Haas (a Republican), you would probably have emphasized more the effort of social work students to become financially independent as self-reliant professionals, and said something more about the tens of thousands of dollars in student debt that newer social workers may cary as they enter the field, and how those debts might drive them from the social work field into fields using similar skills and paying significantly higher salaries (management in corporations, human resource officers, sales, etc.).
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