Aleph, UCLA Undergraduate Research Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences

This article examines how unpaid internships, whether enforced by universities or by a student’s need to guard against job insecurity, are a symptom of neoliberalism brought to attention by the COVID-19 pandemic. Neoliberalism, under the guise of an impartial and objective free market, facilitates a brutal economic reality brought on by the pandemic. This article seeks to trace the deep inequalities encoded in the United States’ neoliberal structure, and how unpaid interns have been affected both materially and psychologically.