I am busy trying to become who I am

The No-Limits Job

Every generation has its own anthem of making the journey from
youthful naïveté to adult reality, whether it's Neil Young's "Old
Man," Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or most recently, perhaps,
the Taylor Swift song "22."

"Tonight's the night when we forget about the deadlines," it goes. "It
feels like one of those nights, we won't be sleeping."

If only it were as easy for Ms. Swift's less affluent contemporaries
to blow off their deadlines as it is for the singer-songwriter (now a
slightly more seasoned 23). Sleepless nights are more likely because
they are on the clock, not at the club.

"If I'm not at the office, I'm always on my BlackBerry," said Casey
McIntyre, 28, a book publicist in New York. "I never feel like I'm
totally checked out of work."

Ms. McIntyre is just one 20-something — a population historically
exploitable as cheap labor — learning that long hours and low pay go
hand in hand in the creative class. The recession has been no friend
to entry-level positions, where hundreds of applicants vie for unpaid
internships at which they are expected to be on call with iPhone in
hand, tweeting for and representing their company at all hours.

"We need to hire a 22-22-22," one new-media manager was overheard
saying recently, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days
for $22,000 a year. Perhaps the middle figure is an exaggeration, but
its bookends certainly aren't. According to a 2011 Pew report, the
median net worth for householders under 35 dropped by 68 percent from
1984 to 2009, to $3,662. Lest you think that's a mere side effect of
the economic downturn, for those over 65, it rose 42 percent to
$170,494 (largely because of an overall gain in property values).
Hence 1.2 million more 25-to-34-year-olds lived with their parents in
2011 than did four years earlier.

The young are logging hours, too. In 2011, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, full-time workers ages 20 to 24 put in just 2.1
fewer hours a week than those 25 and over. That's not a big gap of
leisure for the ostensibly freewheeling time in one's life. Or, to
quote Lena Dunham's 24-year-old aspiring writer in "Girls," "I am busy
trying to become who I am."

A recent posting by Dalkey Archive Press, an avant-garde publisher in
Champaign, Ill., for unpaid interns in its London office encapsulated
the outlandish demands on young workers. The stern catalog of grounds
for "immediate dismissal" included "coming in late or leaving early
without prior permission," "being unavailable at night or on the
weekends" and "failing to respond to e-mails in a timely way." And
"The Steve Wilkos Show" on NBCUniversal recently advertised on
Craigslist for a freelance booking production assistant who would work
"65+ hours per week" (the listing was later removed after drawing
outraged comments when it was linked on jimromenesko.com).

"The notion of the traditional entry-level job is disappearing," said
Ross Perlin, 29, the author of "Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and
Learn Little in the Brave New Economy." Internships have replaced
them, he said, "but also fellowships and nebulous titles that sound
prestigious and pay a stipend, which means you're only coming out with
$15,000 a year."

Once a short-term commitment at most, internships have become an
obligatory rite of passage that often drags on for years.

"Particularly in some rock-star professions — film and TV and
publishing and media — companies are pushing the envelope to see how
much they can get out of young people for how low a stipend or
salary," Mr. Perlin said. "And people are desperate enough to break in
to do it."

That's what Katherine Myers, 27, found when she graduated from college
in 2008. After months of searching, she landed a position as a
development coordinator at a cable channel in New York.

"I was willing to put up with anything," she said. "I never took a
lunch, I came in early, I worked late."

Still, her experience was more pleasant than that of two of her
friends who successively worked for a major film producer.

"Last year, we threw a surprise birthday party for one, and he had to
miss it because his boss called him in to come to a screening," she
said. "For a year we never saw him. He'd get up at 5, be there till 1
a.m., fall asleep at work."

The other friend left for law school after four months.

"I think she thought it made no sense," Ms. Myers said. "You have to
have a feeling that you're doing something good for the world, and
that's hard to come up with in some jobs. If you're a doctor or
lawyer, or even in finance, you can justify it. But if you're in
fashion, it's like, 'Oh, boy, who cares?' "

But Ms. Myers, now in a higher-ranking position at the Web site
CollegeHumor, is committed to her field, as is Cathy Pitoun, 25. Two
years ago, as a production assistant at a Culver City, Calif., company
that cuts movie trailers, Ms. Pitoun earned $10 an hour with no
benefits (though an overtime bonus), with rotating weekend work. After
six months she was promoted to a position "where one dropped ball
could get you fired," she noted, and a raise to $12 an hour with
benefits. She estimated that she worked at least 60 hours a week.

"There were days where I stayed until 4 a.m. just to send out one TV
spot to one client in Japan and then had to come in 4 hours later for
a whole new day," Ms. Pitoun said. "And days where I had to be at work
at 5 a.m. to do voice-over sessions with actors in Europe to make up
for the time change and still stay until 9 at night."

Her investment, like Ms. Myers's, paid off: she's now the assistant to
the chief executive, though she knows that the path to producing, her
long-term goal, "will get worse before it gets better," she said.

Ms. Pitoun's job surely would have been less demanding in the
pre-Internet and smartphone age. If she ever turned off her phone for
a few hours, her in-box would be flooded with e-mails or missed calls
and texts.

"I had to be reachable 100 percent of the time on an on-call weekend,"
she said, "so I would usually use those weekends to do chores around
my apartment and wait for the phone to ring."

The assignment could be as small as coming in to send one e-mail and
as onerous as digitizing footage for 15 hours.

Ms. McIntyre, the book publicist, estimated that she receives 300 to
400 e-mails a day and tries to answer at least 80 percent. How does
she summon the energy for this incessant typing, not to mention
16-hour days traveling with authors on tour?

"I have coffee before I leave the house, there's a Dunkin' Donuts
conveniently in the subway station when I get off, and I get another
coffee during the day," she said. "And they're large coffees."

Complicating matters is the fact that it is not yet known how to
quantify or define digital work. Forget e-mail.

"Is a tweet labor? Is a Facebook post labor?" Mr. Perlin, the author, asked.

Ironically, millennials, to whom the burden of monitoring late-night
social media or e-mail frequently falls, may be underestimating the
value of such work. Their habits of consuming culture free of charge
on the Internet, he suggested, have "carried over into the world of
work, so they're more willing to accept barter or in-kind payment,"
like free lunches. And their primary payment is building "cultural
capital," as opposed to "capital capital."

In these "rock star" professions, too, notably in the business-casual
Silicon Valley, many companies "have tried to break down the
homogenizing nightmare of the 1950s," Mr. Perlin said, replacing
cubicles with foosball tables and other dorm-room accouterments to
entice employees to stay late bonding with colleagues.

"But we've got something more sinister now," he said. "People are
working much more and are convinced to invest themselves body and
soul. It tries to make you lose your sense of your workplace versus
home: who are your co-workers and who are your friends?"

Children of helicopter parents who have been overscheduled since
nursery school might find it especially hard to set professional
limits. As part of the generation "that's been taught to engage in
labors of love," Mr. Perlin said, "it's led us into these fields, and
secondly, it's encouraged us to knock down that boundary between life
and work in the traditional artist mode."

"You can't get a job by saying, 'I just want a job,' " he said. "Your
heart has to be supposedly in it, and you have to demonstrate that by
staying as late as you're supposed to stay or responding to e-mails at
11 p.m."

This commitment is what Lucy Schiller, 24, demonstrated over two years
in Denver and San Francisco, yet nothing panned out. Ms. Schiller
falls into Mr. Perlin's category of a "serial intern." While working
the 4:45 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift four days a week for minimum wage at a
cafe (where her manager would take half her tips in front of her), she
interned, usually for no pay, at five artistic and cultural
institutions as she juggled side projects.

They were never lucrative; at one Web site "there was the possibility
of being paid $3 per article, but that never materialized," she said.
Her 70 hours of work a week netted her about $500.

On her last day at one job, her 75-year-old supervisor asked her to
help move some heavy things in her house. In her garage, the
supervisor opened a door from which issued a blinding stream of light.

"It was a huge room filled with her own field of marijuana plants,"
Ms. Schiller said. "She conscripted me for no pay to harvest it
overnight. She makes $35,000 per crop and it goes straight to her
retirement account."

The intern's payment the next morning: a breakfast burrito.

At her other positions, Ms. Schiller said, she worked "extremely hard
and wrote a lot, and it pays off in some way, but the fact is, it
doesn't pay off in the immediate sense." Her parents, initially
excited at her prospects, grew worried with each additional
internship, a cycle she feared was portraying her "as wishy-washy or
not viable for paid labor." In January, she moved back home to Urbana,
Ill., to save money and apply for jobs — presumably not at nearby
Dalkey Archive Press.

Mr. Perlin pointed out that "some studies show that people in their
20s work eight or nine jobs in that period, which economists see as a
good thing, but they aren't looking at the stress and personal toll it
takes."

Ms. Myers's parents, too, "appreciate and encourage me, but they're
baffled by" her career in entertainment, she said.

"They don't think that I'm on a track," she said. "They think there's
no point unless you're making money.

"It's a legit question," she continued. "I'm going to turn 30 in the
next few years, and it's hard to be young and feel like the gap is so
big between my station in this industry and others who are doing so
well in it. To get up every morning, I have to think that I'll be one
of those people. But I happen to be a delusionally positive person."

nytimes