Experienced, adult political operatives who want to do grassroots work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign currently have no choice but to work as unpaid, full-time interns, raising new questions about how the White House frontrunner runs her own labor force as she prepares to double down on young people’s role in the American economy.

The Clinton campaign is currently in the midst of what multiple Democratic sources described as a “hiring freeze” for paid organizing positions in the early campaign states where the former Secretary of State is laying the foundations of a massive national staff, with few if any paying jobs available for field operations.

Clinton’s camp has made headlines about its frugality and a hard sell on its fellowship program, which allows aspiring politicos between the ages of 18 and 24 to spend this summer as full-time campaign volunteers. The result, however, is the human-resources reality of a campaign – one scheduled to hold at least 26 fundraisers this month alone – that isn’t just taking on college students with political science degrees but expecting political veterans to gamble their careers on her without pay.

Clinton, according to her would-be employees, has left full-time organizers with little choice but to criss-cross the country and work as “free help”.

The Guardian has identified at least five “Organizing Fellows” on Clinton’s current field team in Iowa alone who held paid positions on national political campaigns during the 2014 midterm elections.

“People with campaign experience with a cycle under their belt are being kind of held in this limbo position,” said one experienced campaign staffer who turned down a Clinton fellowship.

The staffer, who asked not to be identified for fear of risking future job prospects, said they were aware of former colleagues being “asked to move out to a certain place under the auspices of getting a job and no guarantee”.

Multiple political organizers and fair-wage advocates painted a picture of a candidate preaching economic opportunity while putting prospective employees in a bind: former campaign staffers are taking unpaid fellowships from now into August, with hopes of securing a job they expect to consist of almost the same responsibilities that they handle as fellows – only with the addition of a pay check and benefits.

‘Free labor’

Kevin Geiken, a longtime Democratic operative in Iowa, said he had tried to hire several former campaign staffers for paid political consulting jobs, only to be turned down by operatives who instead chose to work for Clinton gratis.

“It boggles my mind,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “From their perspective, they’ve got to put in their time in this campaign now to get hired later.”

Geiken said he understood the Clinton team was taking “great advantage in having free help that is already trained” – just that he “can’t understand why any of them would accept it”.

A veteran Democratic strategist unaffiliated with any presidential campaign said he thought Clinton was sending a mixed message by hiring hundreds of advisers to focus on a policy message around income inequality, only “to hire people as interns and treat people as free labor who have already done the job before”.



“It is a really terrible way to treat the most vulnerable people on campaign staff and makes me question their leadership on everything else,” the strategist told the Guardian.

Field organizers do the most basic work on a campaign: recruiting volunteers, wooing local politicos, knocking doors and making phone calls – often day and night.

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Clinton is scheduled to make her policy goals more explicit at a major rally on Saturday in New York, while pitching voters on a message to “overcome the forces stacked against everyday Americans and their families”. In the shadow of a monument to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she is expected to address potential increases to the minimum wage and fair pay for all workers.

Unpaid internships or fellowships have become a major point of contention in the US since former interns at the media company Condé Nast sued their former employer. A group of 7,500 plaintiffs settled late last year for $5.8 million.

“Businesses have taken advantage of unpaid internships to an extent that it is blocking the opportunities for young people to move on into paid employment,” Clinton said in 2013. “More businesses need to move their so-called interns to employees.”

From frivolous to frugal

Obama’s groundbreaking grassroots campaign had its own organizing fellowship program in 2007. But a key difference from Clinton’s summer fellowship, one former Obama staffer said, was that Obama’s fleet of fellows consisted of college students or recent graduates with little if any campaign experience.

While the Clinton internship’s application page insists “no prior experience is required”, that is far from the case that is far from the case for some of the campaign’s early hires.

The high quality and experience of fellowship applicants, said one person familiar with the campaign’s thinking, may just be a sign of the overwhelming demand among young people to work for such a high-profile candidate – one who happens to be the overwhelming favorite to be hiring people in the White House less than two years from now.

The Clinton campaign is currently filled with staffers holding jobs they are “overqualified” to hold, said the person, insisting that people currently being paid as field organizers invariably have held more senior positions on past campaigns.

Over 1,000 people have applied to be Clinton fellows this summer; 150 were selected.

The willingness of former field organizers to work for free is far different than Clinton’s reality from her 2008 run for president, when her campaign had the highest starting salaries for those positions among top-tier Democratic candidates.

In early 2007, a Clinton field organizer could start off making $2750 per month – or the equivalent of $33,000 annually. A similar job with John Edwards paid $2500 a month; Obama paid $2000.

The last Clinton campaign made spending decisions since viewed as frivolous, including buying hundreds of snow shovels on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.

This year, though, Clinton’s campaign has made a point of being cheap – and not just because it began with a road trip. Employees use personal cellphones and avoid paying for hotels when they travel. Its press team allowed a Washington Post photographer to document campaign chairman John Podesta riding a discount bus from Washington DC to New York for an article published this week.

In fact, many high ranking staffers on the campaign worked for free as “volunteers” for Clinton in the weeks before she formally launched her campaign in early April, in an attempt to wiggle around federal campaign-finance rules which ban an undeclared campaign from paying staff.

‘It’s wrong’

The use of free but experienced labor may be a little-discussed wrinkle in a frugal campaign, but when told by the Guardian that so many experienced staffers were turning down paid work to intern with Clinton for free, fair-wage advocates pointed to immediate concerns about ethics, class and political double-speak.

“If Secretary Clinton wants to show she’s serious about economic opportunity for young people, that has to start with her campaign,” said Mikey Franklin of the Fair Pay Campaign.

“It’s wrong that they are not paid because they are giving their labor and labor should be compensated,” he said.

Franklin said the entire concept of an unpaid campaign fellowship program had raised wage issues dating back to the Obama campaign. Now, however, with fellows doing work “of value to the Clinton campaign which would otherwise be done by paid staff” and with “set hours, set responsibilities and a clear chain of command,” her operation had effectively blurred the lines between the privileged and the politically hopeful.

“If you need to work for free to get your foot in the door with the Clintons, you have be from a wealthy family,” said Franklin.

For all the distaste of experience people working for free, the 2016 presidential race may ultimately prove to represent a new market demand for political campaign jobs: veteran staffers said they saw more long-term career prospects after interning for Hillary Clinton than working as paid staffers for upstart candidates like Senator Bernie Sanders or former governor Martin O’Malley.

In the meantime, they’ll just have to figure out how to pay rent in Des Moines, Iowa.