There is a lot of concern in the US about exploiting interns, but it's not class-based, although class issues could come in to it (the rich don't need to resort to unpaid internships; on the other hand they wouldn't financially suffer if they took them; and the actually needy are not high enough in rank to get them: the exploited here are the middle-class). In the US, though we distinguish between races, between the have and have-nots, between the well- and the poorly-connected, and so on, there's such a total lack of a real class system in the British sense that most of us don't know we don't have one.

What happens with interns is a drift from the accidental to the incidental to the purposive. At first, internships were purely for training and to support work in the industry (exploitation was purely accidental). Then companies began noticing that they were getting free labor out of it, but that wasn't the point (now it's incidental). Then it became the point, the goal is to squeeze out as much from the intern as possible and then throw them aside, and the benefit to the worker became pure window-dressing (purposive).