A guest post today from Barry McCulloch. Barry is an independent policy consultant. Currently, he is the Policy Manager at the Centre for Scottish Public Policy (CSPP) and the Policy & Communication Officer at the Economic Development Association for Scotland (EDAS). He hates acronyms yet uses them daily.
There is nothing quite like feeling passionate and angry on a wet, dreich Monday. I’m usually foaming at the mouth reading about internships at the best of time, but Nick Cohen’s excellent article in the Observer has (almost) pushed me over the edge.
Before launching into a polemic it’s worth pausing and providing a bit of context. In November 2009 graduate unemployment was spiralling out of control – youth unemployment was approaching one million, a fifth of whom were graduates.
Essentially, it was making a difficult task (obtaining a paid internship in Scotland) even more challenging in an underdeveloped “intern industryâ€. And there was little assistance to help Scotland’s struggling graduates.
With no funding the Centre for Scottish Public Policy (CSPP) created the Adopt an Intern programme (excuse the ancient site – a new one is on the way). The aim was simple: to build a fair, accessible and transparent internship culture in Scotland. Fast forward two years and 107 paid internships have been placed with the assistance of Scottish Government funding and employer contributions across the public, private and third sectors.
It has been a huge success and the programme is now offering intern exchanges between Germany and Scotland. But enough about the CSPP. As Cohen’s article painfully points out, they are only scratching the surface. Quite blatantly there are deep-seated and regressive cultural attitudes to internships.
Interns, so the argument goes, require experience in the labour market so do not deserve to be paid. They are a different type of employee who is not protected by the Minimum wage or the Equal Pay Act. Thus, their terms and conditions can be altered at the whim of an employer. As new Defence Secretary Philip Hammond (the richest man in the Cabinet) said:
“I would regard it as an abuse of taxpayer funding to pay for something that is available for nothing and which other Members are obtaining for nothing.â€
How frugal. It is no surprise, then, to find new companies popping up to provide free interns and quell demand. One of the companies Cohen highlighted is Etsio. Curiosity got the better of me and I checked out their website. Honestly, I wish I hadn’t.
The FAQs section is worth quoting in detail because it’s illustrative of the norms and values embedded in London’s internship culture. I couldn’t resist adding some comments.
“Candidates
Why should I pay for a job?
You aren’t paying for a job (yes you are). You’re buying experience. Most applicants we come across don’t have any experience that would make them useful to our employers (students don’t have work experience? I don’t know what graduates they know).
And remember that our work experience clients are putting themselves at risk by exposing their trade secrets, customers and inside information to you. That isn’t the kind of experience that you can get elsewhere.
How much do I have to pay? (Yes, they have to pay for the privilege)
Each employer sets their own daily fees.
Employers & Interns
Is it ethical? (No)
With students now paying £40,000 for a university education – but zero useful experience for an employer – we don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to pay a few hundred pounds to get invaluable real life experience.
And many of our employers are small businesses who wouldn’t normally take on an intern. Etsio opens up the market to whole new areas. And applicants get to see how real businesses work. (If you or your parents can afford it)
It’s definitely morally suspect for an intern to take the place of a worker; and that happens all over the Western world at present. But (a big BUT) the Etsio service allows applicants to get a ringside view of what it’s like to work in the amazing businesses that feature in Etsio.
Is it legal? (No, not if they are indeed workers)
Yes. It’s a legal requirement to pay workers a minimum wage. But the interns are not workers: they don’t have regular tasks, they aren’t under the control of the employer, and they can come and go as they please. The intern is paying to learn, just as they pay to attend university. (All of this is complete and utter nonsense).
How does Etsio make its money?
By adding a small admin charge. It’s included in the fee that’s shown against each employer. There are no other charges.â€
There is no shortage of organisations or politicians (a certain Mr Clegg comes to mind) that could have been named and shamed. The list is long, very long and by no means is it restricted to England (see Kezia Dugdale’s article). The exploitation of interns (graduates who will become critical to the success of the national economy) will continue until we settle some basic, fundamental questions:
- If interns are not workers then what are they?
- What rights do interns possess in the workplace?
- Should interns be paid (at least) a Minimum wage?
- At what point in the internship does an intern become an employee? 6 months? 9 months? A year?
The dictionary defines a slave as “a person who works in harsh conditions for low payâ€. I’ll let you decide on whether an unpaid intern is a slave. But one thing we all should be able to agree on is this: paid internships, a “proven access point to professionsâ€, are central to making a fair, equitable and mobile society.
#1 by Nick on October 19, 2011 - 1:03 pm
As someone who had to turn down a lucrative internship in Brussels last month because I would have had to take a substantial loan to move to the city, I fully understand the difficulties of attempting to balance the need to gain experience in the sector with the need to pay for life’s essentials.
The work done by the CSPP with the ‘Adopt an Intern’ scheme is under appreciated, and by providing a fair wage for interns will hopefully encourage others to do so too – however a cursory glance at w4mpjobs.org (a site that advertises jobs in British politics) shows 17 unpaid internships with one of the three main political parties – demonstrating that this is an uphill struggle.
Keep up the good work!
#2 by Nick on October 19, 2011 - 1:27 pm
Postscript – when I say one of the three main parties, I mean at Westminster, where the majority of the jobs are based.
#3 by Doug Daniel on October 19, 2011 - 1:29 pm
Urgh!! I hate the word “intern”. It’s so bloody American. What was wrong with “work experience”, “work placement”, “sandwich placement” or even “apprenticeship” that we had to start using the term “intern”? We have a guy at my work now who is here for a year between his second and third year of a computing degree. I’ve never called him anything other than a “student placement”, and yet he does exactly the same as what an “intern” would do. I had a three month summer placement during my course as well, and there is no way I would have referred to myself as an “intern”.
(I realise this is completely missing the point of the article…)
#4 by Elaine Bone on October 19, 2011 - 1:52 pm
call it what you will. 25 yrs ago I did a ‘work placement’ – I got paid – and thank goodness – otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to take the opportunity which taught me a lot, provided a fantastic network and was most definitely the first stepping stone in my career. The other side of the coin -companies gain enthusiasm, fresh ideas, but at a most basic level however they might like to gift wrap it at Etsio and the like- a worker. CSPP are a leading light.
#5 by Barry McCulloch on October 19, 2011 - 3:53 pm
I’m not keen on the term intern either. Its vagueness allows for the ridiculous notion that skilled graduates should work for free.
But there’s a bigger issue here as I alluded to at the end. The “pool” of talent that employers (I could call them something else but I won’t) access when hiring free interns is very small. Why? Because the vast majority of graduates can’t afford to work for free.
Thanks for the comments. Nick, I feel your pain. I contemplated doing the intern circuit in London a few years ago. It became very clear that I couldn’t afford to work for free, let alone relocate with no job.
Paid internships should be the norm, not the outlier, enforced by legislation that makes unpaid internships illegal.
#6 by Anon. on October 19, 2011 - 6:21 pm
Nobody should work for free for anything except a charity. This whole culture is merely a scam perpetrated by the middle classes in order to reassert the elbow room lost when the number of graduates greatly increased in recent times. It is nothing short of a disgrace that a thoroughly average student could boost up their cv in this way thanks to their parents’ incomes, yet an excellent student might find themselves less employable because they cannot do the same.
#7 by Barbarian on October 19, 2011 - 7:01 pm
Work experience is usually reserved for school pupils around the age of 15/16.
Internships should not be allowed – period. Why should they be reserved for graduates? And many internships are obtained through contacts rather than hard graft by the graduate.
I used to specialise in graduate recruitment, and while many were keen to take ANY job, there was also a fair amount of arrogance.
Certain degrees aside (medical, etc), having the degree does not mean that a graduate is employable. I’m not talking about experience or skills but attitude. If I was preparing a shortlist of candidates I would look at them having the relevant qualifications first, then I would start looking at what lay beneath.
If people are happy to work for nothing to gain experience, then that should be applauded. However, internship as it stands is an abuse in the workplace. It is reserved for the wealthy in almost every case.
#8 by Joy on October 19, 2011 - 9:26 pm
Couldn’t agree more with all the above. What I’d simply like to add is that the Adopt an Intern Programme is attempting to create a culture where the word ‘intern’ automatically means ‘a paid work experience for graduates’. We, and graduates, struggle with all the ambiguity around the wording and the legalities. Our aim is to instil the idea that ‘internships’ are carried out by talented graduates who want to gain experience but also want to contribute and make a difference and earn the money they are paid. We’re succeeding and organisations are behind us all the way. It will take time but we will achieve this culture of paid internships for graduates. Perhaps we also need to ‘create’ a different word to describe the voluntary work carried out by graduates for various charities so as to avoid confusion.
#9 by Observer on October 19, 2011 - 10:56 pm
You can’t give interns employment rights as that would raise the issue of recruitment. Maybe they should be treated as apprentices.
#10 by Observer on October 19, 2011 - 10:58 pm
If you want to work for nothing to gain experience there is the voluntary sector.
#11 by Craig Gallagher on October 20, 2011 - 7:27 am
This is a fantastic piece, and a very prescient one. Speaking as a recent graduate of the University of Strathclyde who has just spent 6 months floundering on the job market and then being trapped in call centre hell for the next 18, before deciding to up sticks and accept a funded PhD place in the United States (which is what I should have had the brains to apply to do two years ago) I completely endorse the notion that my generation is very angry about the horrific state of the job market.
I had an idea that I wanted to go into the civil service, or perhaps work for a quango or other public policy body (such as CSPP) but pretty much the only way that I could have got a position in such jobs was to do it unpaid, which was no way at all. As much as I hated working in call centres, I flat out refused to work for any company without being paid to do so on principle. I’ve heard the arguments (mostly from my father and uncles) that this was both naive and unrealistic, that you don’t get anything for nothing, but to give in to that argument was to accept that the Tories were right, that social Darwinism is valid and that everything I believed was a lie.
Internships (or whatever you call them) are an atrocious practice, the worst kind of right-wing plutocratic ideal, and reflect the deepest and most corrupt aspects of British society. Their eradication would go rather a long way to allowing talented graduates back onto the job market and in the process, stimulate the economy (and hopefully see a few companies and government offices leeching off this practice deservedly go bust or massively downgrade).
#12 by Felix Mitchell on October 21, 2011 - 10:39 am
As the director of a new intern recruitment agency that only offers paid internships (www.instantimpactinterns.com) Etsio’s practice of making interns pay for internships absolutely shocks me.
I’m in no way a lawyer but whilst I was setting my company up I found ‘The employment agencies and employment businesses regulations 2003’ which state that:
“The circumstances, where an employment agency may charge a work-seeker a fee, is limited to cases where the work-seeker is seeking employment in any of the occupations listed in Schedule 3, namely jobs within the entertainment, modelling sectors etc….”
It seems quite strange to me that no one has picked up on this, maybe Etsio has found a loophole.
Internships can, and should be, positive for both the companies that offer them and the interns that take them. Internships are coming under more and more scrutiny and I don’t doubt that within a few years they will be open to all and offered based solely on merit.