Let’s open up internships
Kayte Lawton argues that internships are good – but for too many they are out of reach
Every year, thousands of young people desperately seek out the chance to work for free as unpaid interns in exciting and competitive industries like fashion, advertising, politics and the arts. The lucky ones will often find themselves working long hours doing jobs that many of their employers would admit are vital and would otherwise be done by paid staff.
It would be churlish to suggest that interns get nothing in return for their hard work. That is the whole point of an unpaid internship – people do them because the rewards are significant, including valuable experience, an address book full of contacts and sometimes a permanent role with the employer.
The problem is all those well-qualified, talented and passionate young people who lack the resources to pay their way through an unpaid internship. This means that the experiences and contacts that flow from an internship can be out of reach for young people from less well-off backgrounds.
Not only can it be hard to fund your way through an unpaid internship, but just hearing about these gold dust-like opportunities can be difficult without the right contacts. The Panel of Fair Access to the Professions, a body set up by Gordon Brown to look at how to get more young people from less affluent families into professional jobs, found that internships could be vital. But worryingly, they concluded that internships often operate as part of an ‘informal economy’ where opportunities depend on personal contacts rather than proven ability or potential.
Much of journalism, politics, the arts and publishing is dominated by people from higher social classes who were privately educated or went to the top universities. We should reflect on the fact that many of the sectors in which unpaid internships are widespread wield considerable political or cultural power.
It is difficult to know how many people are working in unpaid internships at any one time because there is no agreed definition of what an internship is. However, a number of studies have given us an idea of the scale of the problem. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that a fifth of employers planned to hire at least one intern over the summer of 2010 and a survey by the training body Skillset found that nearly half the people working in the creative industries in 2008 had worked for free in the past.
In its recent annual report the Low Pay Commission, which monitors the minimum wage, says that there is ‘systematic abuse of interns, with a growing number of people undertaking ‘work’ but excluded from the minimum wage.’ Unlike businesses, charities and other non-profit organisations including government bodies and community organisations are legally allowed to have unpaid interns doing proper work, because minimum wage legislation lets them take on ‘voluntary workers’. Many charities take advantage of this, employing expenses-only interns in policy, research and campaigning roles; as does Parliament, which practically runs on the work of unpaid interns in both Houses – ‘democracy on the cheap’, as one campaigner puts it. There is no doubt that charities and government have limited resources available for covering the wages of interns. Yet many of these same organisations are rightly concerned about improving social mobility – relying so heavily on unpaid internships risks cutting across these objectives.
The key issue is to raise the number of paid internships offered. How could we encourage employers?
The Low Pay Commission has recommended that HM Revenue and Customs, which is responsible for enforcing minimum wage legislation, targets sectors which regularly advertise expenses-only internships. At the moment, the HMRC seems to be turning a blind eye to bad practice in the private sector.
Yet challenging the widespread use of unpaid internships does not rely simply on regulation and enforcement. Working with government, organisations which support businesses (like the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses and sector-based employers’ bodies) need to proactively provide guidance to employers about their legal obligations under minimum wage legislation.
Trade unions should seek out unpaid interns for ‘test cases’ to take to the employment tribunals to demonstrate to employers that illegal practices will not go unnoticed, something the National Union of Journalists is pursuing.
Large employers could work with smaller firms and charities to share interns, covering the full salary costs as part of their corporate social responsibility while working to broaden the skills and experience of their interns. An organisation called ‘Charity Works’ currently offers graduate management training programmes across six charities: this model could be expanded to include internships. The political blog Left Foot Forward recently launched a successful fund-raising campaign to enable them to recruit their first paid intern.
Young people are already taking a hit from the recession and spending cuts, with high youth unemployment, the withdrawal of financial support for post-sixteen education, raising tuition fees and an unaffordable housing market. Let’s not demand that they work for free too. Instead, let’s help employers to create more paid opportunities and to open them up to a broader mix of people.
Kayte Lawton is the co-author of Why Interns Need a Fair Wage, a joint report from the Institute for Public Policy Research and Internocracy. The report is available from www.ippr.org/publications
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