27 August 2015
Internships
by Lynda Goetz
A useful career move or an exploitation of young people?
‘All Apprenticeships are real jobs so all apprentices earn a salary’ (GOV.UK A Guide to Apprenticeships). Unfortunately for those looking for on-the-job training in the so-called white-collar world, internships are not only frequently unpaid, they are also unregulated and undefined. ‘There is no definition of internship in our legislation’, as Baroness Neville-Rolfe pointed out during a debate on the subject which took place in the House of Lords in March this year.
The term internship has come into use in the UK relatively recently. It came to us from the US and is used to describe time-limited, paid or unpaid experience gained by a young person or student in a professional or white-collar occupation. Here, unpaid experience was traditionally known as work experience, a term which largely referred to short placements whilst at school, offered under the national curriculum in years 10 and 11, and placements aimed at gaining an understanding of the world of work or of a particular type of work. These were very rarely paid, as the youth, inexperience and lack of knowledge of those undertaking them meant that their presence in the workplace was often more of a liability than an asset for the brief time they were there.
Although Wikipedia states that internship is the equivalent American term for work experience, the essential difference in this country between work experience and what have become known as internships is probably age, occupation and duration. Those taking up internships have usually been to university and are seeking experience in a chosen field. They are not inexperienced schoolchildren but ambitious graduates wanting to make progress in a competitive field, in a world where the competition is no longer simply national but international. Internships have become very prevalent in the financial, professional, media and fashion worlds. They can last for anything from 2 weeks to many months.
How has it come about that we have had such a rapid growth in young people vying for sometimes quite lengthy, unpaid posts with almost no prospect of proper employment at the end of them? These unpaid positions are not traineeships leading to a job but often dubious contracts (they are clearly not employment contracts) which offer the young person nothing more concrete than the right at the end of it all to add the name of an illustrious ‘employer’ to their CV in the hope that the short term loss will be made up for by the long term gain.
The biggest problem with all this, of course, is that the vast majority of young people cannot afford to take up these internships. If, for example, you come from Birmingham and have been to university in Cardiff you are unlikely to have a network of contacts in London (which is where the majority of internships are on offer) who could put you up whilst you work unpaid. This reduces the pool of potential candidates to those whose parents already live in London or who have friends or relatives who live there. Add to the expense of accommodation the cost of travelling to and from work and living costs and you reduce even further those who will be in a positon to take up such an offer. This is clearly an inherently unfair situation, bad both for the individuals and for the social mobility for which this country has long been admired. Many MPs in both parties are committed to doing all they can to end a trend which has even seen charity auctions of unpaid internships for which parents pay thousands of pounds.
82% of businesses paying interns less than the minimum wage have admitted that the interns were providing useful services to the business. There are many more fascinating statistics on the subject (www.internaware.org), but the clearest of these is that 85% of the general public believe that interns should be paid at least the minimum wage. In May last year, MPs held a debate for the first time on unpaid internships and voted 181-19 (clearly not a well-attended debate – too many vested interests?!) in favour of an end to them. Unfortunately, the bill did not pass into law as parliament was about to prorogue. With the public and at least some MPs in consensus on this subject, it is to be sincerely hoped that businesses will not be able to get away for much longer with a practice which is patently unfair, socially divisive and morally indefensible.
