LABOUR LEADERSHIP HOPEFUL WAGES WAR AGAINST ‘METROPOLITAN ELITE’
Do unpaid interns have a new hero?
And does Graduate Fog have a new crush?
I have written before (on this website and for the Guardian) about how I believe the business community has spectacularly dropped the ball when it comes to championing the battle that interns face in securing a fairer deal for the work that you do.
I was just beginning to despair when a politician I’d never heard of three months ago surprised me.
Labour leadership hopeful and shadow health secretary Andy Burnham has not only picked up the ball – he has has also run with it.
After signing Intern Aware’s pledge in July, he is now going further in his public criticism of the unpaid internships system.
He is now proving to be the first high-profile politician to show he truly understands the injustice at the core of this crucial issue.
Graduate Fog is politically independent but I can honestly say that Burnham’s latest comments are the most convincing evidence I have yet seen that anybody in politics (or business) really ‘gets’ why this issue is so important – and why young people who are complaining about the current situation are not just a bunch of spoiled whingers.
His words are so impressive that I even seem to be nursing a little Burnham-shaped crush on the poor fellow.
In his Labour leadership manifesto Aspirational Socialism, he wrote:
“Labour did a good job in helping more young people get to university. But we should have done more to think through the challenges they face on graduation.”
(I think this is an important admission that I have not heard said before. Have you?)
He continued:
“Today, it is harder than ever for young people to make their way in the world.
“Traineeships have all but disappeared from many professions and now young people are expected to gain work experience without pay before they can break into the world of work.
“It is a system that exploits young people and threatens to throw social mobility into reverse.”
Burham – the son of a telecoms engineer – then blasted the ‘metropolitan elite’ for deliberately blocking those from less well-off backgrounds from the best jobs and opportunities.
He recounted his own experience working as an unpaid junior reporter on the Middletown Guardian, in 1991:
“The reason I feel strongly about how hard it is for young people from ordinary backgrounds to make their way in the world is because I struggled after university to find my feet.
“I had to give up my first job as an unpaid intern in a newspaper office because I was poorly treated and couldn’t afford to live.
“It told me how young people without well-connected parents often find it much harder to break into the professions.
“Today, that is as true as ever.
“Britain is an uneven country where powerful elites still hold sway. This is true in politics, business, the professions and the media.
“…It is getting harder for young people, whose parents do not have the necessary contacts, to break into the professions.
“The trend towards unpaid work and internships across all sectors and industries is placing the most attractive and powerful jobs beyond the reach of young people with least means and connections.
“As I have travelled Britain, I have discovered the full extent of the insidious culture of requiring young people to undertake unpaid work as the first rung on the ladder.
“I was told of a county council in the south of England using unpaid internships. Worse, I heard that some City law and finance firms now auction work experience to the highest bidding family.
“I have also heard from young people with disabilities and young carers who face the biggest challenges of all when it comes to making their way in the world…
“…We must break down the elites that still control too much of the power in our country – particularly in access to the professions – and provide opportunity for everyone to fulfill their potential.”
Graduate Fog is enormously encouraged by Burham’s fighting talk on this issue.
Okay, he isn’t the favourite to win the Labour leadership contest.
And his party isn’t even in power.
But after such a long battle to raise awareness of this issue – started and continued by Intern Aware, Internocracy and Interns Anonymous, and later joined by Graduate Fog – it is fantastic to see quotes like these finally appearing in mainstream newspapers like the Guardian.
How refreshing is it to hear somebody who has ‘made it’ talking about a negative experience of working for free when they were young?
So many claim that because they did it (for one month, back in 1975, when they were in no debt, before securing a well-paid job), you lot should do it indefinitely for the slim-to-none chance of being offered paid work at some point in the distant future. (Or maybe never).
Burnham isn’t saying that. He’s saying it sucked when he did it – and it still sucks, now.
He has also used his position to attack the BBC for its use of unpaid interns. In July, he told the Telegraph that the corporation must pull its socks up:
“We look to our national broadcaster to set a better example and not take advantage of the desire of young people to work within the media. The BBC needs to show leadership and put an end to this practice immediately.”
The only part I am confused about is exactly how Burham proposes to make the changes necessary to gain a fairer deal for interns.
He says:
“Working with business, I propose to end the practice of unpaid internships lasting more than three months.”
So unpaid internships of up to three months are okay? If he is suggesting a three-month limit on internships, what happens then?
What’s to stop a situation developing where graduates go on and on doing unpaid three-month (unpaid?) internships, indefinitely? And how exactly is this better than the situation we have now?
Also, if ‘working with business’ means ‘kicking their arses’, I’m all for it. But in practice we know that pressuring business to do anything they don’t want to do is not easy.
“All placements should be supported by the National Minimum Wage at least.”
Eh? I thought you said only placements of longer than three months would be paid? I’m confused…
“I will explore giving students the ability to have extended access to student finance for a period after graduation to enable them to take on unpaid work experience on leaving university or to subsidise an internship on minimum wage so they can gain the experience they need to pursue their chosen careers.”
Is it just me or is this not very clear either?
Is he suggesting giving you extra money to tide you over while you do up to three months of interning (which it now seems can be unpaid), or while you work for the minimum wage?
Why would you need extra money if you were being paid fairly? I don’t get it.
“I will also propose that all work experience, placements and internships be advertised by law so that the opportunities they present are open to all, not just those in the know.”
Again, a good plan in theory – but again I fear it’s flawed in practice. It is currently perfectly legal not to advertise most regular jobs (even in the public sector it’s only considered ‘best practice’).
So is Burnham suggesting a new, separate law for internships as opposed to all other jobs? If so, how long will this take to go through – and how many more young people will have to work unpaid in the meantime?
Also, even it does go through, many companies will go through the ‘formality’ of advertising openly, whilst giving the position to the person they always were going to hire.
And, if there is no threat of punishment for not abiding to this law, it is open to being completely ignored by employers (as we’ve seen with the current National Minimum Wage laws).
Again, I suspect it would be down to you, the wannabe-intern to report your employer – which I think is not just unfair and unrealistic – but also downright bizarre:
How can you report a job that didn’t get advertised? How would you know about it, unless you got it? And if you got it, why would you report it?!
So to conclude, I’m liking Andy Burnham’s style on this issue – but I think his specifics could use a little work.
However, it makes a refreshing change to read quotes from a grown-up who actually knows their stuff on this subject.
Time and time again, universities minister David Willetts has shown that he simply Does Not Get this one.
Encouraging graduates to volunteer in order to gain experience is not a viable solution when you NEED TO PAY YOUR RENT.
Nor – I feel – is setting up your own business if you can’t get a job and can’t afford to work for free.
(A few grads may succeed at this, but for most I feel this is unrealistic, so early in your career).
I’m also getting sick and tired of experts – like Sheffield University’s Tim Birkhead (dubbed ‘Professor Patronising’ by one Fogger) – advising you on ways you can ‘stand out’ from the crowd.
That isn’t a realistic, large-scale solution either. You can’t ALL ‘stand out’ or there would be no crowd to stand out from. Durr.
I would also like to see journalists and former journalists stop presenting their own experiences of working for free as independent evidence that the unpaid internships system isn’t really the huge problem we know it is.
Yes, this means you Julia Margo, former journalist (I worked with her briefly at the Sunday Times a few years ago) and now Acting Director of influential think tank Demos.
Incredibly – as the Demos website claims she’s an expert on ‘social mobility’ – Margo told the Sunday Times earlier this month:
“While I count myself lucky to have been able to benefit from the inspiring work experience I had, policy wonks are immersed in debate about whether unpaid interns are in fact being exploited.
“To explore that claim, I spoke to one of the 450 unpaid interns who work in parliament: she said she had gained a lot and didn’t feel exploited at all.
“The best way to ruin opportunities for thousands of graduates would be to insist that internships are paid.
“Employers would simply offer fewer placements if they had to pay – they already invest a fair amount of staff time in them.
“Worse, paying interns would pollute the whole process and ultimately lead to internships being conflated with entry-level jobs, thus excluding exactly the kind of fresh graduates who benefit most from the opportunities.
“Who would pay a useless graduate when you can hire a recession-hit 25-year-old? I once worked in an organisation that paid its interns. As a result, we recruited through a formal process and took only those with prior experience.”
Top tip, Margo:
If you don’t know what you’re talking about, how about you put a sock in it?
; )
(Click here to read Interns Anonymous’ blistering attack on her hopelessly uninformed comments).
Conversely, if you DO know what you’re talking about, please speak up.
And continue to speak up, Andy Burnham.
(And please don’t now say / do anything dumb that will disappoint us, after all your good work?)
*Are you glad to see a politician finally showing he ‘gets’ this issue?
Or are you sceptical about Andy Burnham’s motives for speaking up on your behalf? Do you hope the winner of the Labour leadership contest continues to push for the rights of unpaid interns?
“”Who would pay a useless graduate when you can hire a recession-hit 25-year-old? I once worked in an organisation that paid its interns. As a result, we recruited through a formal process and took only those with prior experience.””
Here’s one for old Margo: what if you’re a recession hit 25 year old graduate who has flitted from unpaid internship to unpaid internship since leaving university and still can’t find a paid, permanent job in a job she wants to do in London? What if you’re forced again and again to go back to secretarial work in between media work experience placements in order to make some money, only to then go back to unpaid media internships to try and get more experience, repeat ad-infinum?
I’m 25 years old. I have more than enough experience to do the jobs I’m applying for. Yet the only ones I’ve been offered thus far are unpaid internships. Internships that last for 3 months at a time, before they get the next person in.
I don’t have a problem with paid or unpaid internships IF they are likely to lead into a paid role in that company, and they act as sort of a training scheme. But three months without hope of an opening in the company? All in the name of “helping the intern get experience?” Come on…
Nice work on this article. Really interesting read. However, while I support a paid internship system (as I’ll probably be interning next year) I can’t help but get flashbacks to a few years ago in France when the government tried to legislate against exploitation of graduates with the CPE and endedup actually making their lives a misery.
I’m not saying it would definitely happen in Britain too, but there’s a high possibility isn’t there?
@Jo – Exactly! It’s so (not) funny how anybody who’s worked for more than 5 minutes unpaid (however long ago) suddenly thinks they’re the world expert on this very complicated (and constantly evolving) issue!
@Marc – Thanks for commenting. I’m not familiar with what happened in France – can you elaborate? Sounds interesting… How did the legislation make interns’ lives a misery?
I did a paid work placement as part of my degree. The experience was fantastic, but I fell for the trap of expecting this to lead to a perm job in the future.
If you get expereince then build on it. They have the same labour market problems in the UK as across the whole of Europe. Frankly, I think young people are ‘expected to flit for job to job’ until they are in there late 20’s.
This sign of the times for young people so make you can and then try to break-out on your own.
Their is nothing more alienating about the job process than building it up, only to start again from scratch every 3, 6, 12months.
Old Vic Theatre uses 30 unpaid interns annually.
is in receipt of public funds and gives them responsibility for ‘health and safety compliance’
http://actorsminimumwage.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/old-vic-now-exploiting-vulnerable-young-workers-in-dubious-internships/
http://www.oldvictheatre.com/jobs.php
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3010685363&ref=ts#!/pages/The-Old-Vic-Theatre/116694452184?ref=ts
Apologies if I’m stating the obvious here, it’s mainly my way of getting to a question:
The problem is essentially one of demand; more graduates than graduate-level jobs. This is especially true in the media, where said demand is particularly high. The problem isn’t that people can’t find jobs, it’s that they can’t find jobs that (a) they want to do and/or (b) are at graduate level. The injustice of this is compounded by the fact that they were encouraged to go to university by a combination of factors, and that as a result graduates are in high levels of debt.
And so I think Burnham is spot on in saying:
“Labour did a good job in helping more young people get to university. But we should have done more to think through the challenges they face on graduation.”
I’d agree that unpaid internships post-graduation are unfair, particularly when companies are taking advantage. The reason they can get away with this in large part is because the demand is there – people are actually seemingly willing to work for free, and even if some people drop out because of expense/principle, there are always though who are willing (and more importantly) able to take their places. It really does seem to be a phenomena that is most distinct in the media – not so much in other fields. I might be wrong in this, but thinking about my own peers, whilst internships/work experience do play an important role when moving into medicine, law, business, etc., they certainly aren’t so prominent.
The difference I’d reckon (feel free to correct me!) is firstly, the reason people have chosen those jobs in part because work is more secure. If accountancy was an unstable profession, my guess is that people wouldn’t be fighting to do it. The people I knew who did internships were largely actually seeing if they wanted to do it, rather than trying to gain experience to get work. The other factor is entry requirements – where a really high level of skill/ability is an absolute requirement the labour pool is smaller. I’m in no way saying those in the media are unskilled, but there’s not the same absolutely necessary qualification criteria as, say, medicine or law. And these two feed into each other; the work is more secure because a high level of qualification is required.
Part of the problem is that there are a lot of people who want to be in the media and that there’s no strict way to identify who the strongest candidates are – people may have journalism diplomas and media degrees an whatnot, but there’s quite a lot of them and, also a lot of what’s desired isn’t quantifiable (thus using the 2:1/1st criteria to distinguish candidates becomes potentially less useful). You don’t even need a degree, necessarily, to be a good journalist and equally, having one doesn’t indicate you have the networking/social skills that may be crucial. This is where internships come in, as a way for candidates to show that they are exceptional and deserve employment. And the huge demand means that companies can get away with making them unpaid. I think that they certainly, for the most part, could and should offer at least the minimum wage, but if this happened it seems fair to assume they wouldn’t just offer the odd two weeks over the phone anymore, there’d be interviews and selection criteria. And, likely, as has been said before on this site that would mean there were fewer on offer, not necessarily because of the comparatively low wages, but because of the manpower involved in HR, finance, etc.
It certainly wouldn’t increase the number of jobs, so what’d happen would be that people who be told right off that they weren’t getting placements, so wouldn’t get work, so would perhaps start looking elsewhere sooner rather than being strung along for a few weeks/months/years.
So is this really internship debate really a case of stopping people being strung along and given the impression they have a chance of getting work in a highly competitive industry, rather than just learning fast that, sadly, for the majority, it won’t work out? As you, say, not everyone can stand out. Not everybody will get the career that they want to have, someone has to do the jobs that don’t really appeal. And the problem is, the longer it takes people to move on and start seeking second-choice employment, then most of those careers will have gone to those who pursued them from the get go (which is perhaps fair).
(If so, on the positive side, Tanya, then your concerns voiced elsewhere that reporting unpaid internships will mean there are fewer available potentially disappears!)
@Tanya – re: CPE (FEC in English – First Employment Contract) – The plan was that tax cuts and other financial benefits would be given to employers if they would hire people under 26 in order to comabt a massive youth unemployment rate (historically youth unemployment has been a much bigger issue for the French than the UK.)
Effectively, it would have allowed employers to pay minimum wage and fire before the end of a two-year probationary period with reasons quite dubious. Obviously, this is not ideal and was the cause of massive protest in summer 2006… remember when they burned cars and beat the heck out of the police in Clichy-sous-bois just outside of Paris?!
Chirac never promulgated on the law although he actually added it to the statue book. The french students are still looking for that elusive employment contract that will benefit them. I suppose it could be argued that they did very little to help themselves by not taking the bone they were thrown…
I know it’s tough for them but they don’t help the situation themselves by constantly protesting any measure meant to help at least a little bit.
I’d be happy to write something for you on lessons from France? I recently completed my dissertation in French politics and now I’m going on to study at j-school. You’ve got my e-mail.
Marc
I did an unpaid internship with an engineering company. I learnt a lot. They did not exploit me as I was not really needed and they could not afford to hire me anyway. The company did me a favour and I learnt a lot, they did also get something out of it but not that much. I did it to gain experience as there are very few engineering entry positions for a graduate with no engineering experience (almost none). Some people at the company were nasty to me to force me out as they were incompetent and feared that I would show them up or mention issues to the MD. Even so I still would have done it. The government should not interfere in the internship issue as it is a natural phenomenon as a result the recession/graduate unemployment issue and helps them get experience. Ofcourse graduate must learn to stand up for themselves as many are sheepish. What they should do is cut the number of university numbers as they are too high and also reduce the number of international student as many do stay after finishing their course and so contribute graduate unemployment, not allow them to work part time during their course or after.
Joe,
its good that you could afford to do it and had enough income to support yourself. I don’t think its right that access to jobs should be dictated by how rich you are.