DID I GO TOO FAR THIS TIME?
Graduate Fog has already made a new enemy in 2011 — and we’re not even half way through January!
AND I’ve been accused of being “threatening” — when I thought I was being nice! (Perhaps I need to work on my people skills…?)
I’ve also been told:
– “There are plenty of valid reasons why unpaid internships and work experiences are a very good thing” and
– “If people aren’t prepared to work for free they needn’t apply for the unpaid internships.”
More of which shortly.
The trouble kicked off when one of Graduate Fog’s users alerted me to an ad for a six-month unpaid internship with a digital agency called the Blur Group, posted on a website called EscapeTheCity.
I’d heard of EscapeTheCity – and always liked what they were about. I understood that they help people move from jobs they don’t like in the City to jobs that they feel more passionate about, in other fields.
As regular readers know, when tipped off about unpaid internships, I normally go straight in and ask for a statement, as I’ll be blogging about it on Graduate Fog (especially with big companies). But something made me hesitate this time.
Graduate Fog has made a lot of enemies last year, and I wondered whether I should be more strategic about picking my battles in 2011.
So I sent the founders — Rob Symington and Dom Jackman — this email:
FROM: Graduate Fog
TO: Escape the City
SUBJECT: Friendly warning from Graduate Fog
Monday 10 January 2010, 15.05Hi Rob and Dom,
I’ve been a fan of your site for a while so was a bit disappointed to see that you’re currently advertising unpaid internships, like this one for Blur Group:
http://www.escapethecity.org/opportunities/15693
The unpaid internships issue is something my users feel extremely strongly about – and I have been campaigning against this practice since my website Graduate Fog launched in April. Although these internships are marketed as a positive ‘learning opportunity’ for young people, this is rarely the case – and more often than not they are a way for companies to cut their costs by ‘hiring’ a young person to do what should be a paid role, for nothing. We believe that – more often than not- unpaid internships simply exploit those who do them, and exclude those who can’t afford to do them.
This morning, one of my (furious) users brought your Blur Group ad to my attention and asked me to ‘name and shame’ you and your client on Graduate Fog, as I have done with lots of others, including Tesco, Harrods, James Caan, Sainbury’s, Comic Relief, Urban Outfitters, etc.
However, I have made a lot of enemies since Graduate Fog launched in April (!) and am careful about picking my battles. Since I’m pretty sure that you are not the bad guys, I have no plans at present to write about the unpaid internships currently advertised on your site. However, just as a courtesy I wanted to let you know that I will be keeping an eye on your site in future.
Best of luck with the site – as I say, I really do like what it’s about
Tanya
Two hours later, this arrived. EscapetheCity were clearly NOT impressed…
FROM: Escape the City
TO: Graduate Fog
SUBJECT: Re: Friendly warning from Graduate Fog
Monday 10 January 2010, 17.06Hi Tanya,
We appreciate what you’re campaigning for (paid employment for graduates). However, we don’t appreciate being threatened (which is what your email seems to be doing!) – “I will be keeping an eye on your site in future.”
The thing is – you’re taking a position on a subject that is by no means a closed debate. There are plenty of valid reasons why unpaid internships and work experiences are a very good thing.
I myself benefited hugely from unpaid work when I was an undergrad and graduate. I’m currently working on a project for a community of start-up businesses to share office space with a shared resource pool of unemployed graduates. We will be providing valuable work experience for young people who otherwise would be doing nothing. Escape the City itself has taken people on for 4-week unpaid internships which have worked extremely well for both us and the individuals – and we found 2 of our interns jobs at the end of the process.
Unpaid work experience is one way into niche areas where established entry paths are less obvious. This is part of the Escape the City concept (do something different). We understand that it’s hard to find work that makes you tick and working for free is one of the ways to do this.
So I’m afraid we actually disagree with you here in principle on this matter. I wholly support the objective of helping graduates find meaningful paid work and am involved with a number of initiatives which are aimed at helping graduates find careers that are right for them.
Escape the City lists opportunities ranging from paid executive positions and full-time roles to unpaid volunteer opportunities, paid internships, unpaid internships, connections between people with business ideas, even positions where the new team member only receives equity. The only proviso is that these are opportunities for meaningful and fulfilling work.
Blur group are offering a work placement programme. It’s a scheme they wouldn’t be able to provide if they had to pay all the people on it. Therefore, in our eyes, it is a valid offering and one that we are happy to be listing on our site. We currently have a generously paid internship on our site from RLtec (a clean tech start-up) and we will continue to offer both types on Esc.
If people aren’t prepared to work for free they needn’t apply for the unpaid internships. There are plenty of people who are thrilled to have the opportunity to learn skills in a new environment where they wouldn’t have been able to get a paid position (due to lack of skills).
We are not a bad organisation and get a huge amount of emails from our members saying how happy they are with what we stand for, what we do, and how we do it. Blur took an unpaid intern from us last year who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to transition into digital marketing. If you were asking us to stop doing something that was genuinely wrong / unethical / immoral then of course we would do so – but that is not the case.
Glad you like what we do. Thank you. However, it’s not fair to send a one-sided message like you did on a subject where the right way of doing things is far from agreed. By all means stand up for what you believe in and campaign for paid internships – but you should think twice about threatening people just because they believe in another way.
Regards,
Rob
Rob Symington – Co-Founder
EscapeTheCity
Do Something Different!
Is your blood boiling? So was mine.
Clearly this email is immensely irritating for those of us who believe that the debate is in fact ‘closed’, as in the UK we have a little thing called the Minimum Wage Law. And one of my pet hates is hearing out-of-date ‘examples’ of people whose careers got off to a flying start after doing an internship — with no regard for their poorer peers — used as ‘proof’ that the current situation with internships isn’t the HUGE problem that we all know it is.
So at this point I decided I would in fact be blogging about this after all (Sorry guys!).
So it took all the strength I could muster to send this email back to them:
TO: Escape the City
FROM: Graduate Fog
SUBJECT: Re: re: Friendly warning from Graduate Fog
Monday 10 January 2010, 17.18Sincere apologies if you felt I was threatening you – and thank you for taking the time to clarify your position on this.
Tanya
Since when I have heard nothing back.
In the couple of days since this exchange, I’ve calmed down a little (although re-reading this email again sends my heart rate soaring every time).
I realise that the gentlemen at EscapeTheCity are probably not evil to the core — more likely, they are just really badly informed when it comes to the subject of internships.
And unfortunately they are not alone.
Haven’t we ALL heard these rotten, flawed arguments used again and again to ‘justify’ the continuation (and rise) of the corrosive unpaid internships culture? Usually, this drivel comes from those who have interned themselves (because they could afford to) several years ago, and found that for them it led to paid work fairly swiftly — and they haven’t looked back.
What the EscapeTheCity boys clearly don’t ‘get’ is how lucky they were to be able to afford to work for free AND that they didn’t have to do it for very long AND that they (probably) weren’t in as much debt as you lot are, when they graduated.
As for whether my email was threatening, I’ve re-read it several times and feel pretty confident I stayed on the right side of the line — and I think my firm tone was justified, given the seriousness of what EscapeTheCity are doing. I’m also confused that somehow I’M being portrayed as the bad guy for sending them a slightly mean email — even though they’re the ones who have been advertising for an unpaid worker (for the Blur Group and several others, I might add).
Happily, Graduate Fog’s friends at the interns rights groups have backed me up — issuing the following statements this morning.
From Intern Aware:
“Escape the City miss the point in talking about people who aren’t ‘prepared to work for free’. For most graduates, this isn’t a choice: they simply cannot afford to work without an income. While their intentions may be good, by only making valuable work experience available to graduates who can work without pay, Escape the City are increasing inequality of opportunity.”From Interns Anonymous:
“We thought your email to EscapeTheCity was very polite! And they are wrong on several counts. The fact is that nowadays it is increasingly rare for unpaid internships to lead to jobs. In fact, they often replace what used to be entry level jobs. Graduates have the skills and deserve to be paid for the work that they do. We believe that unpaid work is illegal — and it is certainly unjust. It means the only people who get ahead are those that can afford to get ahead. However well-intentioned an internship or organisation may be – if the work is not paid, it entrenches inequality.”
This whole episode shows that there is a LOT more work to be done in convincing the pro-unpaid internships crowd that they urgently need to reassess their views. However much they think they are helping young people by offering (and promoting) these placements, they are in fact doing the opposite.
Oh, and it also shows that Graduate Fog is likely to make a LOT more enemies in 2011. Game on.
Interested in the original ad? It’s here:
*Did I go too far?
Was my email ‘threatening’? What do you think of EscapeTheCity’s response to my challenge about them advertising unpaid internships? What more can we do to raise awareness about why their views are so out-of-touch?
Look, I am up for a sensible discussion, but please let’s not misinterpret and start twisting people’s arguments here. @Maxine, nowhere did I say ‘If you don’t like it, go and do something different’ – that goes against everything I believe in – everyone should follow their passion as much as possible – so please don’t start completely misquoting me.
What I said was that ‘If you only want to do a job that is paid, nobody is forcing you to do an unpaid internship’, which is completely true.
Two fundamental points I want to clarify:
1) I do think that there is a time limit on when an ‘unpaid internship’ becomes a job, and I am not advocating that companies should exploit young people. That does not mean that all unpaid internships should be banned, because when run correctly, they can provide huge benefit to interns and companies, both of whom are willing participants.
2) I get the impression that most people arguing against unpaid internships are ignoring the dramatic impact that a ban on unpaid internships would have on the overall number of internships. It is here that I think it is worth making some kind of distinction between a start-up, who genuinely can’t afford to take on a paid-intern (yet could really benefit from one and provide an extremely interesting and valuable work placement) and a FTSE 100 company like Sainsbury’s. Having said that, I assume that even large multinationals have group budgets to deal with, and are often given the choice of ‘you can have an unpaid intern, or no intern at all’.
As I requote ESC – Paid internship is better than unpaid internship, unpaid internship is better than no internship.
Does anyone really disagree with that i.e. believe that given the choice of the creation of one extra (unpaid) internship or no internship at all, that it is better to have no internship at all!?
@Sean, I agree that your analogy of private education is a better one. Private education ‘discriminates’ in the same way that unpaid internships ‘discriminate’ in that the people who afford it will benefit (career-wise) more than those who can’t.
Do you all then feel that we should be banning private education?
Matt – I know full well that a degree doesn’t entitle me to a particular profession (or, judging by other threads here, entitle me to anything other than false hope), but I was distinctly unimpressed that someone here was suggesting that I had a choice between a job and an unpaid job. I’ve lost count of the jobs I’ve applied for (in marketing, advertising, PR, editorial, online media, copywriting, proofreading, editing, administration etc etc etc, you name it, I’ve probably applied for it) while working to make some money and interning to boost my CV, and after rejection after rejection, dwindling funds and no real hope on the horizon, someone telling me what I already know – that just because I have a degree I should be entitled to a job – is just another disheartening blow. I’ve learned full well over the past two years of hundreds of applications and only a handful of interviews that that sense of entitlement is wasted.
Enjoying the day’s debate. I would urge anyone stuck on the internship mill to abdicate, immediately. Choose to tailor your own experience by initiating your own project. Bring together a team to start a blog; create your own community project and apply for grants (e.g. O2 Think Big)
– This way your unpaid work cannot be exploited. You can’t exploit yourself, can you?
See the projects I established at joddle.woodpress.com
Believe me, I interned more than my fair share.
‘If you only want to do a job that is paid, nobody is forcing you to do an unpaid internship’
Not *directly*, no. But indirectly, yes. In an increasing number of work sectors, you stand virtually no chance of landing a job if you are not able to do one, so by implication, you’ll have to get a job in a different sector. The end result of your argument is that people have to change their career directions in a way that’s not desirable (or even *possible*, as I’ve said) rather than the work culture changing.
@Ben
You didn’t sound patronising, but you said I missed the point because this was about regulating unpaid internships. I’ll just refer you to the 4th para of my ‘point missing’ post
“I am certainly in favour of regulation — there should be a binding job description (so its not 3 months of tea making) and references must be given. If you ensure the experience is valuable, then this is payment in kind. I think travel expenses should be an absolute must.”
@Tanya
“Err, how on earth do you figure this [that its not a class issue]. Wealthier young people get ahead, poorer ones with the same (or better) qualifications don’t. Sounds like a class thing to me…?”
Your second sentence “wealthier young people get ahead, poorer ones with the same (or better) qualifications don’t” could just as easily apply to those who can afford to go to uni post A level and those who can’t. Perhaps university should be scrapped on the same idealogical grounds in that it is inherently socially asymmetrical?
In any event, class is based on more than finances. It sounds like what you are asking for is positive discrimination – because not everyone can afford it, it should be scrapped. It is a lovely theory but this is the real world and it just will not happen. You have to see the bigger picture here; what is 6 months unpaid work against a lifetime of enhanced earnings, especially where that person has agreed to work for free?
Where is any sort of evidence that its only ‘wealthier’ people that can afford an unpaid internship? Its just theory and conjecture but where’s the proven correlation?
I suppose what matters is that in practice, I totally agree about regulation, as I have said from the start. However, I am not sure about some of the positions that are being taken.
@Ralph. Im with you on this one.
I’m sorry Maxine, and I hope I don’t come across as rude, but if you really do ‘Have a natural aptitude for words’, and are a ‘born writer/communicator’ and have chosen to abandon your passion to go and do something different (which admittedly you didn’t say you had done, but inferred that people do), simply because you couldn’t find a job, then I think that’s probably a reason why you didn’t find a job.
Joddle makes a good point – have you even considered trying to start up your own company / blog / book etc? It hardly costs anything to do, you can generate a good enough income, and requires very little expertise other than that which you already have. On top of that, it is the sort of experience that would allow you to get a job, were you able to add it to your CV.
There is always going to be competition for jobs (which I’m sure everyone agrees is a good thing), whether or not they are paid. Let’s please not blame this lack of paid jobs on those companies that are offering ‘unpaid internships’, which is where this argument is heading. We all know that there are a lot of other reasons why there are less graduate jobs going around, and these are primarily based on the economy, which in order to recover, needs the support (amongst many other things) of new businesses, small start-ups (who may not be able to afford interns), and a highly skilled workforce. How exactly will a ban on unpaid internships help this?? It doesn’t – in fact it has the opposite effect, indirectly and negatively affecting skill levels, as well as negatively affecting small businesses, not to mention removing a great opportunity for a lot of people who are quite happy to take on unpaid work.
@Ralph said:
“I get the impression that most people arguing against unpaid internships are ignoring the dramatic impact that a ban on unpaid internships would have on the overall number of internships.”
But why is this a problem? Internships are a relatively new concept. When I graduated, graduates either found paid work (the first rung of the ladder), or they went onto a grad scheme, or they got further training (in my case, teacher training – funded).
You didn’t have to do an internship to get into journalism, PR, marketing, etc etc. You were either taken on, or you weren’t. There was none of this carrot dangling, and blatant attempts to wriggle out of compensating people for their time and work.
I agree with the poster who’s set up his own projects – no exploitation, plenty of hands-on skills-building, and something to show at the end of it.
There is a much wider debate to be had on what to do with the huge numbers of now unemployed grads who went to uni and took on debt because they were told that it was going to be a good career investment. (Tanya has covered this subject before.) But the solution to unemployed grads isn’t to give them a choice between unpaid internships or crappy work opps: in my opinion it would be to limit the number of undergrad places, and concentrate on supplying paid training / or entry-level jobs for the fewer grads. Right now all we’ve got is a race to the bottom, as a previous poster pointed out.
Anbd what about the small issue of the Minimum Wage regulations Iain? Do we throw away the law, or the rule of law?
Every time I come on this site it seems there is yet another story about the ethics of unpaid internships. This one issue alone appears to drown out the many others that are just as important.
After looking through the Low Pay Commission Report of 2010 I am even more confused on the legality; read it for yourself – http://www.lowpay.gov.uk/lowpay/report/pdf/LPC_Report_2010.PDF – pages 106 – 111, though bear in mind that some of the reported facts have changed with a new government.
Well, it does say unpaid work experience as part of a course is exempt from the NMW, but you are not obliged to work as part of it. As ever, it becomes more of a minefield on the issues of internships. It is not illegal to advertise a job that pays less than the NMW, according to the report. However, whether the NMW applies to interns appears to depend on whether they do work or not – based on my interpretation of the report.
@Ralph
You are absolutely right, we need to consider the alternative. In my view I think you are spot on. Getting rid of unpaid internships will have a dramatic impact on the number of internships overall. However, the job market will do what it always does – adapt. I suspect that the work these unpaid interns do at the moment will not disappear overnight. Firms will just have to treat interns like any other temporary employee – by paying them a wage.
What’s the confusion David? Unpaid work experience can be unpaid (up to a year) if it is a required part of a student’s full time course. Paying less than the Minimum Wage to someone who is being treated like a worker; illegal.
@joddle
Re: your advice “Choose to tailor your own experience by initiating your own project….. See the projects I established at joddle.woodpress.com” – agree with you wholeheartedly.
If you’ve a moment to spare, would you be prepared to say how you planned your own internship as a comment on http://www.careers-partnership-uk.com/post/graduate-internships-advice plse? A good real life example might inspire others to follow you.
Still weighing up the pros and cons of unpaid internships?
This made me laugh today via Laurie Ruettimann http://thecynicalgirl.com/
http://www.shouldiworkforfree.com/