WHICH IS THE BIGGER CRIME – EAVESDROPPING OUR EXPLOITATION?
Graduate Fog is finding MPs’ moaning about their phones (allegedly) being tapped a little bit tough to take.
Have you been following this story? For those who haven’t, News of the World execs are being accused of illegally eavesdropping on the voicemail messages of various high-profile people, including politicians such as former PM Gordon Brown and Lib Dem Simon Hughes.
If you’re wondering how his is relevant to Graduate Fog, read this comment from Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman. She told Sky News:
“Hacking into people’s phones is illegal. Obviously the criminal law has got to be complied with and if it is broken then it should be investigated by the police and it should be enforced.
“Nobody is above the law, no newspaper editor, no journalist … for all of David Cameron’s talk of trust in politics, it’s fundamental that people obey the law and that’s what’s at risk here.”
Phone hacking is illegal – of course this should be investigated. But so is the now widespread use of unpaid workers, in a country where we congratulate ourselves on having a little thing called the National Minimum Wage law. Coincidentally, the same people who have been involved in the phone-hacking scandal (arrogant newspapers bosses) are among the most guilty of using unpaid interns.
Place your bets on which crime is more likely to get investigated properly.
Remember interns – the Department of Business told Graduate Fog that prosecuting those who exploit you is simply “not a good use of public money.”
Graduate Fog remains extremely unimpressed.
* WHICH IS THE BIGGER CRIME?
Eavesdropping on a few famous people’s (probably rather boring) voicemails – or allowing employers to contineue to exploit hundreds of thousands of young people through unpaid internships?
The Government won’t do anything about it, but the courts will.
For example, if you’ve done unpaid work experience in journalism, the National Union of Journalists will take your case to court and help you claim back the minimum wage, even if you agreed that the internship wasn’t going to be paid. In their words:
“you cannot waive your right to be paid”
If you’ve done unpaid journalism work, then I’d recommend going to their facebook page.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=158564457500072
I’m sure there are other groups doing something similar (Tanya – maybe you could do a blog post highlighting some? – It would be a proper practical step in this fight.)
The more people there are who sue companies and sucessfully claim back the money, the fewer companies will take the risk of offering unpaid illegal internships.
@Vinny
Thanks for highlighting the NUJ’s campaign, which I think is excellent. And I’m all for hitting employers hard when it comes to breaking the NMW laws! Unfortunately, what the current reporting and penalty system fails to take into account is the delicate nature of the relationship between intern and employer. Most interns are desperate to impress their employer – that’s the only reason they’re working for free! So the odds of them wanting to annoy them by reporting them are slim. At the moment, we have a system whereby the only interns taking action against their employers are those who have decided to quit the industry entirely, so they don’t care what their former employer thinks of them. But in my experience the numbers of interns who can be bothered to go through this is small -though of course it’s better than nothing.
Of course most MPs have several interns in their own offices. Sometimes these are short-term or low-commitment work experience posts. Sometimes there is a genuinely blurry line between “work” and the voluntary participation which all political parties depend on.
More often, however, interns are recent graduates (or sometimes career-changers) who’re trying to get their foot in the door.
I can’t see that increasing the staff budget by £50k per MP would be a terribly popular idea either, though…