A REWARD FOR GRAFTERS – OR A PENALTY FOR THE POOR?
Graduates who intern for three months after university add an average of £1,500 to their starting salary when they eventually begin their first paid job, new research shows. As most internships are now unpaid (you tell us), this creates an interesting question…
Is a bigger salary a fair reward for those who have survived long periods of unpaid work? After all, many will have suffered real hardship during this period – not all interns are ‘rich kids’, remember. Their internship may have pushed them into debt – so this higher salary might give them the chance to pay some of it off. Or is it a double injustice for those who can’t afford to intern unpaid? Not only are these graduates locked out of vital opportunities necessary to break into their chosen industry – they will also have to settle for a smaller salary when they start earning in whatever job they ‘settle’ for.
The survey found that graduates who take a (usually unpaid) internship of three months secure an average starting salary of £19,400 when they enter full-time work. However, graduates who are forced to go directly into a full-time paid role from university — because they can’t afford to intern — start on an average salary of just £17,900.
The study comes from controversial recruitment company Inspiring Interns — which quizzed 350 graduates who left UK universities between 2011 and 2012.
As previously reported on Graduate Fog, Inspiring Interns receives up to £500 a month from companies who employ interns from their database, while the intern themselves receives as little as £200 a month for their work — well below the minimum wage.
Predictably, Ben Rosen — the company’s chief executive and arch enemy of Graduate Fog (all wave to his legal team at Kuits Solicitors) — seemed to miss the point entirely. He appeared to see these results as proof of the all-round fabulousness of internships (paid or not) – and stressed what a fantastic investment unpaid work can be for graduates. Rosen gushed to Computer Weekly:
“These statistics confirm the importance of work experience in the current employment landscape, Employers are no longer only interested in a graduate’s degree.
“Internships serve as a vital bridge between university and the job market, giving graduates the chance to expand their skills and demonstrate commercial excellence.
“Graduates should take heart that a placement on a graduate scheme no longer represents the only route to success in the graduate job market. Internships, both paid and unpaid, offer an important and credible alternative.”
But Gus Baker, co-founder of interns’ rights pressure group Intern Aware, said he sees things differently, telling Graduate Fog:
“While this is good news for those who have struggled to survive during their unpaid internship (or several) often over many months, they should not forget that however tough it’s been, they are the lucky ones. Remember, it is the vast majority – not the small minority – who can afford to work for months for free. Rewarding interns who survive this horrific ‘test’ sends all the wrong messages. Whatever their background, graduates who are doing a proper job should be paid a proper wage – end of story.”
Graduate Fog remains wholly unconvinced that unpaid internships offer a “credible alternative” to paid jobs, as Ben Rosen believes – and we are worried about these new findings. We never blame graduates for taking unpaid internships if they can afford to do it. We know you only do it because you’re desperate — and many of you are only just scraping by. But we also know that unpaid internships are not a fair system for entry into jobs — for those who do the internships or those who can’t afford to do them. So is it right to offer what’s effectively a financial reward to those who play the system and take the best opportunities at the expense of those who don’t have that option?
*IS IT FAIR THAT FORMER INTERNS EARN MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE?
Is a short period of unpaid work a small price to pay for a better salary when you do start earning? Has your unpaid internship proved to be a good investment? If you can’t afford to intern unpaid, how do you feel about hearing you will start on a lower salary than your friends who can? Are unpaid internships really a ‘credible alternative’ to paid graduate positions?
Living in London it costs £800-1000 to do an internship wiping out the £1500 ‘added salary’ benefits and that’s if you’re lucky to only have to do a single internship (v.rare).
I would NOT do the three-months unpaid – I would take the lower figure.
In terms of total earnings, it would take the person doing three-months unpaid work 3-years-and-three-months to catch up to the person accepting the lower wage from the beginning (that is assuming that the wage stays consistant over that time; it won’t stay consistant, but we’re assuming that any increases are proportionate).
As such, I’d rather start out lower than do unpaid work because I’ll come out financially better in the long term.
Besides, who stays in their first position longer than 12-18 months, right?
That survey seems rather skewed in favour of Inspiring Inerns (unsurprisingly) and a few questions come to mind – did they compare people with internships to people with no prior work experience, people with previous work experience other than internships, or to both? If only one of those groups, what about the other one? If both, do they know if they can be treated as equal? While the initial salary shows a difference, is there also a difference in terms of how soon a first promotion or pay rise can typically be expected? Did they also perform this study in a specific industry, or across industries? If the latter, how did they control for the inevitable variation in salaries across industries? Basically, without knowing more about their research, this “finding” looks rather meaningless.
In terms of overall earnings, I would be very much surprised if a three-month internship were the deciding factor. Also, while starting salaries are certainly something to consider in one’s career choices, focusing just on them is a rather short-sighted perspective, and I would assume over the medium and long term, former interns and former non-interns (?) would stabilise around the same salary levels. So I don’t think it’s any more unfair than any other variation in salaries on the same level. This would lead me to conclude that internships aren’t really such an amazing investment as Ben Rosen claims, especially in a job market where having completed an internship in itself is no guarantee of getting a permanent position. They can be very helpful in industries like finance, where they often lead to a fast-track for a graduate position, but those internships tend to be paid as well, so probably quite off-topic in this case.
Tanya,
you are asking the wrong question because the whole thing is illegal.
“Is a bigger salary a fair reward for those who have survived long periods of unpaid work?”
Unpaid interns isn’t a legal term under the law, these companies are relying on the fact that they are calling these staff ‘volunteers’. It is illegal under the terms of the NMW Act 1998, volunteering section to offer a benefit in kind such as the inducement of a job or higher salary.
i am a recent computer studies graduate, graduates need to get real with the job market, the job market works on who you know in the company not your degree, your always going to be up against the last 3 years with of graduates who could not get a job, there will always be high numbers of unemployment so get over it, get a job and do your best to hold on to it even if it is not a graduate level job, companies have to use GCSE’s, UCAS points and a 2.1 or 1st as an entry level onto a graduate scheme because there are too many graduates coming out of university.
There will always be someone cheaper who can do your job.
on the subject of interns jobs, if you live at home you are lucky because you have people to fall back on, if your a person like me living in there own flat well just look for paid work only.
Derrick is correct.
A future job offer (“If you do well in your unpaid internship, there’ll be a job for you”) actually translates as a requirement to pay immidiately. Any work done in pursuit of that position will form a contract and anyone who knows the NMWA will know that it depends on the existance of a contract – expressly created, or implied.
I can see the headlines now: “Company that makes money out of internships in ‘internships are great’ shocker”
If I could in theory get the same job without my long term unpaid internship as with but with £1500 less a year I would do any time rather than going through the stress and economic pain I experienced during mine.
Dear me Tanya.. don’t get so carried away by your won agenda??? I don’t dispute that there are unpaid interenships out there, but many recruiters offer undergraduates paid internships during their courses.
If you look at the mainstream graduate careers websites, you will see these in abundance. Yes they are highly competitivet to get onto – but hey, that’s life…
@Tanya, can you publish how you generated the above statistics, so people can see if the data is skewed in favor of Inspiring Interns or not?
The higher salary is becasue during the internship the graduates have learnt on the job skills, as such they are more valuable than graduates fresh out of uni armed with just a cv
It sounds like a pay-off to me, designed to promote internship. I think Tanya’s approach is correct, unpaid internships are or should be illegal. Period. If you can’t afford to do an internship, or, like me (even though I have no interest in doing me) are hostile to the whole idea (unless its paid of course), there is another way, and that is to freelance. Freelancing is the growth industry in the UK at the moment and you promote yourself, learn skills, get into marketing and networking, and so in my view is equally as good as unpaid internship, if not more so. If an employer doesn’t offer you a fair deal, control your own destiny. That’s the way to go in this economy.