HUGE PROBLEM FOR YOUNG WORKERS FINALLY RECOGNISED – WILL OTHER PARTIES FOLLOW SUIT?
Ed Miliband has promised that all internships lasting more than a month will be paid if the Labour Party is elected in May. This will end the ‘scandal’ of the work-for-free-first culture that has exploited thousands of young people in the last few years, and locked out many times more who can’t afford to work for nothing.
At today’s launch of Labour’s Youth Manifesto, the party’s leader has pledged his support for the four-week limit proposed by campaign group – and friends of Graduate Fog – Intern Aware. The tweak to the current minimum wage law will leave interns’ fundamental rights to pay unchanged, but will make it harder for their employers to dodge their duty to pay.
(Anyone who has been interning for four weeks will automatically be entitled to the minimum wage unless their employer can prove that they are just shadowing. Currently, the responsibility is on the intern to prove they are a ‘worker’. But, under the four-week rule, the burden will be on their employer to prove they are NOT a worker.)
Making his promise alongside Labour’s previous pledge to reduce the university tuition fees cap from £9,000 a year to £6,000, Miliband said:
“In this country, if you want a good job in a highly prized sector, you’re often asked to work for free, often for months on end, sometimes even a year. It’s a system that’s rigged in favour of those who can afford it.
“Putting careers in highly prized jobs — in the arts, media, fashion, finance and law — out of reach for huge numbers of highly able young people [is] not fair. It’s not right. And it prevents our companies drawing on all the talents our nation has to offer. So we’ll put a stop to it. We’ll end the scandal of unpaid internships.”
Doing it for you? The front page of Labour’s manifesto
Ben Lyons, co-founder of Intern Aware, welcomed the pledge, saying it would make a difference to thousands of young people entering the job market:
“The current chasm between twentysomethings who can afford to work for months on end for free and those who can’t is bad for social mobility, bad for business and bad for Britain.
“Businesses are crying out for clarity on internships, and the four-week limit offers that — as well as vastly increasing the pool of talent they can draw on. We hope this pledge is the start of a change in the political weather around getting young people into work.”
The announcement coincides with new YouGov polling data released by Intern Aware showing that a four-week legal limit would not lead to a reduction in internships.
According to the poll, 62% of businesses say it would make no difference to the number of interns they recruit; 10% say it would make them more likely to hire interns; and 10% say it would make them less likely to hire interns. That means that the overall number of internships available would remain unchanged.
Graduate Fog is pleased to see Labour recognise that unpaid work is a huge problem for the UK’s young people. It will be interesting to see whether the Conservatives give the issue the same attention when they release more details about their plans to help bright young Britain.
* ARE YOU IMPRESSED BY LABOUR’S PLEDGE ON INTERNSHIPS?
Are you pleased to see the issue being recognised at last? Will Miliband’s promise on internships make you more inclined to vote Labour?
If you are working then you should be paid fairly for the work you do regardless of whether you are an Intern, Graduate, Apprentice, Trainee or experienced person. Unfortunately the term “hardworking” doesn’t mean fair pay. My sister has worked for a large supermarket chain for 25 years and is still earning minimum wage. She has to claim tax credits to top this up to a liveable wage, something that tax payers are paying for. In the CIPD newsletter week a charity stated that if Tesco alone paid their staff the living wage then the tax payer would save £92 million pounds PER YEAR!!! Shocking!!!
The story is here: http://www.cipd.co.uk/pm/peoplemanagement/b/weblog/archive/2015/04/13/in-work-poverty-costs-taxpayer-163-11-billion-a-year-finds-citizens-uk.aspx
Unfortunately Labour also said that they had no plans to introduce tuition fees. They also said that they would not introduce top up fees but look at what happened. Unfortunately until politicians are held accountable to the things they are promising then it is all hot air. Good that this is being recognised and brought to the attention of people but based on past behaviour then is it really going to be actioned?
@CommonSense I agree with you! I have a real problem with working tax credits – not because they are ‘hand-outs’ (people need money to survive), but because they paper over bigger problems and allow them to get even worse. If the minimum wage is not enough to live on, we need to talk about that, rather than giving out endless top-up payments. As you say, they don’t come from the government – they come from other working people, who are earning enough (sometimes only just) to pay tax. I also think housing benefit has helped to inflate rental prices, and the biggest beneficiaries of it have been private landlords…
Oh? How big of them. Restore tuition fees to the level they doubled them to in the first place and ‘helping’ all the graduates they shafted during the recession, by hanging them out to dry with no support at all/freezing civil service jobs/cheapening the labour market by paying employers to employ non university graduates on job seekers for roles I had to do for nowt because they were formerly volunteer roles. Also quite happily carrying on the ‘feckless workshy’ jobseeker mentality/immigrant bashing bandwagon.
Yeah. Great
No thanks, they have not earned my vote back- though they seem to talk like they own the rights to peoples’ votes like they’re the only option
In their 1997 manifesto, Labour planned not to introduce tuition fees (a graduate tax), they introduced tuition fees, they tripled the fees in 2004.
The Lib Dems did not lie because they are the weakest component in a Tory coalition, they have no power to stop, the tripling of tuition fees.
However, Nick Clegg, says it is fair to charge high tuition fees, I am not happy with him.
Labour is worse than the Lib Dems.
Unpaid internships of any length are already illegal under National Minimum Wage Legislation (if the intern is working and not simply work shadowing and it is not an accredited part of their course) and we are making great steps at eliminating unpaid internships by making employers aware of this.
This 4 week rule in my opinion could be a step back in the work we as Universities are doing and allow employers who are currently increasingly starting to accept they must pay interns from day one hour one to think they now only need to pay from week five!
Would it not be better to work on clamping down on all unpaid internships?
You wouldn’t expect a temp, or a painter or window cleaner to work for free so why do you expect a student to?
If your argument is they are not yet experienced bear in mind that you are only being required to pay them National Minimum Wage so you are not paying for a skilled worker.
(We would encourage an employer to pay according to the level of work required and the calibre of candidate where possible).
Yes they need the experience and yes it is invaluable but we want to see a time when students are no longer required to see an opportunity to work for free as a ‘great opportunity!’
If they need to get experience in order to have any hope of getting a career or job opening in that field then it creates a job market that is inequitable and perpetuates advantage.
I.e. It only serves to advantage the already economically advantaged and restricts access to certain good jobs and career paths only to those who can afford to work for free.
Those who say I wouldn’t have got this job if I didn’t do an unpaid internship… that is exactly the problem!
Furthermore this may have another perverse effect of encouraging unscrupulous employers to take people on for four weeks, get rid of them and then take on a new person, thus institutionalising the very practice that needs to be outlawed.
I am generally a great admirer of a lot of the work that the guys at Intern Aware do but I can’t help thinking on this occasion they’ve got it wrong… Well intentioned albeit. And they know about my stance on this.
With Universities standing together to uphold this stance we are already seeing a major turn in the tide, so this is not a purely idealistic vision of the future.
@ Susan
Thanks for your comment. My understanding is that all the 4-week-limit does is mean that an intern is automatically a considered ‘worker’ once they’ve been there for four weeks, unless the employer can prove they are NOT a worker. It will just make it easier for former interns to claim the back pay they are owed.
Intern Aware know the legalities of this subject inside out, so if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me. However, I do think it could have been communicated better to the general public. In all the press releases from IA that I’ve seen, it’s been really clear. But something is going wrong at the reporting end. I think it’s because editors are looking for a snappy headline, so often resort to talk of ‘banning unpaid internships lasting more than 4 weeks’, which is not really accurate.
On the point about universities, do you think that most universities are now refusing to advertise unpaid internships? And are they doing anything to educate students and graduates about the law on internships? I became very frustrated several years ago by how slow universities were to come on board with this issue, so it’s good to hear if that is changing. Unfortunately, too many graduates still dont’ realise that unpaid internships are illegal, so that universities can’t be doing THAT brilliant a job of this…
@Tanya
Yes, I work at a University and we have taken a strong stance on this for several years and I do know that most Universities do now also follow suit from professional groups I belong to and shared email groups on best practice – however I cannot say none slip through the net or that 100% of Universities are switched on but I think you’d see a marked difference even from a few years ago and it has really accelerated in the last year or two.
We educate the students as far as possible but I work with employers and we will turn away unpaid internships – but we don;t just turn them away – we provide information to the employer. Many are simply just not aware and as soon as they are made aware they mostly understand and have no truck with it.
I have written to intern aware about my concerns – if it is the case that HMRC will not be turning a blind eye to illegal working under four weeks then that’s great but it reads that is it is OK to have an unpaid intern for four weeks – as you say probably the reporting – but it could seriously muddy the waters of a tide that we as a university have seen turning.
@Tanya
I forgot to say that I know Intern Aware well and am largely a great supporter of their work. They did write to me when they were proposing this for my take.