Un- and underpaid internships
Sure, you can 'work'. Just don't expect a job at the end of it
The Labour party has yet to pass judgment, but for many hard-working people the immediate reaction to the story of Cait Reilly, the 22-year-old geology graduate compelled to sweep floors for nothing at Poundland, must have been: where can I get one? References, obviously, essential.
Most domestic employers would not, I think, insist on geology – a Russell Group geography degree would do just as well – but let's not be picky. It would be a pleasure to have any pleasant, highly educated, preferably strong, young girl to assist with tidying and housework, knowing this will progress her career as choreographed by the government's "sector-based work academy".
Frustratingly for those of us hoping to mentor the young in this way, the free geology graduates are only being distributed at this time to larger, commercial partners such as Tesco and, of course, Poundland, where Ms Reilly was ordered to fulfil an unskilled placement – ie, one which might have been filled by a less-qualified peer, a process the Department for Work and Pensions has defended as preferable to "leaving people at home doing nothing".
Now that Ms Reilly is hoping to bring her case for "forced labour" to court, there may be an opportunity for the department to justify its moral spin on supporting the indigent, one reminiscent of the bracing, Salvation Army approach Orwell described in Down and Out in Paris and London. It was the hostel officers' habit, he reported, to enforce an early night, then rouse the tramps, pointlessly, at seven, "shaking those who did not get up at once".
AA Gill is scathing in the Sunday Times Magazine today about how the well connected middle classes use the "patronage loop" to get their children, and those of their friends and contacts, jobs in journalism, television and publishing.
Gill writes: "The Job is arranged through an elaborate old-boys’ network of work experience and internship that has little to do with academic success. It’s unpaid, or barely paid, and getting your children into the right niches is as competitive and rigorous as it was getting them into the right nursery. Just another step in the relentless game of middle-class one-upmanship.
"The names of the runners on film sets or the assistants in TV companies read like the sons and daughters of a Who’s Who in the arts world. Only the very affluent urban middle class can afford to support children in jobs that don’t pay a living wage for years at a time.
Disclaimer: rabble.ca relies on interns' donated labour to make the site run. While they are not unpaid, the honorarium (not wage) is not at market rate.
The corporation should pay tax based on the value of the work in market terms. The fact that they don't pay taxes on the gift is another usury issue, as well as time in for holiday eligibility, seniority is screwed up, the whole volunteer time is invisible to employer record systems very often. I don't think workers benefit from this exploitation. The ones who do are rare I would bet.
Catchfire, what do you think about rabble.ca's plan to use unpaid interns this summer?
rabble.ca is a non-profit orgainization with a budget of roughly $150K and employs something like 13 (non-unionized) staff. Then they have to pay for administrative (travel, fundraising, equipment) and techinical (web hosting, communictation platforms, conference calls) costs out of what's left. Each paid staff member works hours far in excess of what they are (officially) paid for. We rarely pay for content, and podcasters and bloggers who drive site traffic are almost never paid. Interns receive a small honorarium, not a wage, for their work, despite the high quality of their work. Interns are given paid work when it's available, but it frequently is not. babblers, who have provided some of the best content in the site's history, have, of course, never been paid.
None of these situations are acceptable in terms of respecting the labour put into making this site work. I don't know the solution to it, unless some public money drops out of the sky to fund subversive media.
In conclusion, I'm "against" them, just as every staff member is against them. But I don't know the alternative. If you have some suggestions, I will definitely bring them to the next staff meeting and raise them with the editor and publisher.
It is indeed a quandary for rabble or any other progressive medium or association. There isn't the deliberate "old-boys network" but it does militate against young people from poor families taking on a poorly-paid internship. However, nowadays the alternative is shittily-paid freelance contracts (not just for the young!) and utterly unrelated McJobs.
The "work experience" AA Gill is referring to can last a lot longer than a summer internship. I keep thinking of someone like Leah McLaren at the Globe. I had a conniption every time I read some of her pablum and thought of how much money she was "earning" for it.
I never liked the unpaid internships on rabble either, but there is a difference between rabble's unpaid internships and those of other organizations, and that has always been a somewhat mitigating difference for me (although I agree wholeheartedly with Catchfire's post above). And that is that rabble internships are generally something like 4-8 hours a week, and there is no set working time - so it's not just the domain of rich kids who can live at home while working for free. And a number of rabble interns stay on, and get paid jobs at rabble too (of course, the paid jobs are also way underpaid and people work much longer hours than they're paid). A lot of rabble staff in the past started out that way, including one of the current editors.
So rabble's internships can give people very valuable working experience in alternative media (which often leads to much better paying jobs in the publishing and media industry afterwards), the intern can set their own hours around their classes at school and part-time jobs, and the number of hours per week isn't too onerous. That said, I would assume that interns probably do what the rest of rabble staff do - work way longer than their supposed set hours per week.
Is this ideal? Not even a little bit. I have no idea what the solution is. I think rabble could do much more with their advertising, for instance - there's a lot of advertising space here that is underutilized. But it's hard to get effective salespeople for ads, and for the very brief time I did it, I wasn't completely clear what I was selling and for how much (they should have firm rate scales published, in my opinion), so it's hard to approach potential advertisers when you're kind of fuzzy on the details. Hopefully that's changed - it's been a few years since then, and they were just figuring out how to make it so that ads could be geographically specific.
Not to mention that, at least a few years ago anyhow, whenever an ad would show up on babble, babblers would clutch their pearls and freak out if the advertiser wasn't pure enough. But apparently it's more pure to work on a completely inadequate budget made up of nothing but donations from unions and individual memberships, and to vastly underpay staff and offer unpaid internships, than it is to just ignore some stupid auto-generated google ad, or put up with an American Apparel ad.
If underpaid or unpaid internships are outlawed, many positions that offer valuble on the job training would disappear. I worked for a year as a less than minimum wage intern, and that position has served me well throughout my career, helping me get the job I hold currently 25 years later. Sure, there's exploitation, and I couldn't have afforded that internship if I didn't live at home with my parents. But what's the alternative? My internship afforded me the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the top addiction medicine specialists in Canada. But it isn't politically popular to adequately fund programs for alcoholics and drug addicts so the institution where I did this internship couldn't afford to pay a living wage.
This is how organizations shoot themselves in the foot with absolute ideological purity.
Me too....And speaking of nepotism, later on today we'll be seeing the coronation of King Justin. They could have had an astronaut, but instead went with good hair.
Surely a balance can be struck between ideology and reality such that we don't betray one in favour of the other. For instance, I could turn a blind eye to more ads if it helps rabble hire interns at a living wage.
I agree with this statement and the above. I donate a small amount of $$ to Rabble, and the purity thing really gets me down. This is the real world and I live in it too.
When the purity test ends up ensuring nobody wins anything one needs to rethink who really wins and who automatically loses again. And this is across all political thought.
I agree with you and Michelle completely, but I would add that it is not merely a matter of turning a blind eye. Things like advertising and sales are the engine that makes virtually every organization function. They aren't a dirty secret; in practical if not ideological terms they are its foundation.
We don't ignore that reality when it comes to running our own households; why do it when it comes to organizations?
All this is true, (though advertising isn't a need for everyone's household - it does happen to be for mine, in a sense) but unpaid internships do shut people out. Sineed's story made me think that it is such a shame that her's would have excluded young people who had to leave home early due to dysfunctional, violent families (often, but not always, worsened by addictions of different kinds). I'm sure she is aware of this; we have to think of ways of getting bright and motivated kids from difficult background into such jobs.
I agree, and in the other thread currently open on this subject I said that it is shameful for an organization to do so if the practice amounts to exploitation.
But I don't think there is a hard rule to determine that, and there is a very direct connection between an organization's bottom line and the need to depend on unpaid labour. Paying attention to finances is just as important as the other work that might seem more important.
Many organizations have no other option but to depend on volunteers; and I don't see anything shameful in that.
Regarding ads, I don't think I have ever done a job that hasn't had something to do with ads, whether it be selling them, building them, or currently, buying them. And I don't think there is anyone here who hasn't looked to ads for information. There is nothing inherently unethical about them
Grants, not loans. So there can be interns at a pittance or no pay, but grants for the kids who can't afford it.
I consider internships like I do all post-secondary education/job training. There should be adequate public funding for internships, apprenticeships, college or university -- and they all should be integrated into a social services plan. Internships aren't inherently bad, and the fact that they are instructive and a valuable service to the intern shouldn't be ignored. So I agree with Sineed and Michelle in that sense. The problem isn't that internships exist, it's that interns are exploited and the work that they do isn't recognized or compensated--and that it's impossible to support yourself while doing one.
As one of those former pearl clutchers who complains about advertisements, I think organizations should have an ethical advertising policy which precludes taking money from, for example, anti-feminist corporations. rabble's current problem with ads (Michelle may be happy to know that there is a much clearer protocol to follow if staff want to sell ads) is not that we can't sell to the bad guys, it's that there's no one to sell them at all! Staff are so overworked they can't do extra work to sell ads (even though there's a commission) and the budget is so strained that there's no money to hire someone to sell ads to make more money!
My position on ads is that we would make way more money on ads if we had more progressive cultural content. No one wants to sell ads to people reading labour news. The market for fax machines and dot matrix printers ain't what it used to be. [/burn]
Many organizations do, and I agree. One thing I do like though, is the practice of keeping editorial and advertising separate. It makes for a lot less hand-wringing and finger pointing.
And again, while I agree in principle on internships, that's not going to apply when it comes to smaller organizations or individual people. In fact, the whole dynamic of fair trade and exploitation extends into a lot of realms, including universities.
People and organizations, particularly cash-strapped ones, are always going to be looking for freebies, and relationships that are mutually beneficial. For me (in a position where I am also a volunteer) that involves finding a few carpenters and a truck driver this year.
As for small political and arts organizations, I think the driving force behind getting that first staff person isn't so much reducing exploitation, but rather that the continuity of a full-time person becomes necessary for the good of the organization. I think the realization about fairness comes afterwards, sadly. I have been in enough organizations where volunteers do far more work in relative terms than the paid person.
I
this is a bigger problem for older workers who can't rely on living with their parents have bills to pay, etc.
a friend of mine is going to have to do a long term unpaid position to get his social work degree and it seems almost impossible to go through that at the same time as he has debt from being in school. How is he supposed to pay his rent and feed himself if he's working full time for no pay?
Well milo204, the practicum piece is so important. He needs to discuss his concerns with his practicum advisor and so they can work out the problem. Think of the time spent at his placement as time she/he would be spending attending classes.
I do know that some practicums can be arranged so that hours needed at paid work does not interfer with the unpaid practicum. I also know that some schools of social work will cover any costs associated with "transportation".
I had to do 12 weeks of unpaid internships as part of my B.Ed.