Or just morally corrupt and a contemptible exploitation of the enthusiasm of youth ?
What is an intern anyway ? Well as I understand it, an intern is a sort of trainee; somewhat analogous to an apprentice, but used in somewhat more high-faluting professions such as the medical profession, journalism, advertising, etc. An intern gains experience in a particular industry with the hope that sooner or later they will be employed as a “proper” whatever on a suitably high salary.
But what does an intern do ? Well if they’re unlucky they will be doing nothing but the dogsbody jobs :-
- Making the tea and coffee.
- Passing out documents at meetings.
- Running down to the local shop to pick up lunch for the “boss”.
- Picking up the bosses kids from school and keeping them entertained until the end of the working day.
Most interns find a position with considerably more training value than this of course. But even in such a position, the intern could well pick up considerable experience just from being ‘around’. After all an intern is quite likely to be a recent graduate in the right area and probably knows quite a bit of theoretical knowledge.
Because of that training element, there are those who feel that the value of an intern’s position is sufficient that people should be grateful for the experience and should not expect to be paid. Bollocks.
First of all, whilst the intern gets some value from being in a training position, the company providing that position also gets value by adding some additional training to recent graduates because those who start in the profession will have sufficient experience to get up and running far quicker. Balancing these values quantitatively is difficult, so let us agree that the two values are equivalent.
Secondly, all those dogsbody jobs (getting the coffee, etc.) are not part of training. They are merely a way of keeping an intern busy and effectively freeing up those with high salaries from performing mundane tasks. Nothing wrong with it, but because it allows those doing ‘real’ work to make more effective use of their time, those interns are of value to the company.
Not a great deal of course, but still some value. Enough that it can be said that those interns are actually performing a real job which should be paid at least as much as the minimum wage.
Can’t afford to pay that minimum wage ? Let me tell the story of a job I once had which could effectively be called an interneship – I once had a summer job working with a software house running around doing a wide variety of different tasks. I was paid a pretty trivial amount – such an insignificant amount that when the software house was rapidly running out of money towards the end of the summer and beginning to let people go, they carried on paying me because my wages would not make any difference to whether the company survived or not.
If a company cannot afford to pay minimum wage to an intern, then it is probably in such a poor state that it is probably going out of business.
There is a more sinister aspect to unpaid interneships. It is a conscious or unconscious means to keep certain professions to those of a ‘suitable background’. To survive, an intern needs a place to sleep and enough money to buy some food occasionally. Without a salary, an intern has to turn to other resources to survive – a friendly Uncle with a flat in central London, handouts from relatives and friends. Not everyone has those resources, which effectively increases the barriers of entry to certain professions to those whose background is of more limited means.
Of course it is possible that some interns may be able to survive in these positions on handouts from the government – income support, or whatever the benefit is called – effectively meaning that those companies ’employing’ interns are sponging off the government.
Companies that make use of unpaid interns are in the same category of employer as those backstreet sweatshops that pay under the minimum wage. And should be condemned as much as possible. Perhaps ’employing’ unpaid interns is not illegal, but that is only because these companies are exploiting loopholes in the law; it doesn’t excuse them from the moral position.