Are you free? Policy Paper
Working for fair pay
The division between those who can and those who cannot afford to do internships is greater than ever. The ongoing impact of the financial downturn on employment has led many graduates to accept internships to garner CV points, at a time when they can least afford to make the necessary financial sacrifice. Those that cannot afford to do internships are left behind. Intern Aware is calling for the implementation of the legal minimum wage for interns. This measure would aid social mobility and fairness in this generation and the next.
In Alan Milburn’s recent study into fair access to the Professions, internships were found to be an increasingly important “rung on the ladder to success”.[1] The majority of graduates cannot afford to work for long periods unpaid. As a result, they lose out on internships to people who are lucky enough to have financial support from their parents.
It is a basic principle that no career path should be closed, whatever a family’s financial situation. It is an even more basic principle that work should be paid.
Intern Aware believes that internships are a useful tool for allowing people insight into career areas. However, in the current situation, many interns are not being paid for their work; particularly where no expenses are provided, it is costing interns money to perform work.
The financial beneficiaries from the situation are the companies. The internship often acts as an extended form of interview, ruling out candidates who have equal potential but are unable to go without payment. This reduces the number of people who are able to apply to jobs that require internships, thus reducing the talent pool of potential employees as well as reinforcing social and economic divisions.
At the moment the grey area surrounding ‘internships’ is undermining the legislation for workers’ rights and the minimum wage. The Low Pay Commission’s announcement that it will review the legal situation surrounding interns in 2010 acknowledges the unfairness of the situation. However their two previous reports have also tried to highlight the problem of exploitative internships without effect.[2] Intern Aware will campaign for legislative change ensuring that the legal loophole surrounding unpaid internships is closed.
Intern Aware also argues that Internships have to widely advertised and should be competitive in order to ensure fair access across social backgrounds. This is an area in which the Government has already made significant advances. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has created an online jobs search portal, as has the Mayor of London.[3] It is our aim to ensure that there is further outreach to advertise internship opportunities; as a corollary to this, we also call upon Government portals and educational careers services’ to distinguish between those internships that are paid and unpaid in their advertisement of them. In addition, it could also be used as a way to highlight paid internships and emphasise what interns have a right to expect from firms in which they participate.
An idea commonly put forward is that the Government creates a fund that sponsors internships. However, we argue that this provision would allow private companies to take on unpaid labour at the Government’s expense.
