Industry | 2009.08.12
Most people won't need an internship to be exploited | Lynsey Hanley
Spare me the outcry over unpaid graduates. Most end up earning far more than working-class peers, who fall at earlier hurdles
I don\'t feel sorry for interns. Or at least I don\'t feel sorry for interns who undergo sacrifices in the short term and later succeed in their chosen profession. Unpaid internships for high-status employers are competitive precisely because there\'s nothing better than to be able to choose what you do for a living and to be paid well for it, as professions tend to be. Yet the Low Pay Commission feels duty-bound to investigate whether interns are being exploited illegally for their willingness to work for free.
On the contrary, I\'d say. Internships are the surest way to avoid being exploited over the course of your working life. You don\'t get internship for being a retail assistant, for instance, because you can rest safe in the knowledge that you\'ll never earn more than £7 an hour, no matter how many years you work or how many unpaid favours you do. To get as far as thinking about an internship, no matter what your background, means that you\'re already most of the way to achieving freedom from heavy lifting and living payday to payday. An internship is just another hurdle at which many, manifestly unfairly, are doomed to fall.
These are the hoops through which a young person, growing up in a household whose income qualifies them for free school meals, must jump first. The millennium cohort study reveals gaps in "school readiness" at four that are closely tied to income and social class. You may not know your name, or your alphabet, when others are already reading and writing. Working-class boys are least likely to have made up this initial gap, with three quarters not getting five GCSE passes above C when two thirds of other groups do.
Say you\'re in the quarter that does get five GSCEs. You have a choice of A-levels or "tech". You choose A-levels, but because no one you know is doing them you pick a combination of subjects that suit you but not the requirements of the Russell group of universities. You fill in your Ucas form, hedging your bets between institutions where there are more people like you and ones where you know you won\'t fit in. You battle culture shock and ill-preparedness to get your degree, by which time you are in a tiny minority of the social group from which you came.
The damage experienced by people from disadvantaged backgrounds who, through a combination of hard work and lucky breaks, make it into the foothills of the professions, has already been done. It\'s confidence. It\'s faith in the future when the past hasn\'t been a bag of cherries. That\'s what threatens to knock you back, not lack of money – though more money may have helped to buy your family more confidence.
Meanwhile, the fact that nearly half the working population earns less than £20,000 a year, and will spend their working life in near-poverty, can be overlooked. Without doubt, it\'s an insult to graduates, who have worked hard no matter what their background, to have to work a year or two for free. But that\'s not the point. They will be repaid in kind with a lifetime\'s worth of privilege, and that\'s what needs to be acknowledged as the true problem of static social mobility.
As the director of the National Council for Work Experience, Heather Collier, asserts: "You can\'t have employers using the recession to get people to work for free." Yet the government, with all its power to enforce fair pay and working conditions, can find endless ways to keep its unsustainable economic model going on the cheap. MPs employing unpaid interns, who will one day be lobbyists and senior civil servants, aren\'t the half of it. Childcare assistants, the backbone of the flexible, dual-income economy, effectively do the work of teachers for little more than the minimum wage.
The Low Pay Commission found that the pay rates of a quarter of all jobs in the hotel and catering sector improved when the minimum wage was raised from its low starting level in 2001. A furniture collection and restoration scheme in the town where I live is staffed almost entirely by volunteers, and advertises a range of positions, from driver to call-centre operative, that promise saleable skills but no wages.
The difference between unpaid internships and volunteer positions like these is that with the former, you are mortgaging your present position on the assumption of high returns. If you can stand the course, your assumption will bear fruit and your temporary poverty will fade into memory. Volunteers on community projects in deprived areas can look forward to the possibility of short-term, minimum-wage contracts and no great improvement in status.
Both situations are only exploitative in the sense that the very foundations of our social and economic structure are based on exploitation. Plainly put, working-class people are expected to do the donkey work of society for less pay and less respect than that afforded to those who can choose how, when and for how much they like to work. That\'s why the Low Pay Commission has to exist in the first place: because we refuse to treat people as equals. It\'s wrong that internships are abused; it\'s worse that they\'re still for the few.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]interns-social-mobility-unpaid
