What do Lib Dem MPs have in common with the Tories and Labour? Hardly any of them pay their interns – along with almost all politicians and media groups. With an increasingly competitive employment market, getting a job today often relies less on your interview skills than your ability to intern for free. An article in the New Statesman highlights this problem, but even they fail to pay those interns who are working for them.
To support yourself in London for three months costs around £2000. The division between those who can afford to do internships, and those who cannot, is greater than ever. Where students are intelligent, qualified and want to work, but can’t afford to live without pay, we have a problem. Britain will be a worse place in 20 years if a generation of potential journalists, fashion designers, TV producers and politicians are wasting their talent because their parents couldn’t afford to fund them why they got a foot on the ladder.
Each year thousands of students and graduates are turned away from the opportunities they deserve because they are unable to complete internships. This isn’t just unfair, going against the basic principle that work should be paid, but it is a growing cause of inequality. The government’s major report into social mobility of last July devoted an entire chapter to unpaid internships. It concluded that “current employers are missing out on talented people… radical change is needed”.
A solution lies in the government’s own minimum wage legislation, which must be changed to recognise interns as short-term employees. It is a national scandal that after over ten years of the minimum wage, many young working people do not receive it and in November, the Employment Tribunal sitting in Reading ruled that expenses-only internships are illegal. This isn’t to stop people working in their local Oxfam: the minimum wage legislation explicitly excludes genuine volunteering.
Today’s internship system leads to inequality. That’s why I launched a campaign called Intern Aware. It started as a Facebook group, Interns Must Be Paid The Minimum Wage. We now have 2,000 members and are supported by the NUS, trade unions, several ex-ministers and MPs and have branches at different universities. We’ve had support from many Lib Dem activists and local groups and are working with Phil Willis MP’s campaign for fair parliamentary internships.
Visit www.internaware.org and ask your MP to support the campaign. Asking people to work for free is exploitation. Interns deserve better.
Ben Lyons is Co-Director, Intern Aware.
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13 Comments
I agree with you in theory, but the only way this is going to happen is if parliament creates a special fund to support the payment of interns, which I suspect at the moment would be incredibly unpopular with the general public. As I wrote once before – http://andershanson.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/forcing-interns-to-be-paid-will-just-end-the-chance-of-being-an-intern/ – if MPs are forced to pay interns the minimum wage as things stand at the moment they will end up just not having interns, as the majority of them don’t have slack in their staffing allowances. It’s hardly as if MP’s researchers are well paid either.
These interns do full time and often demanding job. They deserve to get paid a proper salary.
I think it is rediculous to expect a MP to do everything. I think a MP can do a much better job if s/he has an office, a secretary, a researcher and a caseworker. Maybe more than 1 of each. A MP is meant to represent around 100,000 people. How can s/he do that if lots of them decide to get in touch at a particular moment?
No doubt the popular press will endeavor to make capital out of such a rule change, but if it means the MPs can do a better job and have a wider choice of prospective interns, then so much the better.
Despite all these MPs expense fiddling, we otherwise have democracy on the cheap, and a poorer service for it.
I’m sure everyone works hard and is seriously devoted to what they want to do next that makes this all good preparation for that.
However, I have to say I’d rather there was not a culture of people making careers of the likes of politics in such a way. The best job for a future politician (and probably journo too – certainly politico journo), in my opinion, would be a real one, as far away from Westminster as physically and emotionally possible.
But surely getting to strut around like the young turks behind the glass at Portcullis House whilst the plebs, oops, sorry, citizen employers, have to go through ever more intrusive security as if we are there to wait on the king’s pleasure at court is reward enough, and good preparation for taking haughty decisions that nobody needs and most oppose.
I think that it is a mistake to focus on Parliamentary interns here. It’s just as much a problem for all other interns.
We have a tax-funded education system precisely because few employers are willing to front the money to train people. Unfortunately, it falls down at the last hurdle: employers in certain fields are not longer satisfied with the output of the education system, and demand an internship as well. The solution seems fairly obvious – we have a servicable system of means-tested grants and loans for ensuring that people can afford to go to university, we just need to extend it to cover internships.
It’s important not to focus exclusively on the issue of pay. The pernicious effect of internships is that they give an unfair advantage to the children of rich parents.
Internships are the main reason why privately-educated people are increasingly dominating politics, lobbying, public relations and the media.
But I also agree with Jock. MPs are increasingly ‘professional politicians’ who follow this career path: public school > Oxbridge > unpaid internship and/or badly-paid research assistant > lobbyist > MP. We need more MPs who, in Alan Watkins’s famous phrase, have had a “proper job”.
The answer lies with MPs, and indeed parties. Don’t give a job with any influence to someone who hasn’t worked outside politics for a serious amount of time: no need to abolish internships (or, god help us, start paying interns grants to fuel their careers as whole-life politicians!), just abolish the advantage to be gained from doing it.
Does any member of the public really think that paying interns should be a priority in our current cash-strapped times?
I don’t even know why anyone would want such a job. I hope they realise that when the time comes, when the people have finally had enough of being “ruled” by nincompoops in concrete bunkers in London, and march on Westminster with our rubber mallets – the only “weapon” like object we will be permitted to own by then of course – it is the interns who will be placed in the front line while their masters cower behind them or make for the river gate and into a James II taxi!
In the meantime, it makes 650-odd good-for-nothings feel like somehow they are real “bosses” coz, like, they “employ” people and “manage” them, so they must be qualified to manage the rest of us.
Actually I rather suspect that employing interns was what Socrates was probably done for. Hemlock all round in the members’ bar please steward!
“Does any member of the public really think that paying interns should be a priority in our current cash-strapped times?”
Speaking as a member of the public – absolutely not!
And furthermore, as for these bloody parasitic university lecturers, it’s time they all got proper jobs, and proper haircuts too! Bring back National Service, that’s what I say!
No, don’t drag me away from the keybaord yet, nurse – I haven’t fin
Hah! I was only saying the other day that I thought we might need some kind of McCarthyist purge…:) We have a whole bunch of them for whom the last original knowledge ever published was Das Kapital!
‘Does any member of the public really think that paying interns should be a priority in our current cash-strapped times?’
Yes taking advatage of people and getting them to work for free is unnaceptable whatever the state of public finances. You might say that they knew the terms of the position when applying but the whole point is that you then stop anyone who isn’t able to afford to work for free unable to take up an intern position and then you disadvantage such people in the job market. MPs should be setting an example on this issue not taking advatage of a free labour force.
Interns do a valuable job and as such should be paid for doing it and if that requires an increase in MPs paltry staffing allowances (if they are doing their jobs properly at least) then so be it.
Personally I would prefer it to be those who think that a few months with an MP might enhance their job prospects are the ones who should be disadvantaged in the job market.
But perhaps we could arrange a sort of VSO type scheme – you know, the one where you go help disadvantaged people in developing countries and get your living expenses paid. After all, our rulers need as much help to develop as they can get!
At least Clive Stafford-Smith is honest – he does call his “exploitees” – but in return he offers an experience that few in Portcullis House could imagine; working on death row cases where the political and legal classes have done what they do best, right royally dumped on someone.
@ Jock
Political internships do not equate to being a career politician. If you want to work for a political organisation or charity you have to do an internship. Even if you have no intention or desire to become an elected official you have to do one to get your foot in the door. Some people do two or three all unpaid. The result, the MPs, their staff and policy makers and advocists across the entire political spectrum are made up of an unrepresentative number of upper-middle class individuals who could afford to work for free. Lower middle and working class people struggle al mightily to get there foot in the door, become disenfranchised, give up and let the spods carry on. Interns need to be paid at least the minimum wage. This doesn’t just apply to politics. there are a huge amount of organisations using interns as free labour and leaving them with little support and no real new skills. It is unfair, unjust and immoral whether it is in politics, engineering, law or manufacturing.