Unpaid Internships: Hopeful and Undervalued

Unpaid and overworked creative interns trying to make it into the industry

Considering any form of unpaid work is a reality many students and graduates must face in order to build up their resume and contact list. Many employers will “pay” their interns in experience, or cut wage expenses by enabling unpaid labour, projects, and overtime. Inexperienced young adults entering the workforce have no leverage in the situation - they have to start somewhere if they want to later attain coveted positions in established companies. The Sutton Trust reports that one in four graduates, all study-fields combined, have done an unpaid internship in order to “get a foot in the door” in pursuit of their career goals. Sadly, the Cultural & Creative Industries (CCI) are notorious for their unpaid internships.  

The relationship between occupations in the CCI and precarity is partially a result of the structures of CCI, partially of the blurring of work and life under the sign of artistic or creative vocations, and partially of broader social and economic changes associated with creative industries policy (Brook, O’Brien, Taylor 2020). Based on a 2020 UK study, over 80% of respondents working within the CCI have done some form of unpaid work (unpaid internships, unpaid labour, unpaid projects, unpaid overtime, pro-bono work). Many students in our club have experienced this issue when making their way into the field. With companies requiring at least one to two years of cumulative experience within the industry before offering the more gratifying, paid positions, it seems as though new entrants are forced to complete several unpaid internships before being regarded as valuable candidates. Unfair? Yes. And yet many of us, whether employees or employers, still support unpaid internships, implicitly or explicitly. “It is a part of the process” employers will say, while others reluctantly give-in to the status-quo. Will Wood, founder of the Multitude Media PR company says that “there's a culture in the creative industries that allows unpaid work to go on for far too long and take over responsibilities that should be reserved for paid staff. Yes, people will do it, but that doesn't mean it's right or productive.” Moreover, The Sutton Trust states: “Completing an internship is associated with higher salaries, for both middle and working-class graduates. However, there is evidence that completing multiple internships can have diminishing returns and may actually have a negative impact on employment and wages.”

So, what is the legal status of unpaid internships? In the majority of countries, there are laws protecting citizens against unpaid work and many politicians are against the exploitation of young workers. European representatives have recognized, once and for all, that unpaid internships are a form of juvenile exploitation. “We can no longer allow young people to be exploited like this”, commented the President of the European Parliament David Sassoli. “Internships and apprenticeships are the forms in which young people enter the workforce, and they are fundamental.” European legislators demand that companies offer “good quality, varied and appropriate job, training, apprenticeship or internship offers, including fair remuneration”. However, the subtleties of law reveal certain loopholes and create confusion amongst employers and employees. For example, in France, companies are not required to pay for internships lasting less than two months. In Denmark, unpaid internships are part of study curriculums and international students will often have issues garnering enough revenue to cover living costs due to the various requirements related to the educational grant (SU). In the UK, under national minimum wage legislation, interns must be paid if they are expected to work set hours or on set tasks – yet half of employers and more than a third of graduates were unaware of this. Some employers will even “disguise” internships with a “volunteering status”, in order to avoid meeting the required standards of internships.

There is another issue generated by the requirement of completing unpaid internships for experience: social mobility. Indeed, unpaid internships are functionally excluding populations that are unable to work for free. The Sutton Trust states that middle-class graduates, whose families are well-connected and able to fund them, are significantly more likely to sign up as interns than their working-class peers. As a result, those who can afford to work for free are more likely to access opportunities in areas such as journalism, fashion, politics and art (i.e. the CCI). A large proportion (43%) of unpaid interns rely on living for free with family and friends; more than a quarter (26%) are dependent on money from their parents, while fewer than three out of ten (27%) found paid work to subsidise their internship. Sir Peter Lampl, the founder of the Sutton Trust and the chair of the Education Endowment Foundation, said: “Unpaid internships prevent young people from low and moderate-income backgrounds from accessing careers in some of the most desirable sectors such as journalism, fashion, the arts and law. This is a huge social mobility issue. It prevents these young people from getting a foot on the ladder. In order to help tackle this situation internships should be advertised, not offered through informal networks. This locks out the many young people who don’t have connections.” What is notable for this discussion is the affordances of age and social class. The older, established middle class origin cultural and creative workers were most able to blur life and work in a sustainable way. This was very different to younger, working class origin respondents (Brook, O’Brien, Taylor 2020). The CCI are essentially reducing the prevalence of diversity and diminishing the creative spectrum by fostering these unpaid internships. A 2021 Harvard research paper, where various prestigious firms were given both existing and theoretical resumes, with gender and ethnic factors removed, points out this exact situation: “the standard internships that firms valued were typically unpaid, and some candidates could not afford to take them and had to work for money instead”. The paper goes on to state that, sadly, women and minorities are still less likely to be recruited than their white, male counterparts. But there is a twist to this occurrence: the speculation is that employers believe that other firms in their industry are favoring diverse candidates in hiring. They might therefore believe that minority or female candidates have an easier time getting prestigious internships (making those internships a less compelling signal of candidate quality for minority or female applicants). Similarly, they might also believe that minority and female candidates will be harder to recruit because many other firms will be going after them. These sensitive subjects are, luckily, more present in popular discourse and firms are slowly but surely reevaluating their employment methods. 

All that being said, young adults and recent graduates are now faced with a new set of challenges, brought upon them by the pandemic. Internships are harder to obtain and offers are largely reduced compared to previous years. In France, the founder of AjStage, a recruitment firm specializing in internships. has observed an increase in the level of requirements from recruiters: "Even for internships, companies want to ensure they have the right profile that will be operational immediately". In Italy, as the Linkiesta reports, youth unemployment continues to rise (up 32%) and opportunities for extracurricular internships have halved: 96,376 in the first half of 2020 against over 185,000 for the same period of 2019 (down 48%). 

Students may not have the leverage to negotiate for pay when starting their work experience. However, it is worth checking whether the internship offers abide by national laws and whether they provide constructive experience rather than exploitative. Employers should ensure that an appropriate budget is allocated towards intern recruitment and that diversity is truly fostered for candidates that show genuine enthusiasm for the creative and cultural industries. This vicious cycle can only end by the initiative of tomorrow’s employers and students pushing for the status-quo to be abandoned.