The good, the bad and the illegal: Unpaid internships
“Over a quarter of graduates have completed unpaid internships…over half of unpaid internships were over 4 weeks in length.”
This is a small selection of findings from a much wider investigation into unpaid internships carried out by the Sutton Trust in 2018. The rest of the report displays a clear lack of understanding from both employers and employees in regards to employee rights and the laws surrounding them. But can we ever absolve a corporation, however big or small, of its crimes against struggling graduates and its impact on social mobility?
In my time — and there have been so many times — spent scrawling the likes of LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Indeed, I’ve seen adverts that look promising, exciting even. It’s not until I finish the list of demands and responsibilities that I come across the small print, hidden at the bottom of the page: ‘expenses only.’
Sometimes it’s obvious that the advert offering 2 days a week and free lunches, is likely to be unpaid; however, this becomes less apparent when a company is asking for, quite frankly, unrealistic stipulations. “6 months minimum” appears to be the norm as of late, as does the requirement of “extra hours when needed.” These phrases, while still wildly exploitative, don’t phase me anymore. What really irks me is the aggressive, bordering on overtly negative, use of language that recruiters are using. “No pity parties”; “creatively demanding”; “we expect excellence.” Though it’s now commonplace to see variations of these phrases floating around the creative job market, all of these specific phrases have been pulled from one advert. One advert, unpaid.
Not only do these companies demand unattainable standards, but they are also veiling their demand for free labour as a door-opening opportunity for your future. They are devaluing individuals’ work, despite making money off their labour, and expecting these individuals to be grateful. I have had the conversation before; the phone call that begins, “I am so happy to be able to give you this opportunity to get into the industry.” It is jarring and manipulative — but more on that later.
So then, what are the laws surrounding internships? Is it ever legal to not pay an intern and what does such an internship look like? Firstly, it should be said that the law is extremely vague in places and quite convoluted in others which allows companies to abuse loopholes, whether they are actually cognizant of this or not.
The law says you are entitled to National Minimum Wage as an intern if you can be classed as a ‘worker.’ A worker, in this context, is slightly different from an employee in that you are performing work for a company but you aren’t an employee of theirs. You are accepting casual work and can accept or decline this work at your own will. A worker can’t claim certain employment benefits but is, as explained previously, entitled to NMW.
If you class as a worker which, with such an ambiguous definition, you probably are then it is illegal for you not to be paid. If your employer writes or states otherwise or arranges you to sign a written agreement to state you are not in fact a worker, this does not change anything. You are still entitled to a wage.
It is legal to not pay an individual when their work can be classified as any of the following: a student internship that counts towards higher education, a school work experience placement, voluntary work or work shadowing.
You’re classed as a voluntary worker if you’re working for a charity or government agency and you don’t get paid, except for limited benefits (e.g reasonable travel or lunch expenses). Confusingly, there are other sites that state, outside of these conditions, that a genuine volunteer is someone who freely agrees to work for no pay but is under no obligation or pressure to work, and will not suffer any detriment if they choose not to turn up.
From what I gather, voluntary work is voluntary because both parties have discussed and accepted this and have accepted the conditions previously stated. If, for instance, you choose to take on an unpaid internship with no prior discussion of volunteering and you wish to enact your workers rights part way through, your employer cannot invalidate your claim by calling you a volunteer. This, however, is my understanding of the concept which is unlikely to be airtight but certainly took some brainpower to unpick, something I’m not sure many businesses are likely to spend time doing.
The Sutton Trust’s research cements this belief: “When provided with a series of scenarios, around a third of employers didn’t know whether the situation would be legal or not, and up to 50% incorrectly thought a scenario where an intern was being paid under the national minimum wage was legal.” And this confusion is reflected on both sides with 47% of graduates thinking unpaid internships were ‘legal in most situations’ or weren’t sure. If nobody appears to know the law then employers will unwittingly continue to neglect employment rights, and graduates will allow it to happen.
Regardless of an organisation’s grasp on employment laws, it needs to be made clear to all companies that offer unpaid work, of any sort, seriously impedes social mobility. The existence of unpaid internships excludes swathes of working-class individuals from opportunities to further their careers, putting them on unequal footing with their more financially stable peers. An individual who is financially supported by their family or lives in say, central London, is far more likely to be able to take part in an unpaid internship based in London. It is unfair and fosters the lack of diversity we see in industries all over the country,
My own experience of unpaid work is recent and, as you would imagine, exploitative. I took on such an ‘opportunity,’ something I only begrudgingly considered due to a global pandemic-induced period of unemployment. I entered into this with the outlook that doing something was better than nothing; an effort to keep me sane in, what I can now view as, faux productivity. There was no mention of voluntary work, and it was clearly stated that this was an expenses-paid position so I understood the terms of which I was working. I naively thought I was going into this with complete autonomy over the situation, and an understanding that I wouldn’t be taken advantage of.
The first phone call should have reinforced that this, was in fact, not worth it. The individual I would go on to write blog posts for, unpaid, was expressing her joy in giving me such a “great opportunity”- a sentiment I gawped at over the phone (ah, the benefits of working remotely). It was decided that I write one 800 word article a day, something I initially became very stressed about.
Soon it became apparent that there was no clear work schedule and the boundaries between me and my employer were blurred. I received WhatsApp messages in the evenings, waited for feedback that never came, and on a number of occasions couldn’t get hold of my ‘boss’ at all. When I did have catch-ups with them (catch-ups that I was repeatedly left to organise) I was told personal information that I felt, as her ‘worker’, was inappropriate. Eventually, after an extended period of silence, I decided to do some investigative work which led to something quite shocking.
I got in contact with two previous interns (both unpaid) and discovered that my experience was not unique. One of the interns never had any of her work published, and the other was even tasked with the hiring and managing of more unpaid interns. They both left of their own accord and suggested I do the same. I quit the next day.
You could argue that our experience was unfortunate and not a representation of all unpaid work, but that’s not the point. Unpaid, unregulated work creates an environment where this can and will happen. There is no sliding scale in this sort of work; it is, as described in the Taylor Review of 2017, “an abuse of power by employers and extremely damaging to social mobility.”
Unfortunately, despite ample evidence provided by the Sutton Trust’s report, the government response has been lacklustre. The trust asked that the law be changed to making it explicit that “all internships longer than four weeks should be paid at least the National Minimum Wage.” Last year a private members’ bill in support of this action was dropped because it failed to get through parliament before the end of the parliamentary session.
It is clear that there are too many loopholes that allow companies to take advantage of their workers and enable the deferral of blame. Recruitment practices need to be monitored in their entirety and this requires job sites and HMRC to implement stricter policies in order to spearhead exploitative, illegal work.
Below are a number of companies I’ve come across that are advertising for unpaid internships. The list is certainly not exhaustive and I intend to add to it every time I come across another advert.
Lauren Baker Art
Nosakhari
The Anderson Club (multiple unpaid roles)
SHOWstudio (multiple unpaid roles)
See Fashion Analytics
Ahead of Time
Johnson
SwiftSkill
