Unpaid internships aka corporate slavery

[CHL]

As a generation of young students and workers look to enter an uncertain labour market, many are promised that internships are the answer to securing employment after graduation. Thousands of young people are pushed into accepting unpaid internships, convinced that this is the only way to gain the valuable work experience they need to advance in their field. However, the reality is that many of them are forced into long hours of doing menial tasks of little value to their education. In some cases this amounts to unpaid internships being used by employers to gain free labour with the promise of future careers that fail to materialize.

Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance president Amir Eftekarpour has suggested that there are between 100,000 and 300,00 unpaid interns across Canada. These unpaid interns are often asked to work hours that far exceed what is required for their school credit and to the detriment of their health, ability to maintain other paid employment, and their education.

Although the abuse of unpaid internships is not a new issue, a spate of recent incidents has brought the injustice faced by young workers to the fore. In Vancouver, the Fairmont Hotel placed an ad looking for an unpaid intern to bus tables. In Edmonton, a college student was killed in a car accident after interning for 16-hours in one day at two local radio stations. These incidents simply highlight the serious problem that most internships are not regulated in most provinces and have no connection to any educational institutions. The most extreme cases involve internships that are totally unrelated to any academic programs and exist as unpaid entry-level positions. The Canadian Intern Association’s website has a Wall of Shame that lists the worst unpaid internship ads it has found; it includes companies as varied as Reader’s Digest, Bell Media, Roots, and Wind Mobile. The job descriptions in these advertisements are often indistinguishable from descriptions you would normally see for professional paid employment and often show blatant disregard for existing labour codes.

The Toronto Star has highlighted cases of hospitality student interns being relegated to work changing sheets, scrubbing carpets, and cleaning toilets. Some were expected to complete the same workload as other paid employees.

While journalists in the mainstream media seem all too eager to point out that many of these unpaid interns receive valuable work experience and have positive results, we need to consider that these students are already burdened with heavy student debt loads and second paid jobs. Furthermore, companies often use unpaid interns as an excuse to lay off existing staff and to undermine their wages. What is the need to have paid workers on the books when you can hire someone to do the same job for no pay?

Working-class students who support themselves have a much harder time taking these unpaid positions with the pressures of rent, tuition, and looming student loan payments. Long unpaid internships outside of post-secondary programs are only accessible to those with the means to delay their income or those willing to take a huge chance with their future.

Paid internships could save many youth the burden of taking on other part-time work to pay their expenses while in post-secondary programs. At the same time this would ensure that paid jobs are not being replaced by free labour in the form of these so called “internships”. Surely these large and profitable corporations can afford to pay these interns a fair wage while still providing them with valuable skills and work experience. Without these interns corporations would have no choice to but to hire paid workers to get the job done.

A proposed private member’s bill by NDP MP Andrew Cash looks to address the gaps in federal and provincial laws that leave unpaid workers completely unprotected. In Ontario, the Occupational Health and Safety Act does not cover workers who do not earn a paycheque. This means that unpaid interns are not subject to even the most basic labour laws in the province, including overtime or a limit to the numbers of hours worked. The Ontario government even admits that because unpaid interns fall outside of the jurisdiction of the Labour ministry, they have no idea how many unpaid interns are being abused across the province. Eliminating illegal unpaid internships that do not meet provincial requirements and ensuring they are academically relevant is a start but the elimination of unpaid work altogether is a better solution.

No matter how hard the corporate media tries to justify an internship as an important career stepping stone the reality is it is driving wages down below the legal minimum to nothing but a mere promise of “experience”. It is not an exaggeration to state that unpaid internships are a modern form of slavery, where our work is not even compensated. This comes as the global crisis of capitalism forces companies to exploit the labour force even further to try to maintain previous profits. College and university students are being expected to pay for not only their education but their on-the-job training while looking forward to increased living costs and stagnant wages.

We need an end to a corporate education culture in our post-secondary institutions. Canadians deserve the right to free post-secondary education and living grants to ensure they complete their studies free of debt. We need the right to a good job instead of an obligation to work for free.

UNPAID INTERNSHIPS AKA CORPORATE SLAVERY

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Problem?

 

[CHL]

Problem?

Unpaid interns allow for more profit. More profit = more jobs = more economic growth. Thus they should be thanking corporations for not paying them.

 

[DEAD7]

 

[Richard Wright]

This is in no way a problem. There are computer science internships that pay 30k for a summer. If you study in an unemployable field your internship won't be competitive. Also they legally have to offer you credits.

If you want to make money interning, study engineering.

 

[88m3]

The past is the future.

 

[DEAD7]

Call voluntary labor slavery brehs
Have no understanding of human capital brehs

 

[Street Knowledge]

It's a choice

 

[无名的]

I want reparations

 

[Scholar]

Unpaid interns allow for more profit. More profit = more jobs = more economic growth. Thus they should be thanking corporations for not paying them.

I appreciated that trickle down logic

 

[CHL]

voluntary labor

 

[Jimi Swagger]

It is. And with the profits that most mid size companies to large corporations make it is damn near unethical. They can at least pay the federal mandated minmim wage of 7 dollars and something if they don't honor the minimum wage for the state. I think Ivanka Trump pays her interns with "experience"

 

[EndDomination]

This is in no way a problem. There are computer science internships that pay 30k for a summer. If you study in an unemployable field your internship won't be competitive. Also they legally have to offer you credits.

If you want to make money interning, study engineering.

I think Google, Kleiner Perkins, and IBM are in the 99th percentile when it comes to internship pay breh.

 

[CHL]

Money talks even in the internship slave trade

Nick Cohen
If you're young and want a job, you'd better hope that your parents can pay your way

Sunday 16 October 2011 10.02 AEDT

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If you are young, middle class and desperate for work, what will matter most to you – that you are young or that you are middle class? A thought that is as much a bristling resentment as a coherent argument is growing among those unlucky enough to have been born around 1990. They believe that their lives will be determined by their age, not by their background or their schooling and certainly not by any help a negligent government deigns to give them.

Last week, of the 2.57m unemployed almost one million were under 24. Those who hope to get a job must first go through the intern racket, which comes close to contravening anti-slavery law.

The willingness of their elders to put them through it was encapsulated by Philip Hammond with words that ought to be etched on the minds of a generation. The richest man in the cabinet justified taking on interns for the princely wage of £0.00 by saying: "I would regard it as an abuse of taxpayer funding to pay for something that is available for nothing."

Employers, likewise, now regard it as an abuse of shareholder investments to pay for what they can take for free. Arrangements that could once be justified as informal agreements to provide work experience have become an efficient mechanism for exploitation.

If you look at companies such as Inspiring Interns, you can imagine a future where everyone makes money out of the young, except the young. The firm goes through the CVs of thousands of despairing young people and picks out the best. It then offers them to small businesses which have never thought about taking on graduates before.

Look, it says, we will give you these polite, presentable, enthusiastic and well-educated recruits, who understand how to use social networking and the web far better than you do. Grateful employers pay Inspiring Interns £500 (plus VAT of course) per intern per month in return for this bargain offer. The young workers get only travel and lunch costs and maybe some pocket money if they are lucky.

A new intern dealership called Etsio has gone further. Its business model appears to be based on that justly notorious moment at the Tories' "Black and White Ball" in February when wealthy supporters contributed to party funds by buying internships for their children at City hedge funds for £3,000 a time.

Etsio tells potential recruits that if required they must pay "between £50 to £200" a day for the privilege of an internship. Etsio takes a cut for itself and the employer takes a share too because, as Etsio instructs its young customers: "The fact is, most of our employers wouldn't offer work experience unless they're paid."

The comparison with slave owners is, in many respects, unfair. Say what you will about them, but slave owners had to meet the full cost of bed and board. They did not tell the slaves that they had to pay for the privilege of working for them either.

As for other burdens on the young, the problem is not where to start but how to stop. Despite the worst recession since the 1930s, the housing market has not crashed and they must meet extortionate rent demands. The government, which is very careful not to offend the elderly, who vote in large numbers, has slashed help for sixth-formers, students and young mothers, who do not.

In the detail of policy-making one can find an almost complete indifference to the needs of the lost generation. HM Revenue & Customs barely bothers to investigate whether employers are paying the minimum wage, which most young workers are on or should be on. Needless to add, it has never raided a firm to discover if interns are gaining valuable work experience or are, in fact, working for nothing. Meanwhile, no one seems to be worried about the possible sexual exploitation of pretty – or indeed handsome – young graduates, which you do not need too paranoid a mind to imagine.

Roll these grievances together and optimists see the possibility for a generation of political rebels, who will demand social housing and improvements in childcare and employment protection. Shiv Malik, the co-author of Jilted Generation, which is one of those books you have to read even if you think its sentiments are wrong, says that the solidarity of the young has the potential to be more effective than any kind of leftish class consciousness. The young do not identify with their class any longer, he claims. They identify with each other.

Glance at the trade unions and you can see why. Run by men who look like Benito Mussolini and think like Josef Stalin, the inhabitants of the last play-pen for the far left have failed to unionise the new working class in the shopping malls, courier desks, hairdressing salons, call centres and security guards' cabins, let alone tried to find ways to appeal to the young in general and young women in particular.

Yet the notion that the young will form a political movement is hard to believe – and not only because a 60-year-old former miner coughing his guts up in a Yorkshire council flat is not going to take kindly to lectures on how fortunate he is to be born into the gilded baby-boomer generation. Far from leaving them "all in this together", the crisis is exacerbating divisions among the young as it is exacerbating divisions in all other age groups.

Interns need wealthy parents who can give them the money that allows them to work for nothing. However much they dislike doing it, they know that their children will have an unbeatable competitive advantage over children with no Bank of Mum and Dad to draw on – or the majority of young people in Britain as they are also known. The exploitation of the young middle class is outrageous and I do not seek to diminish it but the deprivation of those without family connections remains the true scandal.

Danny Dorling, that unstoppably prolific chronicler of the wounds class inflicts, has a book out this week. The hundreds of statistics in Fair Play batter the reader into acknowledging a simple truth: nothing, not gender or sexuality or colour or creed or character or talent or accent or age, matters more than how much money you have and how much money your parents can give you. This is Britain, after all, and some things never change. Even though it is high time that they did.

Interns face uphill struggle in Geneva - SWI swissinfo.ch

 

[Richard Wright]

I think Google, Kleiner Perkins, and IBM are in the 99th percentile when it comes to internship pay breh.

Then get to the 99th percentile. This shyt isn't a charity lol. I made nearly 45 thousand dollars on internship throughout college. My total tuition was 9k a year * 4 = 36 thousand.

If people want to go to a 60 k a year school and do free / no internships that's their choice.

I feel no sympathy for college students since the truly disadvantaged people in this country are the ones who are doomed before they even get to college. Only 1 in 4 black men in my city graduate high school. College boys getting payed internships is low on my priority list.