When I first graduated I was gloriously naive. My willingness to start out working for free, and much more importantly, my relatively privileged circumstances (London accommodation provided by kind parents) was, I was certain, a winning combination. Two years and a couple of internships later, the effort of finding a job has left me demoralised and exhausted.
Desperate graduates are ten a penny in competitive sectors, drawn in with the vague promise that an internship might eventually morph into employment, or at the very least supply some CV material and a reference.
The scourge of the unpaid internship is a particularly curious one where non-profits are concerned. The caveat of “expenses only” essentially translates to a big fat no entry sign for people who are likely to have personal experience of the very social issues that these organisations are supposed to be tackling.
The problems that unpaid internships cause for social mobility are well discussed and documented, which makes their ubiquity and uniquely fully legal status in the non-profit sector all the more ironic. Charities too often fail to put money where their mouths are, and in the process are entrenching the gulf between the privileged and the not so fortunate.
Speaking from the position of someone lucky enough to be able to take up an internship, working for free put me in a double bind of resentment. Some internships left me feeling like a hybrid of unpaid secretary and glorified teasmade and with the wasted time and false promises – terms like “skill development” could only be spoken aloud accompanied by a hollow laugh.
When interning for a non-profit, my manager was lovely; at pains to tell me how important the work I was doing was, how vital for their projects. But the more this was emphasised, the louder the nagging voice in my head became, demanding: “Why was I the only person expected to work there for free?” It was surprisingly demoralizing to know that I was doing it all completely unpaid. Like someone with a very weird hobby: “I like to spend my spare time poring over Ofsted reports and creating jazzy infographics from the data” is not a sentence I, or probably anyone else, has ever uttered.
Working for three days a week as an unpaid intern and a minimum wage zero hours bar job left me doing a full working week for around £3 an hour. My exhaustion at the end of the week in no way justified the amount dribbling into my bank account. While the increasingly common gesture of paring down unpaid intern hours to two or three days a week is appreciated, the suggestion that the remainder of the week could be used to provide for all the living expenses in a major city is darkly comic, as anyone with a fleeting familiarity with the London rental market will confirm.
By the time my internship period came to a finish I couldn’t take another round of working for gratitude alone. I decided to go to Australia where the more robust minimum wage was a welcome change, with this came the ability to rent a decent room in a nice area, and the freedom to do extra work as a volunteer in some of my spare time for causes I felt passionately about.
The UK’s morally dubious and socially damaging practice of capitalising on young people’s desperation to find work needs to be questioned, particularly when this system is propagated by organisations claiming to advance social justice and equality. For non-profits to rely on upaid labour is unfair, exploitative and ultimately hypocritical. Interns shouldn’t have to rely on charity.
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