youthmoney

Internships are a good way for young people to see the world of work at first hand.

But there’s an important principle: if you are working, you should get paid. It’s a moral thing. Just because the young are capable of being exploited doesn’t mean that organisations should exploit them.

It’s also a legal thing. There are exclusions from the national minimum wage. Volunteers are among them. So are work experience placements – for a couple of weeks or so.

Internships can fall inside or outside the minimum wage system. A key legal distinction for an unpaid role is that nothing must be expected of the intern. They cannot be under an obligation to turn up on certain days of the week or for certain hours, to do any particular work or provide any particular service. If they are, then this is a job of work, not an internship. And is covered by national minimum wage.

You don’t have to look hard to find widespread and flagrant breaching of these laws. They are rife and increasing in the media industry, as media blogger Sally Whittle noted. Here are just a few examples culled today from the Gorkana PR job list:

Sport.co.uk, Content writers – Unpaid….

London-based Sport.co.uk, is offering a number of exciting opportunities to young and aspiring journalists looking to gain work experience and build their byline credits. Applicants have the choice of work experience in the office, writing on a freelance basis from home, or a combination of both. Opportunities to interview stars of the sports world, the chance to produce features, blogs and news articles and partake in the sport.co.uk team’s commissioning process will all be made available.

Mizz, Unpaid Feature Writers….

Mizz are currently looking for unpaid contributors to write features for the magazine – if you are looking for features or a byline please contact lsaxton@panini.co.uk

Resource Media, Editorial Assistant – Unpaid…

Resource Media is a social enterprise based in the centre of Bristol that specialises in publishing periodicals for the UK’s environmental industries (www.resource.uk.com).

Are you looking to break into magazine publishing? We require a part-time, volunteer editorial assistant to work on our environmental publications. You are likely to be educated to degree level, have an eye for detail and some experience in journalism or the publishing industry. Duties include copy chasing, research, writing, proofreading, website editing and design.

These look, sound, smell, walk and quack like unpaid jobs. And that’s illegal.

It’s not just struggling media companies. Respected charity Oxfam seems to be having difficulty understanding the law. Here’s this.

Information Management Assistant for Digitisation and Repository Project

Location: Oxford- Oxfam House

Commitment: Minimum three days a week for up to six months: ideally full time for up to six months…

Key Responsibilities:

Create an updated listing of books for digitisation, checking on existing digital files for quality, and preparing metadata for all products. Source printed copies where needed.

Create an updated listing of policy and research papers for digitisation either from print or from existing files, and prepare metadata and provide copy for replacement title and copyright pages.

Work with the Oxford-based sales office of the Chennai-based digitiser to deliver materials for digitisation, check quality and receive back final digital files before submitting them to the Google BookSearch programme

Review and where necessary rewrite product descriptions for the repository to high level SEO (search engine optimisation) standards. Check descriptions are suitable for external audiences (remove Oxfam jargon)

Work with the Research Team on research reports and materials; with the Programme Performance and Accountability Team on Programme Evaluations; and across the organisation to source materials from Country and Regional programme offices.

This and plenty more, are available on Oxfam’s website.

Everything about that says it’s a job. There’s an application form, with a deadline, and interview and start dates. So why doesn’t Oxfam pay a wage, in accordance with the law?

The fact that they don’t means that they recruit interns from comfortably-off backgrounds who are able to live without an income. The interns will be more likely to get salaried positions when they come up. The result is increased inequality of opportunity, fuelled by an organisation committed to fighting poverty. Big charities as well as media companies are likely to end up “hideously posh”. Some would argue they are already.

I’ve asked Oxfam’s press office for their reasons for such apparent breaches of the law. I’ll post their reply here.

Meantime, here’s the advice given to MPS, themselves long-standing users of interns, from w4mp, a website maintained by the resources department of the House of Commons:

Remember – you must always make clear that an expenses-only intern is under no obligation to provide services for you, work certain number of hours/days, or perform particular tasks. The emphasis should be on their educational and career development – what you can do for them, rather than what they can do for you. While it is all very well to make the initial promise that an intern is under no obligation, this must be adhered to throughout the internship – even if you find changes to the duties and volume of parliamentary work are threatening to overtake agreements initially made.

My advice to anyone who has worked for an organisation in a role thinly disguised as an intern is to invoice for the hours they put in. The national minimum wage applies, and has to be paid.