Good, unpaid internships are just a free foot in the door for children of the wealthy who don’t need an income to get experience.
Nah. If they’re legitimately wealthy they don’t need experience, they just get recommended to a job and hired on the spot.
No this is pure exploitation of labor through and through.
You’re fixating on the word “wealthy” (indeed a bad word choice) and missing the point. - The only people who can afford to spend months in an unpaid internship are people who come from a family that’s well-off enough that the person doesn’t need a paycheck to feed and house themself. Poor people literally can’t afford to not have a paycheck coming in.
This takes many forms. A recurrent one is for the take place right out of college (or while still in it!), taking advantage of the naïveté of those just entering the job market, and often as a precondition to access any kind of paid job some months later. The employer gets free qualified labor, the intern eat lots of ramen… families put up with it as a natural extension of paying for college, for a few more months… it’s exploitation pure and simple.
A “joke” I’ve heard several times over the years (not recently, though) summarizes the level of assholery that’s going on (warning: some may find this offensive)
“joke”
“it is better to have an intern than a slave, because you don’t need to feed, house our clothe the intern”…
i dare someone to play devil’s advocate and pretend that’s funny
Exploitation of labour that can only be performed by the privileged!
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Sparkling Serfdom
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The internships, one unpaid and the other providing a token €400 (£344) a month, chipped away at his savings from summer jobs and forced him to keep a constant watch on his spending.
The result are internship experiences that vary wildly; from those that offer training and a stepping stone to a career, to others that simply use young people as a form of cheap or unpaid labour.
Research suggests that young people are shelling out an average of €1,028 (£885) a month to cover their living costs during internships, noted Mark McNulty, of the European Youth Forum.
Those from families who can help them bear these costs have an advantage, allowing them greater access to sectors such as the media and NGOs, where unpaid internships are rife.
In 2014, France set out regulations on internships and limited unpaid stints to a maximum of two months, while Romania has required companies to pay interns a stipend since 2019.
The draft legislation, expected to be completed in early 2024, will set off a race against time, said Rodríguez Alcázar, as the European parliament seeks to have it approved before elections in June.
The original article contains 914 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
wym i eat ramen all the time @ 55kusd/yr
