Unpaid Internships
This is a popular whinge for me, with good reason. (For a graduate designer anyway, during studies they are more reasonable as they eat into time that is allocated for studying rather than sustaining your own life force via earning money. A student intern is unqualified, a graduate is)
For someone to employ a qualified graduate with a good degree from a good school, put them on a forty hour week for a month (or more) doing menial to mildly interesting jobs to a reasonable standard and in a timely fashion, but not see fit to pay them even the minimum wage. Well, Bill, that’s just fucking cynical.
Because in terms of utility it can be presumed that a graduate designer brings at least enough workforce to a company to warrant being paid the minimum wage of £235. That’s the same as they would get stacking shelves in Tesco. Surely stacking shelves is a far more ubiquitous skill set than highly specialized design skills? But maybe I’ve been regarding a supposed pay rate to skill set in all wrong.
Maybe it’s that employers don’t actually need interns but rather provide a space for interns to learn. This explains then why many interns are put doing menial jobs that paid designers don’t have time to do and why some studios and work places have an endless cycle of interns doing these menial jobs.
If someone (or something doo do doo do) partakes in the work of a company and contributes to the companies overall output then it’s not really learning is it? In what job doesn’t a person learn as they work? It’s called experience and you do it by working. And working in turn should earn you some…
Money. Money is the crux I suppose. Why would a person pay for a movie or an album, however cheap they may be, when they are being offered it for free? Why would an employer hire one graduate intern at £235 a week when they can just hire as many as they want for free? Maybe it’s just another facet of our ‘Fuck you, greed is good’ culture where it’s acceptable that nervous young and talented people can be taken in to a company, worked forty hours a week and then have the price of a travel card a few shitty lunches pushed into their hand at the end of the week. Once it was called exploitation, now it’s called experience.
But is it exploitation? Some studios and companies offer great graduate internship programs that pay in peanut currency. People learn, grow, make contacts, develop new skills and gain invaluable experience in a range of different areas. That’s a truth and no amount of lurid language will hide the fact that while unpaid internships are certainly not egalitarian, they are far from completely useless (the opposite in fact).
But is it fair that the more well off are more privileged than others? No, but then that’s just another one of those shitty facts of life. Just like your politicians are all liars (lizards?), you have no control over any societal policy and that a certain percentage of your tax is used to prop up a ruling elite and the rest goes into a warhead to be dropped on an orphanage full of children in some illegal war in some country far far away. THE ONLY WAR IS A CLASS WAR.
(Breathe.)
The less fortunate (but not unfortunate in any financial regard, at the end of the day we just graduated from design/art schools so chances are we weren’t raised by a troglodyte crack mother in the depths of a Brutalist shit-fuck-hell estate) can - and will in some cases - work a second job to supplement their forty hours spent unpaid. Or else work to save money to embark on an internship. Another fact of life that some have to work harder than others to get to the exact same place.
But the rich and richer argument is a canard. It doesn’t deal with the fact that if you take someone on to do forty hours of work you should pay them for forty hours of work. It’s this simple mechanism of exchanging services for money that keeps the economy ticking over. It’s not much to ask for people to be paid for the services they provide, even if it’s only worth minimum wage.
On a final note, to summarize my own feelings:
I believe that experience in a good company or studio is invaluable. However, for me it’s nearly too bitter a pill to swallow to not get paid for what, at the end of the day, is work and the culture of unpaid graduate internships is widespread - the economic downturn has made it more the practice more acceptable and possibly more ingrained in the design industry. It’s hard to know if design businesses can afford to pay an intern minimum wage or not. You can assume though that they can afford more than a paltry £40 a week for travel and lunch.
On the other hand, some internship positions just have Shitty Bum Sex plastered all over them. I saw a three month position at an obscure ice cream company listed on Gumtree. Three months for free, at a shitty ice cream company that clearly wanted to hire someone to do all their design works etc for free. There were year long internships at marketing companies at for £50 a week. (In fact, if you feel similar to me about unpaid internships and you’d like to develop an erectile dysfunction or brain clot, searching internships on Gumtree is a pretty good way to go.)
In my last job at a corporation there was constant talk amongst the marketing team of taking on interns and the term ‘For free!’ was bandied about with the same excited tone as someone finding twenty quid on the street and exclaiming ‘Twenty quid!’. It would be discussed all the menial jobs they could do while they were at the company and how it would be ‘good experience’. I even heard the fake potential of a job was ‘the carrot’.
As my contract was coming to a close I had discussions with my boss about how there wasn’t a budget to keep me on and that one plan they had to aid the workload was to higher an intern for three months: “for free but with transport costs, can you recommend any friends for the job?”
(Yeah man, sure that’s what I’ll do. I’ll recommend a shitty internship to my friend. And then I might just walk into their rooms and rob them while they sleep. Hell, I may even find it in my heart to place my testicles into their milk.)
To be fair my old boss is the nicest guy in the world. But it illustrates how, for some companies, an intern is a way increasing output and cutting costs.
