IN THE DOLDRUMS of an economic recession internships are a rare growth area. Employers set them up to save on labour costs, young people use them to tread water in a harrowing job market, and now even policymakers tout them as a solution to youth unemployment.
JobBridge, the Government’s new national internship scheme, unveiled last Wednesday, would seem at first glance to be beyond reproach, a measure calculated to create jobs, or at least build skills, among those who need them most. But a closer look reveals several fundamental problems.
If the scheme is to live up to its optimistic moniker, the Government will have to take a far more hard-headed and tenacious approach, recognising that internship is all too often a byword for white-collar exploitation.
The basic idea is that the Government will back 5,000 internships in the private, public, voluntary and community sectors. Big employers such as Tesco, Aer Lingus and PricewaterhouseCoopers have already signed up to hire jobseekers for internships of six or nine months, with the understanding that many of the interns will be hired at the end. The others, supposedly, will have gained skills and experience that will help them land jobs elsewhere. Taxpayers will pick up the €20 million tab, a reasonable investment if 5,000 solid jobs were to result from the programme.
JobBridge interns will at least have it better than the several million unpaid interns who have worked at firms large and small around the world in recent years. In addition to keeping their social-welfare entitlements they will receive €50 a week each from the Department of Social Protection. Organisations involved in the scheme must be legitimate entities, with at least one employee on the books, and the number of interns they can take on is dependent on payroll size. Technically the interns need not have graduated from university and can be of any age, but it’s not clear whether companies will be as open-minded as the architects of JobBridge on these points.
Ireland is not the first country to pin hopes on a national internship scheme: similar programmes have been discussed or introduced in the UK, Australia, South Korea and Pakistan, with unclear results. Unsurprisingly, companies are usually enthusiastic backers of the schemes – this is free labour subsidised by the state, after all. Businesses and voluntary organisations also have a stake in the more general spread of internship culture, with its attendant and sinister normalisation of the idea that people should have to work unpaid to further their careers.
Until recently no one did real work for a meaningful period of time without pay. The concept of internships, as I detail in my book Intern Nation(Verso, 2011), originated in the medical profession in the US and has spread to every sector of the white-collar workforce over the past 30 or 40 years. This internship boom, which has since gone global, means that many young people are asked to work for several months unpaid or underpaid, often without real training and with little prospect of being hired. It is a system in which interns essentially pay to play, with social mobility and access to key white-collar professions blocked for most young working-class people. The US now has hundreds of thousands of unpaid interns doing vital work for their firms and displacing untold numbers of regular employees. This is in flagrant violation of the law and saves unscrupulous companies about €1.4 billion a year in labour costs.
Given this larger context JobBridge runs the risk of being a Government stamp of approval on an internship free-for-all. The organisations that benefit from the hard work of interns should pay for it, not Irish taxpayers. (Korea’s scheme, for example, at least required a 50/50 split between employer contributions and government subsidy.) Nor can we put much faith in the scheme’s attempts to ensure that internships won’t displace employees and actually impede job growth, as it’s notoriously difficult to know whether a company is not hiring when it otherwise would be. There is a risk that firms will look to JobBridge interns rather than doing some good old-fashioned hiring.
As a small-scale two-year scheme in a dismal economy JobBridge just might be able to brighten some people’s career prospects, as long as the Government is vigilant about fairness and transparency in hiring and the quality of experience gained by interns. But the precedent it sets is dangerous.
A bolder policy, more attuned to the global reality of internships, would financially penalise companies that don’t follow through on full-time hiring. Firms that currently employ unpaid interns should be ineligible for the scheme, and indeed the Government should take this opportunity to remind everyone just what constitutes a legal internship, and go after companies that violate the law.
Employment policy should involve sustained, far-sighted public and private investment in the creation of real jobs (rather than pseudo-jobs) and the promotion of a humane, equitable culture of paid work.
Compared with such aims, JobBridge looks like an iffy quick fix.
Tales of two interns
Declan Shaw
“I finished my studies in London last summer, moved home to Ireland and was unemployed for a time.
“I started a placement in April with ABK Architects in Dublin through a Fás scheme. It lasts for a maximum of nine months, by which time I have to be either hired full-time or let go. But it’s almost certain that they will replace me with another .
“I know a lot of people on similar placements, and it’s advantageous for young Irish architects because there really isn’t work out there. From the employer’s perspective, they get tax incentives and the free labour enables them to undercut competition at cheaper rates.
“I’m definitely learning, and it’s tough work. You’re not treated like a slave, although you essentially are one. It might be a pain not being paid, but when you hear about the fate of freelancers and others stuck in career breaks, that sounds worse.
“I need the experience for my CV, whether I’m paid or not.”
Vicky Kavanagh
"I started my BA in journalism in 2008 and I will be graduating this November. I have already interned with the Dublinermagazine, unpaid, in summer 2010. My duties were conducting vox pops and writing articles and gig listings.
“While I value all experience, I didn’t really learn anything new there.
“The internship I’m doing now, with RTÉ in Washington DC, is much different. I have a month to go. Its a small set-up: myself, Richard Downes and cameraman Harvey, who everyone knows from that Charlie Bird documentary. I’m getting loads of experience, researching news stories, putting packages together, getting to develop and work on news stories. The internship is very constructive.
“Although I am not receiving any financial benefits from the internship, the experience and contacts are extremely worthwhile. There is no better way to impress somebody than by showing them how dedicated you are when you’re not even getting paid.
“In general, I think internships are worthwhile and you get back what you put in. I usually find the people who complain that they learned nothing didn’t give 100 per cent.”
