Unpaid internships: How working for free went mainstream

Updated

Are you "outrageously organised"? "A rising Junior"? Do you "consider yourself a young Hemmingway" [sic]? Are you "looking to become a strategic weapon"?

If so, then we might know of an internship for you.

These are direct quotes from a dataset of more than 1,000 unique internship advertisements posted between January 8 and April 12, 2018 on six of Australia's largest job websites: CareerOne, SEEK, LinkedIn, Gumtree, Jora and Indeed.

The advertisements provide an intriguing snapshot of a practice that appears to be growing but for which little data exists. Though not a representative sample, the collection sheds light on the strategies employers use to attract interns, the requirements some demand and the financial arrangements advertised — from paid positions to those charging interns upwards of $1,000.

It's a murky world. While some say their internship helped them land their dream job, others warn Australia is at a tipping point of an internship culture that legitimises worker exploitation, undermines the graduate job market and entrenches class inequalities.

The price of workplace experience

Sydney Pead was looking to start her career in journalism when she applied for the summer internship at a Sydney-based newspaper — a six week, unpaid internship offered aspiring journalists the chance to get their names on stories in one of the country's most respected mastheads.

"To get a byline in the paper felt like the ultimate goal for me. I was hoping to learn from the best in the business and absorb as much as I could from them."

But after the excitement wore off, the reality of working full-time without pay for six weeks set in.

What we learned from 1,054 internship ads Job Title Company Location The Role Requirements/Skills/Perks About the Company

Unpaid internships have the greatest potential for exploitation, experts say. Australia's only nationally-representative study of internships, published in 2016, found 58 per cent of Australians aged between 18 and 29 had participated in "at least one episode of UWE [unpaid work experience] in the last five years".

One in five had undertaken five or more.

"We found significant hardship amongst some young people participating in unpaid work," Paula McDonald, one of the report's co-authors and Professor of Work and Organisation at Queensland University of Technology's business school, said.

The study found one in four respondents reduced their hours of paid work to participate in unpaid work experience; one in five paid for their own insurance and one in 10 paid money to a broker, agent or directly to the organisation.

The ABC News dataset contained a similar proportion of ads posted by brokers (11 per cent), which advertised fees ranging from $699 to $1,650. The average across all advertised fees was $945 plus GST.

Pead didn't pay for her internship but it still came with a hefty price tag.

She was commuting to Sydney from Wollongong while trying to survive on Youth Allowance — the government assistance eligible for young people who are studying, training, sick or looking for work.

"Once my rent and transport were paid there wasn't much left over for food. I didn't have time to supplement it with casual work."

She was not alone. "There must have been about a dozen interns there, all working for no pay and producing stories everyday — some even making the front page of the paper," Pead said.

"Essentially, we worked for free, but more than that, I was hundreds of dollars out of pocket for the experience."

The rise of an 'internship culture'

A text analysis of the 1,054 job descriptions collected by ABC News reveals some of the most common words and phrases advertisers used to attract interns.

The scatterplot below arranges the words from least to most common, and from negative sentiment to positive sentiment, based on the results of MIT Media Laboratory's SenticNet language indexing tool.

The most common words tended to have positive associations, with "experience", "skill", "team" and "opportunity" among the most frequently used words.

The most common words and phrases SHOW TOPnounsverbsadjectivesphrases MORE NEGATIVE

WORDS MORE POSITIVE

WORDS MORE COMMON

WORDS LESS COMMON

WORDS Note: the vertical axis is scaled to show the difference within each category of words, not between categories. However, sentiment is consistent between categories, and ranges from -1 (completely negative) to 1 (completely positive). Some phrases were only labelled "negative", "neutral", or "positive" so were placed at -0.5, 0, and 0.5 respectively. Some "stop words" ("be", "have", "do", etc.) and less pertinent words ("Australia", "day", "week") were removed.





While this kind of language is probably typical of job postings, Bernadette Anvia, who has done eight internships and two unpaid jobs (not advertised as internships) in the past six years, believes this is part of the problem.

"What really frustrates me about a lot of internship job advertisements is that they use… words that you would expect to see in an ad for a paid position," Anvia said.

"That in itself creates this idea that you're there to join the team as an employee, you simply won't be getting money for the work that you are doing."

Yet despite the sometimes substantial cost, internships are increasingly the norm for young people looking to get a foot in the door. And it seems almost everyone — from businesses to universities, government and even parents — has skin in the game.

"We know through very strong anecdotal evidence that it is becoming increasingly prevalent," Professor McDonald said.

Employers benefit from free or cheap labour, lower training costs and a pool of graduates already equipped with some workplace experience and training. Advertisers captured in the ABC News dataset spanned more than a dozen industries, from multinationals worth billions of dollars to "new media" startups, government agencies and local businesses.

One Sydney-based startup with seven employees was advertising for five interns. Another self-described "well-funded startup" advertised an unpaid internship for someone seeking "untapped opportunity".

A tighter graduate jobs market means employers can demand more of graduates, who are often expected to be "what's known as 'self-basting and oven-ready'," Professor McDonald said.

This has likewise meant stiff competition for internships and tougher demands on interns. In the ABC News dataset, this was reflected in job descriptions seeking interns who were "thick-skinned", "willing to hunt", "a superstar", "a gun" or "motivated by making big money".

Numerous advertisements asked interns to submit videos with their applications. Others requested "previous internship experience".

Unsurprisingly, the potential for exploitation of these often young and inexperienced workers has also risen. "I'm not saying all employers have the propensity to exploit young people but certainly we've seen enough exploitative cases of internships to know some are using it as a source of free labour," Professor McDonald said.

Who really benefits?

It's not just employers driving the growth of internships.

Universities, faced with mounting pressure to produce work-ready graduates, promote internships as a means of boosting the employability of their students.

Students themselves believe they need real workplace exposure to be competitive in the graduate labour market. This is often backed by "middle class parents… [who] see their children investing in higher education and want to see them succeed in the labour market," Professor McDonald said.

Add to all these factors the enthusiastic support of governments that see workplace exposure "as a way of getting more young people off Centrelink and into the labour market," Professor McDonald said.

"In my view, it all stems from a tighter labour market. If there were sufficient jobs and the majority of graduates could go into a graduate position there wouldn't be a need for significant participation in unpaid work."

But here's the rub: if everyone's working for free, it no longer gives you an advantage.

"So that creates more competition, where students feel they have to participate in longer periods or more episodes of unpaid work experience," Professor McDonald said.

It's a kind of race to employability but, paradoxically, it's not even clear that unpaid internships make you more employable.

"The evidence that unpaid work experience actually leads to better employment outcomes is very mixed," Professor McDonald said.

The cost to society

The heatmap below shows the most common length of paid and unpaid internships in different industries. (The darker the colour, the more common the combination of days and months.)

The most common duration for unpaid internships was two days a week for three months (roughly 192 hours); for paid internships, it was five days a week for three months (roughly 480 hours).

The longest advertised internship was 24 months.

(Note that about one in four ads specified the timeframe as a minimum, so the actual duration could be longer.)





For Jacque Rowe, 18, one of the most demoralising aspects of her part-time, six-month radio internship was the effort "wasted" on work that "literally no one even looked at".

"The work I was doing was being entirely discarded the moment I stopped doing it," Rowe said of the experience last year.

"I might as well have worked for a day, saved it all into a folder on my desktop, and then dragged it to the trash without even showing anyone."

But beyond the demoralising encounters and wasted hours, unpaid internships raise a litany of social, legal and moral issues, researchers warn.

"It's a problem for our society broadly," Anne Hewitt, an associate professor at the University of Adelaide's law school, said.

"If work has value, then shouldn't we ensure that everyone engaging in it gets some remuneration or some reward?"

Unpaid internships can also help to reproduce social inequality because they require those involved to work for free, sometimes for long periods. This effectively excludes those without independent means, family support or substantial savings.

"And that's probably the kind of thing we want to carefully consider: whether [some industries] should only be accessible to those who can take on unpaid work," Associate Professor Hewitt said.

Pead said she was generally happy with her time at the newspaper but realises she was lucky to have enough savings to survive six weeks unpaid. Many others would never have the chance.

"It means the kind of people who can benefit and get jobs out of these kind of internships are only those who can afford it," she said.

The legal questions

Part of the problem, according to experts, is the legal ambiguity around what an internship even is and which laws should then apply.

The law can vary depending on the jurisdiction, the characteristics of the internship (such as whether or not it's a compulsory part of a course of study) and, crucially, whether or not the position is paid.

* A number of factors determine whether an "employment relationship" exists between the intern and the employer. Find out more about your rights at fairwork.gov.au * A number of factors determine whether an "employment relationship" exists between the intern and the employer. Find out more about your rights at fairwork.gov.au

Of the 1,054 advertisements ABC News collected, 12 per cent were advertised as paid, 31 per cent were advertised as unpaid, and the remainder did not specify.

"Some jurisdictions treat unpaid people differently [to employees]," Associate Professor Hewitt said.

This can affect whether or not interns are protected against workplace discrimination, bullying or harassment, or entitled to workers compensation if they suffer a workplace injury, for example.

Sarah Ashman Baird, executive director of volunteer-run advocacy organisation Interns Australia said unpaid internships appeared to be on the rise, with Australia now "at a tipping point".

"Our goal is to nip that in the bud before it does become an entrenched culture of unpaid internships," she said.

The organisation is campaigning for all internships to be paid and to provide clear guidelines around employer expectations, the length of the internship, the type of work involved and the value the intern would receive in exchange.

As it stands, however, there has been no discussion at either a national or state level about which rights should be extended to people who are learning in the workplace, Associate Professor Hewitt said.

"At the moment no one's taking responsibility."

Brett Tweedie was a Google News Lab Fellow with ABC News.

Credits

Notes about this story

Job data was collected monthly over three months from January 8, 2018 until April 12, 2018 from CareerOne, Gumtree, Indeed, Jora LinkedIn and SEEK.

The search criteria was the keyword "internship" and the location "Australia". Jobs that weren't internships and jobs that weren't available to all Australian citizens, and medical internships were manually excluded. 1,054 unique advertisements remained after duplicates were removed.

Internships were assigned to an industry based on the type of work the intern would be doing, rather than the employer's industry. For example, a sales internship with a bank would be classified under "Sales, Retail, Wholesale & Real Estate" rather than "Accounting, Banking & Financial Services".

While all care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the data, minor errors may exist.

Disclaimer: The ABC occasionally uses interns.

No interns were exploited in the making of this piece

Topics: work, community-and-society, youth, university-and-further-education, education, australia

First posted