With scores of young journalists clawing for a limited number of jobs each year, landing that media internship has become a critical career step. While some internships come with a stipend, many are being offered with no pay. Increasingly, both interns and media professionals are asking: are young people being exploited by these unpaid internships and are they keeping those from lower-income families out of science media?
The public relations (PR) industry has been especially affected by the rise of the unpaid internships. The news outlet
PRWeek recently reported that a former chair of the industry’s Professional Practices Committee has called on industry bodies "to stamp out the 'odious' practice of unpaid internships."
The Association of British Science Writers and
Psci-Com mailing lists regularly advertise science writing and journalism internship opportunities, which are just as regularly scoffed at and criticised for their poor pay or alleged illegality.
In the past, a would-be science journalist could go straight to a paid job as a general reporter at a local newspaper and earn their way up to science beat; now it seems they may face a double expense to do so: sometimes paying for a specialised course and then working for free ‘internship-hopping’ for as long as it takes to land a job.
These media internships come under many guises: work experience, job shadowing, work placement, volunteering... and their duration also varies (two weeks, a month, three months, six months; full-time or part-time) making it all the more difficult for interns to figure out what their rights are. Some internships pay small salaries, but many only pay expenses or nothing at all.
Legality of taking on unpaid interns
Interns are most likely to be classed in law as workers, who have a written or implied contract with the company they are interning with, and accordingly have a right to be paid.
"In employment law, you don't need to have [the] contract written down," says Kayte Lawton, senior research fellow at the
Institute for Public Policy Research. So the work you carry out as an intern "indicates that you're employed and have certain rights."
Intern employers must adhere to the
National Minimum Wage Act 1998 established to enforce a statutory minimum wage: it is illegal for employers to pay their workers any less. This covers full-time, part-time, and freelance workers, but not volunteers or the self-employed.
However, an unpaid short-term work experience — not more than 160 hours, full time over four weeks or part time over three months — is in keeping with the law, according to
National Union of Journalists’s (NUJ) legal officer Roy Mincoff.
Unpaid placements for students as part of their course are also legal.
Mincoff suggests that unpaid interns should look to employment tribunals for enforcing their rights. "If [someone] is performing the role of a worker, a tribunal would be very reluctant to find in favour of a company that's treating them as an unpaid so-called volunteer," he says.
But Lawton says people often "don't want to go down that road because they want to keep a good name for themselves in the industry".
In 2010 the
London Freelance Branch of the NUJ started its
Cashback for Interns campaign, in which anyone who has worked as a media intern in the last six years may be able to claim back the minimum wage. This is one of the several campaign initiatives and websites set up recently to raise the profile of interning issues, especially the right to be paid, such as:
Intern Aware,
Interns Anonymous,
Internocracy,
Rights for Interns...
"There are quite a few people taking us up on the Cashback Campaign," says Mincoff. "If an organisation is not able to pay [minimum wage] to somebody that's working up to 40 hours a week, they shouldn't be taking people on."
Many intern employers do "comply with the law and treat people properly," but the NUJ wants
all employers in the field to do so.
Former London Bureau Chief for
TIME magazine Jef McAllister told ABSW: "When I worked at
TIME, we always paid our interns. We were unusual to some degree, but it was a long tradition and we didn't feel that we should not pay people for work."
And
Science’s Europe news editor John Travis says "
Science has always had paid internships and usually at a level where the intern can, at a minimum, break even."
Science and
TIME interns are among the lucky ones. Breaking into the media industry is not easy, so "there's a lot of unpaid labour available for journalism jobs," said McAllister.
Bias in favour of the privileged
Journalism and media jobs are competitive and experience is crucial for success in getting a job. Former
Science intern Sara Coelho, who is currently a science writer at the European Grid Infrastructure, says her time at
Science did "wonders for [her] self-confidence and writing."
And Jack Serle, a student in London City University's science journalism MA, who took on unpaid internships at national magazines and newspapers, says these placements provided him with valuable experience and contacts which might help him to find a job after his course.
But with many internships providing poor pay or no pay at all, many cannot afford to get the foothold.
"I have been fortunate ... to be able to afford to work for no pay," Serle admits. "Unpaid internships further inequality, further the divisions between sections of society and further the chances of achievement for those already in a privileged position."
Another City science journalism student Djuke Veldhuis says: "As long as people accept free internships in a desperate attempt to get their foot on a rung of the ladder, this vicious cycle continues."
The key thing to break the 'vicious circle' might be to "have available the maximum number of paid internships," says Lawton. The NUJ is trying to let employers know that "good placements are welcome ... those that are exploitative will be exposed [by the NUJ] and hopefully be a deterrent," says Mincoff.
But others point out that although some interns are being abused as free labour, banning unpaid internships would not necessarily create any new paid opportunities and would in fact cut the opportunities for many who are willing to get such unpaid experience. It could also make it easier for those in a position to provide such experience to decline it on the basis that it is illegal.
ABSW chair Natasha Loder says that "there is a delicate line to tread between eliminating the exploitation of long, unpaid internships, and maintaining access to valuable short periods of work experience."
Loder adds that "short unpaid internships, of up to a month, can be an excellent way to get a taste of working in the media and some valuable experience at no cost", but she adds: "Any organisation that expects young people to work for longer than [a few weeks] for no pay at all, not even a basic stipend for living expenses, should be avoided."
Coleho, who could not afford to work for free for long time periods after her masters degree, also agrees that "an unpaid work experience of, say, two to four weeks ... can be a great way to kick-start a career."
While some unpaid internships may be exploitative and interns may now claim their wages back through the NUJ’s cash-back campaign, others are legal – but being unpaid they will always be unfair towards those who cannot afford them. The jury is still out on whether they should be banned altogether, though.
