Intern Affairs : Getting our own house in order

By Stella Creasy MP / @stellacreasy

Internships can be a good thing. A chance to experience an industry, gain valuable skills and make contacts that can help find paid work in the future. My career was shaped by spending a year as the first ever Fabian Society volunteer. Having learnt to touch type, I would seek temporary secretarial work two days a week to pay for rent and food and then go into their offices the rest of the time. I learnt a huge amount about policy making, I stuffed most of the mailings anyone received from them in 1995 and met people whose advice guided me into gainful employment later in life.

But internships can also be a bad thing. Most sectors are now rife with employers asking young people to work for free in return for CV points. This in turn limits who takes up these roles as only those with the funds or ability to get into debt can afford to live this way. It also makes a mockery of our minimum wage legislation. Indeed, the cost of these placements appears to be rising as increasingly applicants need cash to buy their unpaid job as a raffle prize or auction item. As the number of under 24 year olds out of work rockets, the chance to get your foot in the door is lifechanging to a generation facing mass unemployment.

In politics interns are asked to do everything and anything– from tea making, to casework, to personal chauffeuring and drafting legislation. The high level of interest in working in this field makes it a seller’s market- too many MPs, think tanks, media, charities and lobby companies offer posts which are full time, for months on end and with no or little remuneration. Meanwhile, opportunities for flexible volunteering – whether for experience or to contribute to the work of an organisation- are unclear as employers don’t have the time and resources required to manage such placements properly.

Back then my role with the Fabians was informal and flexible – it allowed me to manage my need to earn money to live with the time I spent collating articles for the then General Secretary. How quickly expectations around internships have changed is shocking to me. Across public life I come across staff working for six months or more without pay in full time positions. These bright young things are tired and stressed by their predicament, having gone out to work in bars or call centres after a day working to make ends meet. Alternatively, they are independently wealthy – or substantially in debt. Whether in media, banking, publishing, fashion or law such practices are now widespread. Those without a nest egg hoping to break into these fields face an impossible choice. Take a position and find a way to scrape by, or ask for flexible hours or payment and risk losing the post altogether.

Opening up opportunities to all to develop skills attractive to employers, as well as networks to find out about jobs, is just one aspect of being a more socially mobile society; of being a country in which potential defines your success in life rather than family income. I don’t want to stop political and policy internships. I want them to be high quality learning experiences employer and employee desire and accessible to those interested in working in this field from across all walks of life. To help make that happen here are four principles that could offer guidance to political employers:

Firstly, the key test any employer should apply is whether the work undertaken is critical or adds value. If it’s critical it is about delivering a project or function vital to operations. If it adds value the activity complements the core work being done but if it didn’t happen by a particular time there wouldn’t be a problem. Put simply, it’s the distinction between doing casework and helping sort out a filing cabinet.

Internships should offer the supervised chance to experience and learn about critical work and the skills it requires. Work placements or shadowing should involve helping out with added value activities. The law distinguishes between work experience and paid work too – but as Internocracy’s work shows only 12% of managers know under the minimum wage legislation unpaid internships may be illegal if they cross such a line. Indeed many may wonder how the new work placements the Government is seeking to replace the structured Future Jobs Fund with will mesh with these regulations.

Secondly, no one should be asked to go for more than four weeks in total without any form of payment in a work experience position. A longer term placement which does involve some critical work and some remuneration but doesn’t receive the minimum wage should only be offered for less than 16 hours on two consecutive days. This would enable the person doing this role to find alternative paid employment or to study alongside such a role.

Thirdly, all forms of placement or internship can be a waste of time if they are not structured. Just as apprenticeships are geared towards the accumulation of certain recognised skills, so too internships need to cover a certain set of processes to be a professional development experience. As well as the opportunity to understand different aspects of an MP’s work, all internships should have a clear line management structure and a contract setting out breaks, holiday entitlement and probationary periods. Treating an internship seriously benefits both employer and employee, as interns know they will get marketable skills and employers can be confident it’s worth their while to train the person. Finally, employers should aim to offer these opportunities in the same way as any other role – through open competition and interview.

Getting right the way in which internships are crafted is about more than upholding the minimum wage legislation and we shouldn’t think drafting contracts for interns is the only challenge affecting access to skills development. For example, many of those already out of work find they can’t take opportunities for volunteering without damaging their entitlement to employment support. Furthermore, within politics a more honest conversation needs to happen about the demands on MPs and the staffing support they need. In the meantime I currently cannot and will not offer internships because I do not have the money to ensure they are paid positions. But this means I’m not contributing to training the next generation of caseworkers, researchers and community liaison officers working for MPs which is something I regret.

Changing the culture in which employers view internships across all sectors so that we can be confident they have the status, skills content and accessibility that makes them a vehicle for social mobility will take both time and resources. Getting our house in order to put the house in order is still some way off. Yet as we look at the numbers of young people chasing any chance to get on in life, getting this right has never been more important.