". Three-month unpaid internships only, came the reply. Mummy and Daddy didn't have the money so that was that."

Did you consider getting off your backside and earning it yourself?

You people think your country owes you. You live in a capitalist country so why not get used to the idea. Big business is not your government handing out freebies left and right. If business wish to auction off their internships and raise some money for charity, that’s not your concern or right to moan about. Get your butts in gear and make sure your kids get the best education they can. We can’t all be born into privilege.

Also - I agree with most of the points in this article, but think it's important to draw a distinction between people paying for internships in the manner described (which is disgusting) and the standard unpaid internship which is applied for with a CV.

The latter is still unfair - as Laurie points out, many can't afford to work for free (I've also written on this topic in the past), but it's not the same as bidding for an internship at an auction.

It's not about merit: these 'magic circle' companies know exactly what they are doing when they use the financial barrier of an unpaid internship to screen out recruits to the best positions on their graduate development programme. These companies want 'people like us'; not necessarily nieces and nephews of the directors and the major clients, but people one or two degrees of separation away within the same social and economic stratum.

In other words, it's about maintaining the priveleges of an economic aristocracy; a deliberate rejection of merit in a scheme to screen out all who do not measure up to being 'the right sort of people'.

Go git em Badger.

There is a way, but it takes time and you're best going to Asia...

My plan is to head off to Mongolia to teach English for a year or two. If you can get yourself a good contract/employer, earning $10-$12/hour, that is good money relative to local standards of living. You don't have to live sparingly just to put some money by each month. The English-teaching-boom isn't quite what it was a couple years back but there is still plenty of work. A TEFL etc isn't necessary.

Its not ideal, but you'll have fun and should have enough money at the end of it to afford an internship.

P.S Miss Penny! How do I apply for an internship at New Statesman? Might there be any need in the near future for an unpaid NE Asian correspondant? :)

Jim,

"Last time I heard, notions of company honour and social justice weren't mutually exclusive."

Well I never said they were. I was simply implying that social justice is a rather more important factor at work than "company honour". I also would have thought that was astonishingly obvious, and am surprised that anybody could think that falling back on a tangental point about "mutual exclusivity" could possibly be interesting or to the point.

It's fascinating that these comments focus largely on the NS' use of unpaid internships -- which is, yes, reprehensible, though the disclosure is at least vaguely commendable -- where the larger issue here is that hugely beneficial internships are being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The point is two-fold: firstly that not all internships are made equal, and that the most prestigious can be attained through a combination of nepotism, social position and private purchase should scandalise us. But the second is that the auction at the Red Dress Ball only serves to make explicit the particular economy *already* in operation with internships, especially in media; if anything they've only been so gauche as to put an explicit price on it.

Steven, your meritocratic society is just like mine. Money talks, and BS walks. Big Business is not your government...*cough* ..kinda not.
Business has no obligation to give free training according to your Uni grades. It's their training to give to whom they wish.

I can understand the need to draw a distinction between auctioning, at high cost, desirable and career-boosting internships and unpaid internships which can be applied for with a CV. However, I'm not sure it stands up.

The two opportunities are still not equitable if people are excluded from them by an inability to pay. When I graduated sixteen years ago I was in significant debt. It took me five months to find a paying job, during which time my debt increased. In addition my first paying job was only part-time which also increased my debt. There was no way at all that I could have afforded to support myself in unpaid work, however desirable an opportunity might have turned up.

So the auction may look ostentatious and distasteful but the offering of unpaid internships even through application by CV is equally discriminatory and inequitable.

I understood from a recent BBC Breakfast report that, with a few exceptions, it is illegal to have interns doing a job and not being paid.

PS Both pay a shit load of tax and my sister pays out £750 per month in nursery fees.Can anyone tell me how much unemployment benefit the govt will pay them and how much housing benefit they can claim

This is a great article.

My first thought about unpaid internships is: fine. Don't want to do it, then just lower your expectations and/or move to a less competitive field and get a paid job. Also, presumably companies can appeal to financial crises past-present-future to justify being unable to pay interns.

This quickly crumbles away though.

Why are there so few jobs? And why is so little work contributing anything to society? The root causes of this need to be tackled.

I don't believe that companies - especially the slightly larger ones - couldn't push a few extra paid internships through.

The auction is a great example as it feels obviously immoral. But it's just a slightly more extreme version of standard unpaid internships which aren't (at least immediately, to me) immoral. Selection for internships is not only based on ability: obviously you have to have enough money to work without pay and to apply for an internship. So the unpaid internship club is only marginally less elite than the auction.

Perhaps the only right thing to do is to ban unpaid internships. Everyone or no one.

Oh, the New Statesman doesn't auction theirs off so they're all fine and dandy. They even pay travel costs! That's just WONDERFUL! We all know there's no talent in the country outside London anyway.

You're every bit as bad as them, you bourgeois liberal twats.

CrISpY DuCk: What they do is they pick themselves up, dust themselves down, and go out and find another job – or maybe even go into business on their own account. Things may not be quite so rosy for a little while, maybe they will have to accept a bit less pay and say goodbye to that gold-plated public sector pension, but, since they both have brilliant minds, they will find themselves in a much better position than many. As somebody who was born into the kind of stereotypical environment that everybody seems to want to pour so much sympathy into these days (namely, in my case – a sprawling council estate in Newport, South Wales) I’m sick of hearing this kind of whinging. Since barely scraping through university (my own fault) and starting work in 1980 I have weathered a number of recessions and found myself out of work on a number of occasions – some of them “unfairly”. I was never out of work for long, and I was paying and continue to pay a great deal of tax. I have only a moderately good mind, certainly not brilliant, and yet I have managed over the thirty years involved to significantly improve the lot of me and my family compared to what my “roots” would seem to popularly imply I could expect to be condemned to. Why? Because I got of my arse and helped myself – that’s why! If I and many others like me can triumph then surely it will not be too difficult for them?

'(Disclosure: the New Statesman employs unpaid interns)'

Yep. A few years back after finishing my NCTJ I wrote to the NS asking if there was any chance of some work experience. Three-month unpaid internships only, came the reply. Mummy and Daddy didn't have the money so that was that.

It's not about "company honour", Jim, it's about social justice:

http://badconscience.com/2009/02/28/social-mobility/

If magazines like The New Statesman are not willing to take a stand and refuse to employ unpaid interns what hope is there for social mobility in this country? Any amount of worthy articles about how unfair it all is count for nothing if you don't actually put what you supposedly believe into practice. And then of course there is the fact that it is illegal to require someone to turn up and perform specific tasks without actually paying them - look again at the minimum wage legislation.