A forum for interns to share their experiences and discuss the ethics of unpaid employment. Most importantly, we want this site to be a place where YOU can tell us your story.
Police are to investigate reports that Ashley Cole accidentally shot and wounded a 21-year-old student with an air rifle at Chelsea football club’s training ground.
A Surrey police spokesman confimed that the force would be in touch with the club after a report that the England international fired the weapon at the man at close range on Sunday last week at the training facility at Cobham.
This takes the exploitation of interns to a whole new level!
Well… for the first time in our 2 year history interns anonymous has been threatened with legal action!
We have taken the offending blog down for the good of the intern… who was also threatened. Threatened by the Global Director of Comms no less.
This is all we are going to say at this stage.
Answer: They were both interns for Christopher Hitchens at the Nation magazine in New York.
From George Eaton’s recent Q and A with the Hitch…
Q: When you were at the Nation, Ed Miliband was your intern. What are your memories of him?
A: We talked a lot about the old left and his father’s distinguished role in it. His brother’s middle name is Wright after the socialist C. Wright Mills, a great friend of Ralph’s.
Don’t you feel enlightened! We wrote about Clegg and internships here.
You might be hearing a little more about something called the ‘Internship Alliance’ over coming weeks and months. They are a newly created pressure group of vested interests and public affairs companies who want to lead discussions with the government about the role internships play in the job market. We, and a few others, have some concerns.
They have styled themselves as being ‘friends of the intern’, but to quote an anonymous intern who alerted us to this story:
Its motivations seem dodgy to say the least. It seems more like a grand plan to make money for some of these organisations by lobbying Government under the guise of making internships better.
Our anonymous intern went on:
One of the organisations involved is Luther Pendragon who, it has been discovered, takes on unpaid interns. This is genuinely quite shocking. I have found three adverts for unpaid internships with Luther Pendragon from the past few months: here, here and here.
Luther Pendron will be running a full-scale press campaign for the companies involved – and we have recently discovered that some of these companies pay a fee to Luther to be associated with the alliance.
Our anonymous Intern describes another member of the Alliance – Inspiring Interns – who we have written critically of in the past. They make a profit out of the intern industry – getting a fee for arranging an unpaid internship, and then charging the company if the intern is given a paid job! They also boast of having 10+ unpaid interns themselves. It’s a staggering business model, that uses interns like serfs.
We do not believe they have interns’ rights at heart – and I do not want them speaking for me in the national press.
Someone from Inspiring recently wrote this to try and convince companies to sign up to its scheme:
The answer for many businesses may well be hiring an intern. Interns represent very effective, but inexpensive, labour.
We look forward to being surprised by the Interns Alliance. Anything that ends the current intern culture is undoubtedly a good thing. But we do not think the Alliance is best placed to do this.
Intern Aware is involved, who really do care about getting minimum wage for interns, but as ex-member Tanya from Graduate Fog wrote, she had to spend the Alliance meeting fighting for interns rights. That should be the uniting factors behind an intern pressure group not something to debate!
Tanya left because she didn’t like the morals or the motivations of the companies involved, and as the anonymous intern who originally emailed us said:
I’d seriously consider how it looks for you to be associated with this Internships Alliance group, they seem like they are in it for the wrong reasons.
Beware any press coverage that comes from them over the summer.
NB: Other groups involved, according to a comment on the Graduate Fog website include: WEXO, STEP, Give A Grad A Go, The Student Room, Wikijob, Rate My Placement, Enternships, Student Beans, AIESEC, Brave New Talent and Business In The Community.
We love this poem by ‘always an intern’ and would like to share with all of you…let us know if you’ve ever done the same:
I have spat
in the tea
which you asked me
to make
and which
you were probably
expecting
by now
Forgive me
it was delightful
so hot
and so tempting
In our second interview with an ex-Intern, Interns Anonymous caught up with someone who had a behind the scenes look at the fashion world. She found that working at a glamorous magazine actually wasn’t that glamorous.
Interns Anonymous: Tell me about your internship. What kind of magazine was it?
*****: I worked for a fashion magazine. I was in the beauty department, working alongside the beauty editor and her assistant. It was unpaid…
Interns Anonymous: Did it live up to the stereotype of the fashion world?
*****: Emphatically yes. But in different ways. It’s not as glamorous as you would think. But the people are almost like a parody of themselves. I don’t think they are very well paid, but I think they have very wealthy parents.
Continue reading ‘Beyond Parody: Interning in the Fashion World’
Outrage at Grazia magazine after an intern who was sent out regularly to buy skinny lattes for the beauty desk announced at the end of her stint on the mag that she had in fact been buying them all full-fat ones. Cue much spluttering from the staff and a mass rush to the nearest set of weighing scales. Actually Monkey just made that last bit up, but feels after pulling a stunt like that, the intern’s future in the industry is assured.
REVENGE!
A mole has told us that HMRC are soon to publish a set of guidelines which recognise “internships” in terms of the National Minimum Wage.
If true, these guidelines will say that internships are a “step up” from work experience; suggest a longer time period; and crucially they MUST BE PAID.
We understand this document will be relevant to all areas of work, and will give all employers an official document to be referred to follow.
However, the law as it stands is pretty clear – if you are working set hours, are relied upon to do set tasks, and are not a student – then you should be paid minimum wage for your internship.
The third sector is not counted amongst current regulations – but MPs and media organisations are. It would be interesting to see if they take note of these developments. I suspect they won’t.
Watch this space. An announcement is expected next week.
We share an office with another organisation. Just now a bald louche man sidled up and asked my boss in a husky voice: “Want a couple of interns?” Just like a seasoned drug-pusher stood on a street corner.
He went on:
“We are inundated with applications”
“It’s a consumer market”
“We had 2, then 5”
“They did all the work…haha… no really”
“Its not slave labour… we pay them a bit for lunch and their travel”
These are genuine quotes. I scribbled them down as he was speaking. “No thank you” was the reply from my boss.
“Ok, but if you ever want some you know where to find me”.
My blood boiled. Young people desperate for a bit of experience traded around an office like goods that have fallen off the back of a lorry.
I wonder how often this conversation is repeated around the country.
Subject: Euan Anthony Blair
Profile: The son and heir of the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair
Future big shot
To quote Wikipedia:
“He is known principally for being found inebriated in Leicester Square as a teenager, having a flat purchased by his mother for use while a student at Bristol University and having his appendix removed.”
After graduating with an unspectacular 2:1 in Ancient History from Bristol in 2005, the typical graduate life of struggle and drudgery did not befall Euan. The money and connections kicked in.
In 2005, he spend two months interning at a French radio station owned by France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault – a sometime private guest of the Prime Minister at his country house, Chequers.
A year later he landed another internship working for Republican politicians in Washington DC.
“The former Prime Minister’s son spent his time making photocopies and helping to set up hearings for the committee – ‘just general intern-type duties’, according to a spokesman.”
I am sure having the surname ‘Blair’ was no help at all. After another few weeks interning for Democrats, Euan left to pursue an MA… but not just any MA, an MA at Yale with a scholarship of £50,000.
This came as some surprise to other Yale students, who had no recollection of such a grant being made to a postgraduate before, particularly one with an unspectacular 2: 1 in ancient history. Maybe it was the internships that swayed it?
And now what for our well connected friend? He is about to begin a 30grand graduate traineeship with Morgan Stanley, where his father’s former right-hand man, Jonathan Powell, is a top executive.
Last week I got a text from a friend who is also trying to make it in the journalism game:
“Oh my god. Have you seen the work experience guy who’s written Charlie Brooker’s column in G2 today? The last thing we need!” Work experience is a funny thing. When you’re 16, it’s a week-off school. But when you’re trying to get a job in an industry a zillion others want to work in (and just as many are being made redundant from), a work placement becomes a shop window – a chance for you to show-off how employable you are. And boy can it be frustrating when someone does better than you or gets an opportunity you don‘t. Lucky Tom Meltzer… bugger.
I heard my boss on the phone today speaking to someone who needed an article proof-reading. His side of the conversation went something like this:
“Oh, I’ll give X a call… He’s got twelve interns; he will have someone who can do it for you.”
