A fortnight ago, several labour market experts raised concern about the proliferation of unpaid internships, which risked becoming a black market for slave labour.
Today, The ABC has picked up on the theme:
Unpaid internships are increasingly becoming the default way of beginning a professional career in Australia.
According to the largest survey so far, 60 per cent of people aged under 30 have done at least one, but when it comes to the status of interns, the law is unclear…
Up to half a million interns may have been in unlawful arrangements over the past five years, says Andrew Stewart, a professor of labour law at the University of Adelaide and co-author of the 2016 survey.
“We seem to be getting away from that idea about organisations investing in their workers and being prepared to put the time into paying them while they’re on the job,” he says.
“They say, ‘Well, if they’re not ready immediately to work for us then we’ll just make them an unpaid intern.'”
The article goes on to profile several unpaid interns and shows both positive and negative experiences.
As I noted a fortnight ago, a key driver of the proliferation of unpaid internships is because of the heavy oversupply of university graduates due to the deregulation of university places by the Gillard Government, which has placed bargaining power well and truly with prospective employers. With one million students enrolled in higher education in 2014:
And graduate employment outcomes at “historically low levels”:
Competition among graduates to secure employment in their field of study is immense. Accordingly, employers are able to pit graduates against each other and obtain free labour in the form of unpaid internships.
That said, the proliferation of internships has also extended to low skilled workers as well. Under the Turnbull Government’s Youth-Jobs PaTH program, announced in last year’s Budget, employers are incentivised to substitute a regular employee for an intern, saving themselves money in the process (with the tab picked up by taxpayers).
It’s called an “internship” because that sounds a lot sexier and less exploitative than “free labour”. But if a private firm is seeking volunteers to do work that would otherwise be paid, then it is clear exploitation.
