Exploiting interns is rife in Britain, says National Union of Journalists

It's not just in Toronto or Canada that there's occasional consternation about unpaid internships. In Britain, the National Union of Journalists has released a survey of 644 journalism graduates who qualified in the past five years. And it claims that exploitation is rife among magazines, newspapers, broadcasters and websites.

According to a story in UK Press Gazette, the union said employers could be breaching minimum wage legislation by keeping people on in unpaid roles.

Newsrooms are offering potentially illegal work experience placements to journalism graduates lasting months, giving them hollow promises of paid work and relying too heavily on free labour, the NUJ has warned.

Unless things improve, the union said, it was going to name companies that were the worst offenders. Just over half of all respondents took work-experience placements after graduating from their journalism courses. More than 15 per cent did between three and six months continuously and 6.8 per cent were on placements lasting more than six months.

NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: “That’s not work experience; that’s work. Many media companies seem to think that it’s acceptable to exploit the hopes and dreams of recent journalism graduates by getting them to work for free in exchange for flimsy promises of future work.”

More than half of respondents (56.3%) said they received only limited help and guidance and of the 90 per cent who had their work published, only 20 per cent said they were "always" or "sometimes" paid for it.

Some newly qualified journalists found their placements useful: 43.7 per cent said they were given clear support and guidance, but 56.3 per cent said they received limited help.

While 42.7 per cent were told a placement could lead to a permanent paid job, only 24.1 per cent of those were taken on.

Dear said he accepted that work experience was a “vital element of a student journalist’s training”, but that some employers were creating “bogus placements”.

One respondent, who spent several months at a national daily and Sunday newspaper, said: “Neither would survive without unpaid work experience. One of my colleagues had been working unpaid for 11 months before going on the payroll after NUJ pressure.”

One person who did a three-month internship three years ago with a women’s monthly said there were two features interns and two to three fashion interns all working at once.

She said: “To get your foot in the door, you need to serve your time as an intern, which essentially means working for free in the most expensive city in the country.”

“You sign up, you do your time, no questions asked. However, saying all that, my experience was both enjoyable and invaluable to where I am now.”