There has been an anger boiling away in side of me for months. It’s not an anger that will lead me to come into my workplace with a selection of semi-automatics and start making hundreds of little holes while screaming ‘you were all in on it!’ I won’t climb a bell tower and start picking off people through the crosshairs. Basically, I won’t kill anyone, I promise.
The anger stems from a growing culture in our society regarding working for free. Some people call it internships, I prefer industrialised slavery. It has now become very much the norm for people to have to do a long internship before being even considered for employment (I did it myself for nine months).
The plain fact is that employers are now using young people to do jobs they used to pay others to do. And they should never justify this by invoking the worldwide recession. A hard fact of life is that you aren’t generating enough money to hire somebody, than your business isn’t getting enough business to justify it anyway.
Rather than paring back their staff and running their business more efficiently (one of the most important things to do during a recession) employers are still keeping bloated levels of staff by hiring cheap interns, and continuing with the practices that got them up shit creek in the first place.
When it comes to hiring someone new, every employer has to ask the same question: Will this person generate more revenue for the company than we will be paying them?
When it comes to the lowly serfs in the office, this can often be very hard to justify. The back office doesn’t bring in clients like the sales department does, so suddenly the attraction of bringing in an intern for next to nothing is hard to ignore. An employer who hires an intern for six months makes a saving of around 10k against hiring someone at the minimum wage.
Employers are now budgeting for this saving i.e. this is the practice they are now going with in the future. A minimum wage will cease to exist as the lowest standard of pay, internship ‘expenses’ will take over.
Thousands of young people, who have spent small fortunes getting educated, will now have to spend another year being propped up by both their parents and the state. And the Washington style of internships will be here soon. Over there, you have to PAY to do internships. Imagine that, paying an employer for creating business for them
There was an announcement a couple of weeks ago that several multinationals have offered to be part of an internship scheme, with thousands of places coming on stream.
It is called JobBridge.
This was the tipping point for me. What this said was that there was enough work for thousands of people, but they were no longer willing to pay for it. They have institutionalised internships and it will be impossible to get rid of once it’s here. One typical example was in the Lansdowne Hotel, where some lucky young person would be given the chance to learn all about…. waiting tables. For nine months. What an opportunity.
So who pays for this? Not the employer, who pays nothing under the JobBridge scheme. The government? You’re the government, you foolish person you. Yep, the person that ends up paying is you and me. More fool us.
And this is a very important point; while an intern is working at a company they can still receive the dole, much like I did. In other words, you are paying their wages, not the employer. So not only will you pay for a meal at the Lansdowne Hotel and tip the staff for such a lovely job, you’re also paying their wages.
Unfortunately there is no way to stop this, because we’ve already let it happen. What we’ve really done is to extend college education by a year, thereby destroying any already dubious financial gains made by increasing tuition fees. For a nine month internship, the government (you) will pay out about €7,000 in dole money, plus €1,800 for expenses. Again, it must be stressed, the employer pays nothing under the JobBridge scheme, unlike a typical internship.
The nature of an internship is to train people in an industry, giving them the opportunity to learn more than an average low-paid job. An internship is not a replacement for an average low-paid job. If this is what’s happening to you, than it’s illegal for the employer not to pay at least the minimum wage.
Beautifully, this is only true for private internships; it doesn’t apply to government schemes. So the JobBridge programme is not only bullshit, its government endorsed bullshit. It is a scheme that systematically screws over young people desperate to get onto the already greasy jobs ladder.
And I’ll leave you with this thought. The manager of the Lansdowne Hotel admitted on RTE Radio that he was using the scheme ‘for cheap labour’. The advertisement is still there.
So interns of the world unite!
I’m right behind you.
Links:
Some JobBridge ‘jobs’ that I’ve come across.
Lansdowne Hotel Waiting Staff
Marketing Assistant (read the skills requirements, as pointed out on Twitter, it’s like they copied and pasted it from a horoscope)
Research & Project Assistant for the Labour Party. Yeah, someone at the Labour Party has gotten a degree in irony.
24 internships at HP Ireland. Funnily enough, the head of HP Ireland is also the government appointed head of the JobBridge initiative. Strange, eh?
Want to embark in an exciting career in stacking shelves?! Wait no more! Tesco are hiring 17 'Customer Assistants' for the Christmas rush. This is your chance to help out a struggling company that could only post a measly 4 billion in profits last year!
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