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@thefutureinterns-blog-blog
INTERNS FIGHT BACK
Are you an unpaid or low-paid intern (or 'volunteer') in London? Is your workplace filled with other unpaid interns?
Send an email at [email protected], we'll come say hi to your employers! The information received will be treated anonymously.
The Future Interns
Future Interns: The debate! http://on.fb.me/1bKjvY3
This Friday May the 1st at the London College of Communication
Future Interns 2015: The debate
The General Election is very soon. Labour said it will ban unpaid internships. What about work experience and 'volunteer' placements replacing those internships and entry-level jobs? Have we lost a European social model for the youth? Future Interns 2015 is a day of awareness and activism around internships and precarious work, followed by an afternoon debate about work, youth and resistance. The event will be an opportunity to hear about the amazing work going on to fight back against the culture of unpaid work, with guests from the French Precarious Generation, who led direct actions in Paris and won the campaign's goal to give the youth fair working conditions. The demand for fair compensated work - and for fair and open access to that work- is not going to disappear. The event starts from 1PM to 6PM at the London College of Communcation, Tower Building Room T304 This is the programme for Friday afternoon: 1PM Film screening of 'Generation Unpaid' by filmmaker Sylvia Mulder 2PM 'Surviving and Avoiding Internships' the Precarious Workers Brigade 3PM Employment Rights Workshop: the law on internships and its grey areas. 4PM 'ALL WORK NO PAY: IS THERE A WAY OUT?' - THE DEBATE I. Unpaid internships, work experience, volunteering: towards real prospects or precariousness? II. Are we losing the European social model? III. How can we fight back? Guest speakers: Vincent Laurent, from Precarious Generation (Collectif Génération Précaire, 2006) Campaigner Charlotte Gerada, who undertook research on unpaid internships in the voluntary sector Peter Fleming, analyst of work, author of 'Dead Man Working' and 'Resisting Work' Comedian Matt Lacey, author of the 'Gap Yah Intahnshup' comedy sketch 5PM Refreshments If you're interested about your future working conditions, or would like to share your experience and discuss the current ideology of work, you're more than welcome to join us. Here is the event: http://on.fb.me/1bKjvY3
Also you can find us on Twitter- search Future Interns If you would like to tweet about the event http://on.fb.me/1bKjvY3 For more information email @ [email protected]
Statement on The London Symphony Orchestra
After our demonstration at The London Symphony Orchestra in March The Future Interns are pleased to announce that The LSO have confirmed they will be introducing a paid internship scheme in the Autumn. Whilst we appreciate this, we will continue to monitor their employment practices to ensure they stick to their word.
We have updated our "Press and Publications" page with latest on the LSO action and it's outcomes.
Letter to The London Symphony Orchestra
To The London Symphony Orchestra, We have recently been made aware that you are advertising for and currently using unpaid interns within your organisation. We have a number of concerns that we feel you should address. Firstly, by asking someone to work “9.30am – 6.00pm Monday to Friday plus evening work as required” for 6 months unpaid we wonder how you expect that person to survive in London? Are you only expecting to receive applications from those who are from a very wealthy background, or someone whose parents live in London? Straight away you are excluding the vast majority of people based on either wealth or geography. Do you think it is responsible to be further widening the gap between those who can and can’t pursue a job within the arts? Secondly the roles you have outlined in your advertisements are very specific, and are clearly essential to the functioning of the organization- it is unclear from the adverts what you are offering the intern in terms of training and development and yet it is very clear what they are offering you- “Scheduling and maintaining the diaries for the Marketing and LSO St Luke’s Centre Director and the marketing team, planning marketing meetings, booking rooms…” and “Office filing “ are two examples you give. You also outline in one of your advertisements that interns would be required to help “run the box office” and help with “stewarding” jobs that would surely normally be paid positions. Given that you require your applicants to already have “High standards of personal organisation able to manage multiple priorities, using strong time management skills to manage a large and varied workload” and “Excellent computer skills” it is difficult to see exactly what they are going to learn from the tasks you are expecting them to do. It is worth pointing out that by advertising a full time role with set hours, the position falls under national minimum wage guidelines. The arts council, who you receive funding from are clear on their position regarding unpaid interns: “…the majority of interns (as defined by these guidelines) would most likely be classified as a ‘worker’ for the purposes of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 …A ‘worker’ is anyone who has either…a contract of employment… (written or implied) in which they agree to carry out personally any work or services for another party…You must pay an individual with ‘worker’ status at least the full national minimum wage for their age range…” Putting aside the moral and ethical issues of asking someone to work for you for free, you are breaking the law- fines for breaching minimum wage guidelines are £20,000 per employee. As well as this, any intern who has worked for you could potentially take you to court to be reimbursed what they are owed. At a time when youth unemployment is skyrocketing, institutions such as yours should be doing everything they can to provide opportunities and training. What you should not be doing is exploiting the desperation of young people and undermining the responsibility of organisations to pay for labour. We have in recent months had success in pressuring other high profile arts organisations into complying to national minimum wage guidelines, and structuring their internship and voluntary programmes to not only being legally and ethically sound but to ensure they offer genuinely worthwhile opportunities to all people regardless of their background. We hope you will address our concerns swiftly and take the necessary measures to deal with the ethical and legal issues we have highlighted. Until then we will be engaging in a number of public actions in order to raise public awareness of this issue. The Future Interns Precarious Workers Brigade Ragpickers
Response to The Serpentine Gallery
Thanks for keeping in touch and informing us of the steps you have taken to ensure your employment practices are legally and ethically sound. The Future Interns welcome the changes you have made in response to the concerns of the public and appreciate that you have decided to comply with legal minimum wage requirements.
While we are happy with the steps you have taken, we will continue to monitor the situation closely both through your website and through contacts within the gallery.
Serpentine Gallery confirms they are introducing paid internships
In December we visited the Serpentine to protest their use of unpaid interns, with a follow up visit in January. Two months later they have confirmed that they are introducing paid internships in accordance with Arts Council guidelines (and National Minimum Wage Legislation). This is excellent news, and we are also pleased that the gallery are looking into ensuring that staff are paid London Living Wage too. We'll continue to put the spotlight on those who choose to exploit young people through unpaid labour - join us!
https://www.facebook.com/futureinterns
@FutureInterns
1000 words on unpaid internships
To be printed in a London Metropolitan University publication We need to talk about corporate responsibility The Future Interns are a cross-campus network of students and graduates opposing the culture of unpaid labour. We campaign for the eradication of all unpaid internships and precarious work. The phenomenon of unpaid internships is relatively new in the UK. The National Minimum Wage (NMW) was introduced in 1997, and whilst the volunteering clause of that law enables ‘voluntary’ work to be unpaid, as soon as there are set hours, set obligations, or any kind of productivity towards the profit of the company, this concerns labour and has to be paid. When your ‘boss’ sends you an email asking you to come in at 9 the next day, you should be paid according to NMW. After you graduate, an unpaid internship might seem like a chance to get experience in your chosen industry. As most unpaid internships are uncontracted – and therefore illegal – we have no possibility to get any idea of how many unpaid interns are working in London; I’ve come across numbers ranging from 2,000 up to 12,000 people working long-term, for free. This practice has become normalised across a wide range of industries – fashion, the arts, as well as advertising, finance and law, media, and politics. In the first 18 months of this cabinet, 260 unpaid internships were advertised by MPs. The Future Interns employ a few different strategies to work towards the eradication of unpaid internships. The most important is public awareness. This means going out to different universities to campaign, talking to students, employers and the public about the problem of the current internship culture, and supplying information about the legalities of working for free. Of course, political activism still means demonstrating. When the Serpentine Gallery advertised an unpaid internship in December 2013, we set off to the gallery in Santa suits to hand out Christmas scrolls donning the internship advertisement, accompanied by a banner that read ‘ALL WE WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS PAY’. The advertisement titled ‘Volunteer Research Assistant’ was for a position that didn’t offer vocational training or valuable work experience, but one specifically in search of a graduate with a minimum of a BA degree, previous experience and further qualifications. The job description basically came down to that of an office assistant. Even though the action was quite small and friendly, it was highly publicized, and the Serpentine Gallery have admitted that the advertisement was in fact not in line with their terms of placement. They have since changed their employment policy to exclude unpaid internships. A more controversial strategy (which is also employed by HMRC) is naming and shaming. We look for advertisements for unpaid internships online and compose lists of these positions. When MTV and Sony announced the prize to their competition was a three-month unpaid internship, we swiftly took to Twitter to point out the blatant illegality of that prize – it was then changed to a drum kit. The last thing an advertising company wants is a Google hit on being involved in illegal activities. This means fighting the free market with its own weapons, but can also be a catch-22; just because a company has stopped advertising an internship, doesn’t mean that intern doesn’t exist. They might wait for a graduate to approach them, or harvest their social circles. We would very much like to support legal cases, but have financially been unable to do so; court fees have been increased since last year from being free to £250 for the claim and £950 for the hearing. That’s a £1200 investment to a case that will pay a maximum of £6,31 an hour back, with no guarantee whatsoever. Even though the fines for companies employing unpaid interns have recently been quadrupled to £20,000, and this might well work as a discouragement to employers, real enforcement is lacking; according to the 2013 study ‘National Minimum Wage Enforcement’ by the Centre for London, HMRC has been able to prosecute and fine a total of two companies in 2010-2013. As an unpaid intern, you are not also not legally considered an employee, and don’t enjoy the same protection against discrimination, occupational hazards and sexual harassment. Although ‘paper rights’ might have you covered, real world enforcement places the emphasis on the individual, rather than corporate responsibility. It’s important to see an unpaid internship in light of a broader problem. Whilst I understand that a 3-month internship at that media company in Farringdon is a great opportunity that will look fantastic on your CV, there needs to be an awareness that the people who have this choice were already in the position to have a choice at all. The prospect of having to work for free is frightening. The interns living off of their parents are of a generation that is in fact sustained by another generation, and not self-sufficient. For the interns that don’t get money from elsewhere, it means having to work another job, like a bar job, on top of their office hours, in the name of ‘true dedication’ to the industry they want to enter. To the graduates who can’t work such long hours, such as people with a disability or a dependant, it might mean never entering the industry they’re educated to work in. The emergence of the culture of unpaid internships therefore means a deeper anchoring of class difference and a generational gap. It marginalises groups of people that are already marginalised. Even though an unpaid internship might provide you with a great opportunity to enter an industry, it needs to be understood as a widespread problem that compromises the labour market for young people. Unpaid internships are unethical and immoral, and widen the gap between those who have a choice, and those who plainly don’t. It is central to the Future Intern’s mission to make everyone aware of this situation: when you are doing labour, you should be getting paid. If you’re interested in knowing more or supporting the campaign, go to facebook.com/futureinterns or drop us an email at [email protected] LV for Future Interns
We received this email from someone at the Serpentine
Dear Future Interns, My name is , I work as a gallery assistant at the Serpentine Galleries. I just wanted to thank you for putting pressure on our directors and HR about their elitist and exploitative internships. The 'bad' press from the bonus scadal and the protests about unpaid internships has given us leverage internally to bring about changes. If HR's promises are to be believed a new Internship scheme is going to be revealed soon that is paid. Also our fight to earn living wage and to have more say and rights in relation to our contracts is making significant progress. This would probably not have been possible with out your help... so thanks! Let's keep up the pressure and don't let them sneak anything past us! Thanks again,
Letter that we delivered to The Seperntine today.
To The Serpentine management,
We recently wrote to you asking to clarify if you currently have any full time unpaid interns working at your gallery.
You failed to answer this question directly, saying “The Programme is now closed for applications while the Gallery reviews both the Programme and how it is advertised.” We decided we would ask you again, this time in person. Are you using illegal unpaid labour in your gallery? Any person at your gallery with regular working hours should be paid in accordance with national minimum wage guidelines. We look forward to a more clear response on this matter.
We wanted to assure you this is not a personal attack on your gallery. The Future Interns are working against unpaid labour wherever it may be.
The Future Interns
After emails from member's of the public, The Serpentine Gallery have sent us this email...
The Galleries received an email from the Precarious Workers Brigade on Friday and as you know, The Future Interns staged a protest here at the weekend. We are taking this action seriously and have sent the following response to the group:
Dear Precarious Workers Brigade, Thank you for bringing this advertisement to our attention. The points you make in your letter to us are valid and we have listened to your protest. We take our responsibility as employers very seriously and this advertisement is not in line with our current terms on Volunteer placements. We will be addressing the issues you raise immediately. Yours sincerely, Rose Dempsey
Please let me know of you need any further information. My direct line is 020 7298 1520.
Many thanks,
Rose
ROSE DEMPSEY Head of Communications E [email protected] D +44 (0)20 7298 1520
M +44 (0)7876 593 758 W serpentinegalleries.org
OUR REPLY
Hi Rose,
Thank you for your quick response.
The Future Interns welcome your acknowledgement that the job you advertised was "not in line" with your employment terms. We look forward to seeing what your next step is- we hope it will mean a concrete change in policy.
Please let us know the decisions you come to.
Best,
Future Interns
We hope that this admission of being in the wrong will result in a concrete change in policy and not just a change in rhetoric.
Intern protest: 'All I want for Christmas is pay'
Students dressed as Father Christmas demonstrate against unpaid work at a London art gallery
+The London based artist-activist group “Future Interns” staged a successful protest against the Serpentine gallery. Their central concern was over an advert the esteemed art establishment had placed for a “Research Assistant” position that had a job requirement of full-time work. The protest took place inside the gallery, where the young protesters dressed in Santa Claus outfits and held up a banner reading “All We Want For Xmas is Pay”. They handed out copies of the job advert with a note inscribed under it outlining British National Minimum Wage standards and the conditions under which someone must be paid for their work, for which Serpentine was clearly in breach of.
Future Interns Protest at The Serpentine 14/12/13- Christmas scrolls being handed out that explain how The Serpentine's advertised 'Volunteer Research Assistant' breaches National Minimum Wage laws.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/in-the-frame/2013/12
A major London gallery has been naughty this year. Half a dozen Santas gave a surprise visit to the Serpentine Gallery armed with sacks, cute hats and a banner that read “all we want for Xmas is pay”. Students from the “Future Interns” group wished a Merry Christmas to gallery visitors as they handed rolled-up copies of an advert for an unpaid “Research Assistant” at the Serpentine. Next to the job description, which requires a “full-time commitment of 5 days a week from 10:00am-6:00pm”, appeared a hand-written note pointing out that positions with set hours are required to meet National Minimum Wage standards. Originally intended to be 20 students from several London campuses, the smaller group seemed happy with their intervention. “It made it easier for us to sweep in unnoticed,” one told The Art Newspaper. Surprised at how smoothly it was going, a young female protester from Goldsmiths art college noted: “They clearly don’t have a manager or anybody in charge here.” For another protester, it was all quite successful and even the noticeably flustered staff was deemed friendly. “We didn't get forced out of the space, so that’s a good thing.”