This is a written up version of a speech that I gave to the Association of Journalism Educators’ annual conference on 13 June 2014, at Liverpool John Mores University.<\/p>\n
When Keri Hudson was 21, she took on an unpaid internship producing editorial content for a website called \u2018My Village\u2019.\u00a0 She worked full time, but without any kind of contract.\u00a0 Her bosses thought she was good \u2013 so much so, that within a couple of weeks she was given the job of training up other unpaid interns who arrived to generate content at the office.\u00a0 There was a change of management, and Keri was promised a full-time job.\u00a0 The weeks passed and neither contract, nor pay packet appeared.<\/p>\n
So far, I suspect that this story is one that might be true of hundreds of the journalism students that you have all known over the past few years.\u00a0 Nearly 10,000 a year graduate with first degrees in journalism, but there are precious few jobs around.\u00a0 Little wonder, you might think, that unpaid experience seems like a way to keep alive their hopes of a media career?<\/span><\/p>\n Where Keri\u2019s story differs from the norm, is that in May 2010, with help from the NUJ, she took TPG Web Publishing Limited to an Employment Tribunal.\u00a0 It found that because she was, in a legal sense \u2018working\u2019 she was due the minimum wage.\u00a0 It awarded her \u00a31,024.98<\/a>.\u00a0 Better news still, days afterwards she was headhunted, and started a proper job a week later.<\/span><\/p>\n My point in telling you this story, is to try and persuade you of two things.\u00a0 First, that long, unstructured internships – say lasting more than a month – are profoundly wrong, and secondly that you, as educators of the next generation of journalists and media workers, can do something to improve this situation.<\/span><\/p>\n University-level study should, at its most fundamental, teach people two things: how to use their brain as an adaptable tool that can be repurposed throughout their lives; and that a well-trained mind is capable of undertaking enormously valuable work.\u00a0 I don’t necessarily mean monetarily valuable work – although if you have paid several tens of thousands of pounds for your education, achieving a decent level of earnings is important.<\/span><\/p>\n Whatever success you as educators have with your students, however, I believe that your work is largely negated by the long, post-graduation internships that have become such a feature of media careers. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Keri Hudson came to the NUJ during a campaign that we ran around the slogan \u2018Cashback For Interns\u2019<\/a>.\u00a0 A ruling obtained by a sister union had shown that interns could obtain remedy at Employment Tribunals.\u00a0 We canvassed workplaces where we knew there were a lot of interns and used other contacts to encourage young people to share with us their intern experiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The results were depressing.\u00a0 There were people who had worked unpaid for over a year.\u00a0 Some went through several unpaid internships with different \u2018employers\u2019 breaking successive promises about future salaried work (another survey suggested that this nearly half of all interns had a similar experience<\/a>).\u00a0 And lots of young people fell by the wayside \u2013 when the cost of travelling into London daily go too much, when their parents\u2019 willingness to support them finally ran out, and when economics forced them to abandon the dreams to which they had been working for several years.<\/span><\/p>\n It was a self-selecting, and anecdotal survey, of course, but hard facts about interns is hard to obtain.\u00a0 CIPD figures suggest that there are between 50,000 and 70,000 interns currently at work in the UK.\u00a0 Some suggest that as many as a fifth of these are in media industries.<\/span><\/p>\n We all react to personal stories of suffering and exploitation, but this situation is not just pitiful, it is wrong for a host of reasons.\u00a0 Free labour depresses wages across our industry.\u00a0 It is socially exclusive \u2013 only the children of the wealthy can work for nothing.\u00a0 And unpaid workers have no money to put back into the economy.<\/span><\/p>\n Much more important, though, is the moral damage that working for long periods for nothing does to young people.\u00a0 It teaches them that the skills they have spent so much time and money acquiring are worthless.\u00a0 It teaches them that exploitation is endemic in the industry they are seeking to join.\u00a0 And in many cases it provides a vivid demonstration that in the key to getting started in the media, is not what you know, but who your parents know. \u00a0Once they have internalised that lesson the really are going to feel bitter about the years they will spend repaying their course fees.<\/span><\/p>\n I fear that a year in unpaid work is sufficient to negate much of a graduate\u2019s self confidence, self-esteem and sense of personal worth – qualities that you have all spent so much time trying to build up.<\/span><\/p>\n Happily, tide is turning. The economy is clearly improving.\u00a0 It may be a little while before that decisively feeds into media employment, but it surely will.\u00a0 The ONS released figures recently<\/a> suggesting that the number of journalists working in the UK had risen over the past year.<\/span><\/p>\n Keri Hudson\u2019s victory \u2013 and those of a handful of others supported by different unions \u2013 has woken up at least some of the worst-offending \u2018intern\u2019 employers. The TUC has backed a campaign for fairer internships, as has the Government<\/a>. There is even a government-backed Pay and Work Rights Helpline that interns can call to check it they are getting a reasonable deal.<\/span><\/p>\n The next step in turning the tide on internships is down to you \u2013 the educators of the next generation of journalists.\u00a0 You need to weave appreciating the value of their own work into the very fabric of what you teach.\u00a0 Future graduates should be leaving university with deeply etched \u2018red lines\u2019 to help them recognise the difference between acquiring useful skills and contacts on the one hand, and being exploited on the other.<\/span><\/p>\n How you deliver that message might take many forms \u2013 all of them better left to professional pedagogs.\u00a0 At a basic level, however, it should involve explicitly talking about the way that work creates value. \u00a0\u00a0Those who enter employment must understand that all workers deserve a living wage, commensurate with their skills.\u00a0 And if new entrants to our trade work on a freelance basis, then they need the confidence to price that work in way that makes it economically sustainable to produce.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n You might even want to mention to them that it is when journalists come together as trades unionists that they stand the best chance of improving their pay and safeguarding a socially responsible media.<\/span><\/p>\n