Are unpaid internships an exploitation of labour?

Most college students believe that internships are necessary for their resume to look impressive and to enable them to land a job in big companies. However, there remains a question: Are unpaid internships fair? Employers prefer to hire graduates with some work experience, so students voluntarily join internships to get hired by Multinational Corporations (MNCs). After graduation, when students start looking for jobs, some of them eventually end up doing unpaid internships. The practice of gaining profit by extracting work from interns without payment is common in India. In today’s scenario, internships have become an added bonus for securing a good job but it is difficult for students and young graduates from the poorer sections of society to find internship opportunities as they lack exposure and contacts. This also raises the question whether it is only the privileged sections of society that can avail unpaid internships.

While some students are aware that unpaid internships are thoroughly exploitative from an ethical viewpoint, there are plenty of young minds who are still in favour of them as they are willing to work for free to gain ‘experience and exposure’. The interns are loaded with work like regular employees and all their effort and time is invested in the organization’s profit, under the pretext of exposure and work experience. If letters of recommendation and work experience are important for a young graduate, remuneration and fair wage of labour should also be considered important. Unpaid internships further increase the inequality that prevails in workplaces.

Labour deserves its rightful pay

Source: The Vanity

Many students and graduates undertake unpaid internships in order to gain a competitive edge. Two final year students and a young graduate were interviewed on their experiences with unpaid internships.

Megha,* who graduated in the year 2019, shares her experience as an unpaid intern in a well-established organisation:

“The only reason I was able to take up an unpaid internship is because my parents paid for my commute and other necessities. I had to travel long distances without pay and I was loaded with multiple work tasks, just to add a line in my resume and LinkedIn profile in order to get more opportunities. My time, money and effort were wasted under the excuse of gaining ‘exposure’ which, I realised only later, was of no use and was indeed exploitative.”

However, some interns feel the opposite and believe that internships can provide some insight into future career options. Nikhil,* a young graduate who has completed a few internships says, “I personally felt that one of my internships was a good way to get more connections and helped me discover the career I wanted to pursue. It also helped me experience a professional environment while being a student.”

Roshini,* currently in her final year of college, talks about her 4-month unpaid internship in an esteemed sector that she finally quit after realising that she was being treated like paid employees, but with no salary and only a letter of recommendation. “The company I interned for initially told me I would have only 2 hours of work each day but it increased gradually to meetings and so on. I was forced to work like a paid employee and I realised that everything was done under the guise of gaining experience but the practice of hiring unpaid interns cannot be justified. It is nothing but exploitation from an ethical point of view.”

Ayesha,* a final year student who recently completed her unpaid internship, takes a strong stand on how this is a glorified scam. “Generally, students don’t know what they are sacrificing as they have built a good rapport with their bosses under the pretext that they would help their career growth. The interns go to extreme lengths to finish projects even if it is past working hours, without realising that it only benefits the firm. Many students, including myself, were not aware of that, since we were fond of the people we interned for and desperately wanted to sustain ourselves in the competitive world.”

Today we see that most interns working for large sectors like media and lifestyle magazines are unpaid in India. This should not be normalised. Moreover, when students are willing to work for free, they are stealing the opportunity from those who deserve the internship but cannot afford to work for free. The time and effort of students and graduates should not be availed for free by profit-oriented firms and organisations and they should not be denied the fair wage they rightfully deserve for their work.

(*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of respondents.)

Editors: Tenny Ann Thomas, Dainty W