Work

It Is High Time We Change the Culture of Internships

Student internships, by design, have been exclusionary and exploitative. We talk to students and experts to assert why there needs to be an urgent change, especially now.
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Photo: Tim Gouw / Unsplash

Being a college student can be pretty kickass, thanks to finally getting some newfound freedom (hopefully in a city away from your home, if there’s no fault in your stars), a ravishing dating life (well, as ravishing as dating at 20 can be) and generally having a decade-long gift of the ability to get shitfaced without feeling like a train wreck the morning after. But then there it is standing between you and the full control of your life: an internship. 

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An intern’s role is to grind, impress, learn, make their mark—all with the hope of landing that dream job. While an internship is supposed to be a win-win for both ends—employers get to prep the next generation to take control but also harness well-educated and enthusiastic young people at low costs and risks, whereas the interns get some real-world experience—the status quo in this capitalistic society has made internships a highly one-sided affair. In countries like India which had unusually high unemployment rates even before coronavirus smacked us in our faces, internships can be tough to land. Which also means, they can be easy to exploit for those on the other end of the spectrum.

“My employers hired me for one company but had me also working for another company they had,” says Kriti Gupta, a 19-year-old student working for a residential startup. “Their second venture wasn’t even fully registered. Additionally, at the time of hiring, they told me I’d be getting Rs 10,000 ($132) for two months with a Letter of Recommendation (LOR), which is a letter that most companies hiring first-time jobseekers ask for. After the completion of a month, I asked them if they’d be compensating me monthly or at the end of two months, to which they replied that they would give an LOR only if I perform well, and pay ‘performance-based’ stipend—not even the 10 grand I was promised—only if I continued beyond the two months I had signed up for.” 

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Gupta’s employers had not even signed a work contract with her, which meant she had little ground to hold them accountable on. But more than that, when you’re starting out, you often don’t know what is right and what is not, unwilling to fight for something that could threaten the dream of landing paid work. And it’s this silence that helps perpetuate the cycle.

Internships are often exploitative

From being little more than an admin worker being sent on errands like grabbing coffee and solely doing work no one else wants to, to being saddled with way more work than any human should be doing, internships and their casual approach have been grounds for exploitation of those who don’t even know how their work should be valued. A survey conducted by TimesJobs in 2017 revealed that 72 percent of interns in India claimed they were exploited during their internships, with corporates, engineering and media being jobs with the most stressful internships. 

“The people I am interning with don't adhere to a schedule and text me whenever they feel like asking me to submit a 1,500-word non-plagiarised legal piece before the end of the day, which if I’m unlucky, is only a couple of hours away,” says Mahima Maitra, a 19-year-old law student. 

Young people between the ages of 15 to 24 are more likely to experience mental illness than any other age group, and these unethical internships or toxic workspaces are often to blame. “At one point I had to work eight to nine hours a day to produce enough ‘output’ to justify logging the required six hours in my work log,” says Madhuri Ravi, a 20-year-old content writing intern. “I worked practically every Sunday because there was always some supposed backlog. When I first joined, I made it clear that I was only looking for a part-time internship, but it very soon became a demanding full-time job. The fact that I would get yelled at for mistakes made me incredibly anxious and I had a really bad panic attack when I realised that I was unclear on how to proceed with a blog I was reluctant about starting in the first place. At one point, I was totally overwhelmed when I realised that I had spent over five hours on this one blog without making the acceptable level of progress/output. But instead of helping me out, my boss forced me to log it as just one hour, and made me work overtime on Sunday all over again.”

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For a student stepping out in the real world, the massive changes can often be daunting, with no roadmap to figure the way ahead as opposed to being in an educational set-up where you kind of know exactly what you need to do to get ahead. Experiences like Ravi’s then can lead to a drop in confidence, affecting the intern’s mental health not only at the time but even as they step into other jobs and roles in their 30s and 40s. 

Unpaid internships add to the exploitation

One of the more insidious ways of exploitation comes in the form of how unpaid internships are packaged. Often, they are sold under the guise of ‘experience’ and the allure of future employment. But the reason why they are the worst kind of labour is not just because they deny students the rightfully earned fruits of their labour but because they’re also immensely exclusionary in nature. Especially in a country like India where huge income disparities exist, free labour for grunt work means only those hailing from privileged backgrounds and who don’t need to earn to help put food on the table or pay off their student debt can afford to take them on. For those coming from low-income households, this might mean opting for a dead-end low-income job rather than an internship that would help bring out their potential. Unpaid internships, thus, end up becoming just another way of marginalising the already marginalised. 

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Educational institutions often make the exploitation a requirement to graduate

While the culture may be supported by the industry, the educational institutions are often at fault here too. “The internship for my college degree was an unpaid internship required by the government, the National Council for Teacher Education and the University Grants Commission,” says Anusha, a 26-year-old educator. “The two-year model of the Bachelor of Education course has a compulsory internship in government schools and some private schools, where they can get away with not having to pay you. They make us grind for 96 working days which is almost five months, factoring the holidays and the Sundays, without paying us a single penny!” 

This often seems to be the case with “glamorous” jobs like media too, as also industries like law, medicine, fashion and non-profits. “I’m studying law, and my university makes it compulsory for us to do nine internships at the very least through the course of 10 semesters,” says 19-year-old Tanisha Banerjee. "In the first few semesters, you almost never get a paid internship. They measure the payment in ‘experience’. Experience, solely, obviously doesn’t suffice, considering we go to different cities to intern. Even later on, the internships that advertise themselves as ‘paid’ tend to be performance-based.”

Architecture students in India need to complete 100 days of work experience at a studio in order to get a training certificate.“The competition for these precious internships encourages unscrupulous firms and prevents desperate students from complaining,” said Urvashi Vasishtha, an architecture graduate to Dezeen. "With colleges churning out design professionals in excessive numbers, the demand-to-supply ratio is so skewed that procuring even an unpaid internship is a matter of relief." 

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And the worst of them all: where interns PAY to work

If putting in hours and hours of labour for a certificate and exposure was terrible, what is worse is internships where students not only give away time and labour, but also money. Several internships, especially in academic circles, often end up becoming an opportunity where interns pay to work. Common for think tanks and research centres, some organisations end up asking students to pay in return for which they offer—you guessed it right—exposure. Since the organisations which ask so are usually reputable and distinguished in their fields, most students—the ones that can afford it, that is—have no option but to give in their money. And all these internships do is perpetuate the toxic cycle of privilege in their own circles, reducing the future employee pool to just a select few.

So, how should everyone address this?

In a country like India, with a huge labour force, a largely unregulated market to protect the said labour force, and immense income disparities, internships often end up becoming even more exploitative and exclusionary. The fact is, students who have the means to survive unpaid internships and do take unpaid internships are a part of the problem in the system. It is essential to understand that exposure is not enough of a payment—work is an exchange of time for money and should be treated as such, no matter the designation. 

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"Apart from guidelines of Prevention of Sexual Harassment, health and safety, Shops and Establishments Act or Factories Act, India’s legal systems don’t have any prescription specifically addressed to internships," says Aditya Narayan Mishra, the director and CEO of HR consultancy CIEL HR Services."It is unfortunate that students have a very limited avenue to address their concerns. Unless one is studying in a top institute, one doesn’t have the leverage to deny intern hiring opportunities to the employer organisation. The only possibility is to reach the highest level in the organisation to seek an audience there. Most often, top management personnel in a company are receptive to addressing concerns from a range of stakeholders. So, students should address it there.” 

But this can be tough when you’re just starting out. So, maybe, start with smaller steps. Ask yourself if the internship will bring real value to your skills. If unpaid internships are not feasible, look for a freelance gig or a side-hustle which can teach you more skills and leave you with enough time to look for a full-time job. When faced with an unpaid internship, build the courage to remind the prospective employer of the value you can bring. When you advocate for yourself, you also build respect, and the power to dictate the conditions of your labour can actually carry you through far bigger challenges. 

But knowing the status quo as it exists, this is a good time to remind the people reading this that if you are an employer (or if you will be on in the future), please, kindly, respectfully, do not become part of the problem. Paying your intern also means getting a motivated one in return who can bring more value to the job. And for god’s sake, let it be more than just bus fare.

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