Overworked, Unpaid: Placements to die for?

Sleepless nights, constant headaches, non-existent lunch breaks and immense strain on your closest relationships. Unpleasant aspects of working life reserved for those of us who roost within the chrome, marble and glass of the corporate world as a graduate. Right? Wrong.

The phenomenon of being an intern has been under intense media scrutiny over the past few months; Global headlines coining unpaid schemes ‘slave labour’ existing hand in hand with UK ‘zero-hour’ horror stories. This week, Chinese electronics giant Foxconn, who produce products such as the Playstation 4, admitted to student intern labour violations including allegations of employing 14-year-olds, forcing graduate interns to work on assembly lines and compulsory overtime. You would assume that UK employment law safeguards against these types of exploitation, but UK internships, paid or otherwise, foster exactly the same working environment. Why? Applicants’ desire for a job leads to a feeling of obligation to live a hellish life of unpaid overtime, all in the name of that endorsement on LinkedIn.

Working too hard for too long? In certain sectors, interns often stay in the office past midnight.

Internships might better be considered week, month or year long job interviews. We’ve all come across job interview comedy sketches as well as a fair amount of real-life shockers (a personal viral favourite being the woeful tale of Alan Bacon, a graduate forced to “dance like a robot” during an interview for Currys). Apply the anxiety, pressure and unnecessary over-preparation for your average graduate job interview to a longer period and what results is something altogether unhealthy. A particularly tragic case of the desire to impress prospective employers occurred this summer in London: Bank of America intern Moritz Erhardt was found dead in his flat after allegedly working 72 hours straight without sleep or a substantial break. It later transpired that he had suffered an untimely epileptic fit. Bank of America commented on the issue, highlighting amongst other duties of care their policy of an in-house ‘buddy’ system to look out for interns.

 The fact is, interns like Moritz are not forced to work so late: they choose to 

The tragic loss of such an intelligent, motivated and successful young mind can’t be attributed to any single company. Instead to blame is a universal, poisonous working culture that has embedded itself within our generation in response to ever-increasing graduate unemployment rates. Consider this a plea to all prospective interns for the coming year: take care of yourselves and be realistic with your work ethic. We all want to land a placement to die for: at no point should this statement become literal.