European Quality Charter on Internships presented in Paris

European interns working outside or after formal education should earn at least 60% of the median income or the national minimum wage of a European country, say the European Youth Forum, MEP Emilie Turunen and a range of other stakeholders in the new European Quality Charter on Internships that was presented at a Youth Employment conference in Paris last week.

The signatories stress the fact that internships and apprenticeships should be a learning experience to integrate young people into the labor market, not a means for companies to replace a full-time position with an unpaid internship. Therefore, they should normally take place within an educational programme and be appropriately remunerated.

At the Youth Employment conference organized in partnership with the OECD, panelists from the European Commission, the European Parliament, Trade Unions and youth organizations also debated the fate of Europe’s young population in the economic crisis. With youth unemployment rates between 45% in Spain and 7% in the Netherlands (September 2011 figures), young Europeans are disproportionately hit by the crisis. Reasons for this are the fact that the crisis first eliminated new job vacancies that could have put youths into employment, and that an employer’s need for particularly skilled personnel increases in a crisis, thus making it difficult for young people without prior work experience to meet the requirements.

To improve the situation for young unemployed, the European Commission is set to come out with a Youth Opportunities Initiative tomorrow, 20 December (update: now online here) working towards a “Youth Guarantee”, and a Youth Strategy in the spring of 2012. “Young people should be either in education, or in work,” said Jean-Louis De Brouwer, Director of the Division “Employment, Lisbon Strategy, International Affairs” in DG Employment of the European Commission, adding that they may be offered a qualification measure if they have not found a job after four months of unemployment.

At the conference, I interviewed the Member of the European Parliament Emilie Turunen, European Youth Forum Secretary General Giuseppe Porcaro, Santa Ozolina, in charge of the Quality Charter for Internships on the part of Youth Forum as well as Ben Lyons, Co-Director of InternAware. You can watch a round-up about the Quality Charter here and the individual interviews below. 



See the individual video interviews here:

• Emilie Turunen, Member of the European Parliament
• Giuseppe Porcaro, Secretary General of the European Youth Forum
• Santa Ozolina, Policy Officer Employment and Social Affairs at the European Youth Forum
• Ben Lyons, Co-Director of InternAware (will be available on Monday)

Youths challenge European leaders on EU foreign policy

Fed up with widespread political apathy of the young generation, the editors of the European blog Europe & Me dared a bet: If they could mobilize 10,000 young Europeans to fill out a 4-minute survey on European Foreign Policy, its results will be presented at the Berlin Forum on Foreign Policy organized by the German foreign ministry, and discussed with European foreign ministers.

The survey not only asks young people to state their perception of current EU Foreign Policy ("who do you perceive to be the most prominent actor?", "is EU foreign policy easy to follow?") but also asks what young people perceive to be the most important challenges for the EU in the future.

At the time of writing this blogpost, there are just about seven days left to complete the survey. Might I invite you to give your opinion as well?


Some young Europeans, by the way, are not idle and politically apathetic at all: The European Youth Forum, together with MEP Emilie Turunen, the Young European Federalists (JEF) and other partners, are drafting a Quality charter for internships at the request of the European Parliament. Once this charter is established, every intern will be able to hold up a document to his future employer and demand his rights as they are written down. 

75% of European interns are unpaid or insufficiently paid

A new survey by the European Youth Forum reveals that three out of four young Europeans are either unpaid or do not receive sufficient compensation to pay for their living expenses. Only about 25% of all respondents were able to pay all of their living expenses with their internship allowance. The European Youth Forum conducted a 4-month survey and obtained slightly over 3000 responses.

According to the survey, a large majority of employers did not give a particular reason of why they could not pay their interns, prompting 64,7% of the respondents to rely on funding from their parents. From the survey results, it becomes clear what employers are banking on. Taking out a loan of 4000 EUR for a 6-month unpaid internship deters those applicants whose parents cannot finance them. Employers thereby ensure that applicants will come from a wealthy background and preferably received a high degree of informal education via their personal environment.

From a recent Twitter exchange with the World Development Movement, a small development NGO based in the UK, I gathered two things:

1. WDM refuses to pay its interns despite +£139,217 in last year's accounts
2. When I confronted them, they pointed to the small size of their organization and more importantly to the fact that "we only recruit internally, thus giving interns a much stronger chance of employment with WDM" and that "if we had to pay wages to interns, it would be unlikely that we could offer an internship programme".

In other words, this NGO asks its interns to pay their way in. On the other hand, where would they get highly-qualified personnel if they didn't have the luxury of a 6-month scrutiny of the intern's capabilities, paid by the intern him or herself?

WDM is only one of the examples for insufficient treatment of interns and for bleak inconsiderateness about the world's future qualified labor pool. There are many more.

In cooperation with MEP Emilie Turunen and other partners, the Youth Forum is elaborating a Quality Charter for Internships at the request of the European Parliament. It will be non-binding, but if there is a clear measuring rod, interns have a document to which they can point when they demand their rights in future.

II Youth Convention on Volunteering

On 8 September, the II Youth Convention on Volunteering kicks off. More than 1500 registered participants are expected in the European Parliament in Brussels and on the Esplanade in front of it from 8 to 11 September. Many more young people from Brussels and its surroundings will visit workshops, events, discussions and free concerts on the Parliament Esplanade from Thursday afternoon to Saturday evening.

For those based in Brussels, the Convention offers a great opportunity to find information about volunteering and volunteers' rights, to join workshops, events, discussions and free concerts and to meet young people from all over Europe.

Those outside of Brussels may be interested in following the live blog of the event. Over three days, a young blogger team (disclaimer: I am one of them) will follow events, discussions, workshops and concerts for online readers.

Hope to see you online or offline - at the II Youth Convention on Volunteering.

Work, sweat, pay - Internships in Europe

The European Youth Forum has produced an interesting short film on internships in Europe.



Internships are not a way to save money but a way to build up future leadership. If you're in favor of paid internships in the EU, join the European Youth Forum in their fight. If you have done an internship yourself before, please share your insights by filling out this survey.

I may add that young Chinese are facing similar problems as young Europeans. An interesting issue to raise during the EU-China Year of Youth.

China and EU start into Year of Youth

Today was the official launch of the EU-China Year of Youth in Beijing. 40 days after the European launch event in Brussels, 200 young people from China and the EU met in Beijing to kick off what will hopefully be a year of fruitful exchanges. They discussed potential EU-China cooperation projects, ranging from environmental protection to world heritage and intellectual property.

The cooperation is managed by the European Youth Forum (YFJ) on the European and the All-China Youth Federation (ACYF) on the Chinese side. Both have launched websites on the year of exchanges (China, EU) and an array of events and conferences is being planned in the EU and in China.

On the European side, the French are the most active organizers. They are trying to export the French language to China via a blogging competition (offline!) and a film festival for young Chinese. Second are the Germans with events on sport and social development.

But before you believe that the EU is relegated to being a spectator in culture, there are also some political EU-China Youth Events. Tomorrow marks the beginning of a a China photo exhibition in the European capital (I will try to cover it), other events include the European Youth Week or an EU-China Youth Culture Week. And also in China, some interesting things are taking place, such as the Shenzhen Universiade in August (college olympics).

Who knows, maybe we can even increase links between European and Chinese bloggers. China has a growing blogosphere (see English coverage here, here, here, here and here) and more conversation can certainly reduce a lot of cultural prejudices.



Launch video of the EU-China Year of Youth 2011

Unpaid internships - soon forbidden by the EU?

Unpaid internships in Europe could be abolished soon - or least reduced in number. Following a report by Danish Green MEP Emilie Turunen, the European Parliament Committee on Employment and Social Affairs passed a resolution in which it

"calls on the Commission and the Council...to set up a European Quality Charter on Internships setting out minimum standards for internships...These minimum standards should include an outline of the job description or qualifications to be acquired, a time limit on internships, a minimum allowance based on standard-of-living costs in the place where the internship is performed that comply with national traditions" (p. 21, my emphasis).

Now the ball is in the Commission's camp. It has to come up with a European Quality Charter for internships and bring it through the Council. Admittedly, even a final proposal would not be binding upon the member states, so that it will still be possible for enterprises to offer unpaid internships. But once member states have publicly endorsed the principle of paid internships, it will be more difficult for them to backtrack.

For the moment, Turunen's initiative meets opposition from the Liberal Group and business representatives, according to the German Süddeutsche Zeitung. They claim that an internship is a learning experience and therefore should not be paid. They also argue that many businesses could not offer internships any more at all if they had to pay their interns.

But take all interns off from Brussels for a week and see what happens. Nobody taking the phone calls in the offices of the EP, nobody maintaining your company's social media profile, nobody drafting letters in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian any more - ask yourself if the value produced by those interns is really lower than the cost of "educating" them.

In addition, an enterprise that doesn't offer internships brings about its own fall. It cuts off its own future. For its own self-interest, it is bound to keep recruiting young people, otherwise it will cease to exist, or create an age gap and explode its transfer cost for knowledge.

In my view, therefore, a payment guarantee for internships is absolutely fair. Enterprises need to understand that they cannot request value without compensation. It is time to end the advent of the precarious society and offer young people a fair transition from education into the labor market.

The responsible directorate general is László Andor's DG Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. I suppose we should start lobbying so that the Commission does not take the minimum payment back out of the proposal. Here is Commissioner Andor's email address, his cabinet can be found here.

Internationales Freiwilligenprogramm: Weitere Informationen

Nach meinem Post gestern hat Kosmopolito über die Pläne der Bundesregierung geschrieben. In den Kommentaren hat Felix das Anschreiben für die Abgeordneten etwas verändert, damit es in die Form bei abgeordnetenwatch.de passt. Abgeordnetenwatch ist eine einfache Möglichkeit, mit Bundestagsabgeordneten zu kommunizieren, allerdings muss man sich vorher registrieren. Ich kann jeden Leser nur bitten, von dieser Möglichkeit Gebrauch zu machen und auf seinen Abgeordneten und die in der Email genannten Politiker Druck auszuüben.

Die genannten Abgeordneten sind Mitglieder des Ausschusses für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend; hier geht es direkt zum Ausschuss auf Abgeordnetenwatch. Ich habe in der kurzen Spanne seit gestern abend schon drei positive Zuschriften von Abgeordneten erhalten, die das Vorhaben unterstützen und hoffe, dass es bald noch mehr werden.

Hier die aktuellen Positionen der Parteien zu dieser Frage:

• Sönke Rix, SPD-Bundestagsabgeordneter im Ausschuss für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend, setzt sich für eine Stärkung der Freiwilligendienste ein (Stand: 4. März 2010 bzw. 9. Februar 2010).
• Florian Bernschneider von der FDP hat sich in diesem Interview mit der Welt (Stand: 3. März 2010) eindeutig für den Ausbau der Freiwilligendienste ausgesprochen: "Deswegen müssen wir die Förderung (bisher knapp 50 Millionen Euro) ausbauen, um die Stellen zu erhöhen und in ihrer Qualität zu stärken."
• Die Position der CDU/CSU ist derzeit unklar, aber wie schon berichtet schreibt der ICJA Freiwilligenaustausch weltweit (ICJA e.V.), "dass man sich im
  Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend darauf
  geeinigt hat, noch im Mai diesen Jahres den §14c Abs. 4, in dem die Höhe
  der Fördermittel (421,50 €/TN-Mon.) festgelegt war, zu streichen".
• Die Grünen lehnen die Mittelstreichung für den Internationalen Freiwilligendienst ab, sagt der zuständige Bundestagsabgeordnete Kai Gehring in einer Pressemitteilung: "Die Zukunft liegt im quantitativen und qualitativen Ausbau der Freiwilligendienste. Die notwendigen Mittel dafür stehen nur dann zur Verfügung, wenn die überholten Pflichtdienste endlich beendet werden."

SPD, Grüne und FDP kämen bei einer Abstimmung im Plenum auf 307 von 622 Stimmen, sofern tatsächlich jeder Abgeordnete gegen die Mittelstreichung stimmen würde. Das reicht aber noch nicht. Ich kann die aktuelle Position der Linken nirgendwo finden und habe deswegen meine Zweifel, auf welche Seite sie sich schlagen wird.

Das bedeutet im Umkehrschluss, dass Lobbyismus zwar überall zugleich ansetzen muss (wie gesagt, der persönliche Abgeordnete ist eine wichtige Macht), dass allerdings vor allem bei der CDU/CSU und der Linken Druck ausgeübt werden muss, damit sich die Positionen verändern.
Meine Hoffnung ist es, dass SPD, Grüne und FDP gemeinsam mit der organsierten Zivilgesellschaft und den Bürgern gegen die Mittelstreichung kämpfen werden damit das Ministerium seinen Vorschlag zurücknimmt.


Update: Auch europaeum hat einen Blogpost zu dem Thema verfasst.

Update 2: My apologies to all English readers of this blog. Despite an international implication, the cancellation of the international volunteer programs by the German government is essentially a domestic question. A communication campaign first has to target German politicians. This is why I chose to blog it in German.

Online consultation on learning mobility of young people

A couple of days ago the Commission launched an online consultation for young people on learning mobility. Interested by the topic, enthusiastic that the Commission cared about my view and even more enthusiastic that this message actually succeeded in reaching me, I went to the linked Commission page to give my opinion. More money for Erasmus, better acceptancy of international diplomas by foreign countries, a further reduction of travelling cost for young people and the like.

And then I stumble upon this: "First, the Commission invites stakeholders to provide responses to the open questions raised in the text, as well as further reflections and examples of good practice. You can send your contributions via e-mail to eac-green-paper-mobility@ec.europa.eu" (my italics).
Fair enough. The text in question is a 23-page long Green Paper. Reading and understanding that paper as well as finding specific answers to the open questions will take me at least an entire afternoon. And then I still have to formulate that in policy catchphrases and send it by email. Imagine how my enthusiasm ebbed away.

At least, there was a second. "Second, from 15 July there will be an on-line multiple-choice questionnaire, tailored to the wider public" (my italics).
Awesome! So I was just going to come back and fill out that questionnaire. But when I got back there today, I couldn't find the questionnaire. They seem to have forgotten to put it online. Not really a proof of how much the Commission values my or other young people's opinions.


Add-On, 16. July: The consultation is now online and can be found here.