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.

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.

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.

Challenging internship for an international employer

Are you looking for a challenge and want to prove yourself in an international environment? Do you want to make a contribution to make the world better? Do you have a working mentality and approach administrative and practical problems with equal thrust? Can you work at an outstanding academic and organizational level throughout a week of 65-70 hours (excluding occasional overwork, i.e. for special occasions and conferences)?

Then we are looking for you. Ideally you:

• have a Masters' degree at a renowned European or international university in economics, political sciences, law, social sciences or related subjects with outstanding grades
  
• have six years work experience in international environments, at least two of which in a developing country and at least two of which in a leading position
  
• are socially active and have founded or at least contributed significantly to several NGOs, social initiatives or emergency funds
  
• have outstanding soft skills, allowing you to organize a team even under high time pressure and can present references to prove this
  
• speak English, French, German, Russian, Chinese and Spanish like your mother tongue and are fluent in Japanese, Indonesian, Arabic and Farsi, while you have a good working level knowledge in the remaining languages of the European Union as well as most known dialects in Africa and India
  
• are 20 years of age or younger
  
• consent to postponing the foundation of a family at least until your 45th birthday
• bring your own car and consent to paying your travel expenses
• bring your own computer (newest model, newest hard- and software is an asset)
  
• bring in a statement from your parents testifying their willingness to back you up with up to 10,000 EUR per month in case of intensive financial demand for travel and other expenses related to the position you hold
  
• are still enrolled as a student at your university, eligible for an Erasmus grant and can make the European Union pay for you so we don't have to do it