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.

Dambisa Moyo and the decline of the West

After her bestseller "Dead Aid", Zambian author Dambisa Moyo has presented her second book, "How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly--and the Stark Choices Ahead".
While "Dead Aid" was entirely focused on development in Africa, Moyo now turns to the industrialized West and diagnoses it with 50 years of paralysis.
Working along the terms capital, labor and productivity, Moyo says that the West and in particular the US (but also the UK) have failed in all three regards.

• With regard to capital, the US went deeply into debt by borrowing from China and investing into housing.
• As far as labor is concerned, Moyo holds that Western pensions, health care and education are seriously underfunded, and disregarded in the democratic four-year cycles of most Western countries.
• Productivity gains in the West, finally, have stayed far below those in China. Western countries do not try to use education to produce higher-quality products and services, but fail to reform their systems, meaning that they are headed to compete with China on the same playing field: labor cost.
  

Although not saying that democracy is harmful, Moyo points out that four-year election cycles reward Western politicians for short-term thinking. To get out of decline, she proposes to either reform political systems in favor of a more long-term view, or to build strong incentives that encourage innovation and education. Or both. Without innovation, she says, countries will engage in a struggle for a shrinking amount of resources which is necessarily a zero-sum game and will produce bitter struggles.

If you want to listen to the full speech that Moyo recently gave at the LSE, you can do so here:



Picture Source: Amazon