You are young and you want something. Working full-time, for example. Young people want to work, so much that they even do it unpaid en masse. I’m talking about interns. Reported earlier this month NRC that 44 percent of trainees at colleges and universities do not receive an internship allowance, compared to 16 percent among MBO students. If there is compensation, it concerns amounts for which you would not be able to get an adolescent to mirror in the supermarket (the average for HBO trainees is 342 euros per month). But hey, those are numbers, and with numbers we fill in the moat. The reality is always worse.
I have done two internships myself. Two? Two yes. Because if others do one, you have to do two. That is how it works. Meanwhile, twenty-somethings, lured by promising promises such as a sunny office garden and the nicest colleagues, have to do at least twelve to stand out a little above the rest. I can still vaguely remember life before my internships. In that life I was regularly asked whether I had already completed an internship. No? And how did I think I would tackle that after my studies, without work experience on the labor market? That was the thing: I didn’t think about it at all. But these kinds of idiotic questions forced me to. Frightened, I first applied for a PR internship at a reading promotion foundation and a year later for an internship at a literary publisher.
In total, I interned for a year, four and a half days a week, for an amount that did not even allow me to pay half my rent. I never found that strange. I am convinced that this is why the internship, often a disguised form of unpaid or poorly paid labor, is such a formula for success, just like child labor. Young people are less or not at all aware of the fact that you should be paid normally for the work you do. On the other hand, if you try to get a boomer to do an internship, you won’t succeed. He has seen too many paychecks come in in his life.
‘The emphasis during an internship is on learning,’ states the government website under the heading ‘Am I entitled to the minimum wage if I do an internship?’ (Short answer: no). “If you just do work, then there is no internship.” Anyone who has ever been an intern for an hour in their life knows that you do ‘normal work’. Companies and organizations do not have unusual work. You do the same work as others, or worse, work that others don’t want to do.
For example, at the reading promotion foundation I was responsible for the Children’s Jury, a campaign in which twelve little know-it-alls, one from each province, have to encourage as many other children as possible to vote for their favorite book. That meant calling journalists from all the regional newspapers day and night to convince them to interview a seven-year-old boy or an eight-year-old girl. In the meantime, colleagues did the PR for the larger campaigns, which were more important, but for which the press itself came to them.
Even worse than doing the dirty work was not knowing what I could do. Then I went looking for my internship supervisor, and it turned out that she didn’t arrive at the office until eleven o’clock that day. Then I decided to pass the time by having lunch and, with my back to the doorway, I hurriedly spread two rice waffles with peanut butter, the only topping on which no one had written their name in a thick black felt-tip pen. And then, while I ate those waffles at my desk, I looked for weekend jobs.
Fortunately, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The Minister of Education now sees “room for improvement” in the field of internship allowances. Very well seen, Robbert! Here is a great opportunity, in times when life is unaffordable, to screw young people just a little less hard. I’d say, go for it! Pleasant drinks, a football table and pats on the back for the minister if he dares.
Tessa Sparreboom is a Dutch specialist and former editor of Propria Cures.