Unpaid internships ‘locking out’ young working-class people from careers
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UK charity calls for positions of four weeks or longer to be banned to help close social mobility gap. Young people from working-class or disadvantaged backgrounds are being “locked out” of careers by unpaid or low-paid internships that benefit middle-class graduates, according to a social mobility charity.
Research by the Sutton Trust found that middle-class graduates made more use of internships as stepping stones into sectors such as finance or IT, even in cases where the internships paid nothing or below the minimum wage as required by legislation. Nick Harrison, the chief executive of the Sutton Trust, said: “Internships are an increasingly critical route into the best jobs, and it’s shocking that in this day and age, many employers still pay interns below the minimum wage, or worse, nothing at all. They should be ashamed.
“The government has pledged to ban unpaid internships, which is absolutely the right thing to do. Clearly not all young people can get support from the ‘bank of Mum and Dad’, so banning this outdated practice will help to level the playing field for these valuable opportunities. It’s a no-brainer and should be implemented without delay.”.
A survey of 1,200 recent graduates commissioned by the trust revealed that 55% of middle-class young people had undertaken internships, compared with just 36% from working-class families – and that the gap between the two groups had widened “substantially” since its previous survey in 2018, from 12 to 19 percentage points.
