Inequality | Ban unpaid internships - not because they don't pay, but because they deepen inequality

When you hear the words ‘unpaid labour’ it’s unlikely you’d think of Western countries as being places that would endorse this. After all, one of the things we pride ourselves of in the UK are robust labour rights.

However, there seems to be an element of cognitive dissonance when we think about unpaid internships as work that isn’t paid for by employers. Although the unpaid internship has decreased in popularity over the years, and technically isn’t classified as ‘unpaid work’, the prominence of them is still high.

Earlier this year, the EU planned to minimise unpaid internships, saying this type of work was almost always linked to exploiting the “despair of young people”. This was linked to data that revealed there were 3.1 million trainees in the EU in 2019, with almost half of them going unpaid.

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