The PR industry’s unpaid internship problem must stop
Red Agency’s Jackie Crossman looks at an increasing problem rife within Australia’s PR industry: agencies using unpaid interns to make a tidy profit.
Unpaid internships, outside of official university programs, are rife in the PR industry in Australia. It’s illegal and just plain wrong.
New entrants to the industry should be paid the minimum wage at the very least, just like an apprentice, to motivate them, show we value their work and are committed to their ongoing development.
As a result of my work at Red Agency, I’ve been hot on the recruitment trail for the past two years.
What I’ve discovered perusing a multitude of CVs and interviewing a swarm of candidates is that agencies – and I won’t name names – are regularly and repetitively using the services of undergraduates and youngsters fresh out of uni as a ‘free’ resource to deliver against important client commitments like media monitoring and reporting, and to ultimately bolster their profits.
And this is exactly the problem that’s been brewing in creative/advertising agencies for years – and do you know what comes from it? Gender disparity at senior levels is what comes from it. Elitist employment practices through internships where that same Mum & Dad Bank can put their kids to the front of the line through their ‘contacts’.
I remember being offered a ‘promotion’ from Senior Designer to Junior Art Director once in an agency. I couldn’t afford the pay drop so declined, only to watch two little boys take the role, being paid nothing as they were still living at home and ‘grateful’ for the chance. The agency leads had no idea that what they were doing was ensuring a system that rewards nepotism and unconscious bias where only rich, white kids can ‘afford’ the ‘opportunity’.
Absolutely right, ACF
Unpaid internships should be illegal Australia wide. If your business needs to continually hire interns, then you need an employee to fill the role and you are cheap. At the very least, an internship should be minimum wage for an agreed contracted short term period.
They are Ryan. The laws changed some years ago.
The one exception is where work experience is part of studies. In that case, there will be a capped number of hours and the employer will have a signed agreement from the University, TAFE or college.
This ensures the intern falls under the course providers insurance and also ensures the employer offering the work experience has the correct documentation in place to comply with Fair Work regulations.
About 15-20 years ago I did two x one week unpaid internships at a v large PR consultancy that still exists. It was part of a formal program at both the agency and my university and I benefited enormously from the experience. This was in large part about the PR work but also from the perspective of joining the workforce full time, understanding client/consultant relationships and interpersonal relationships with colleagues.
All these years later I try to remember this when I’m met with requests from students to do internships. I’ve had some great interns and some ordinary ones who have been more work than they were worth, if you’ll pardon the brutality of how I’ve put that.
I was treated well on my internships and worked hard in return but I appreciate it’s not always like that. Perhaps our energy could be better spent in making the unpaid internship system work better for all involved?
In my case the experience led to my first job which led to lots of other great jobs along the way. I wouldn’t change a thing.
Unpaid Internships do a good job in setting your expectations low when going on to the overworked and underpaid life at an agency…
Thanks for a timely reminder Jackie.
There is also a comprehensive guide to internships – for interns and employers on the PRIA website which was created in consultation with specialist HR lawyers around the time unpaid internships were outlawed.
If you’re an intern and not getting paid please read it.
If you’re an employer and have unpaid interns (unless they’re doing set hours of work experience as part of their accredited studies) you should also read it – perhaps before your interns do …
Paying interns according to the correct award rate is basic business hygiene, no different to paying BAS or super.
It’s also incredibly short sighted given the ongoing shortage of PR practitioners in the sector.
While I was an unpaid intern I did the monthly digital report (This client was only on monthly reports, no other reports) for their largest client, one of Australia’s fast food giants. Work like this should 100% be paid for. It’s a shame that employers don’t want to look past lack of experience and put the time and effort into training their coordinators themselves in the media industry.
Also please remember that not all interns live off the bank of mum and dad. Coming from a low income family, I have been financially independent since the day I got my first job at 14. I went to my internship 2-3 days a week, worked four days in retail and did uni on top of it. Unpaid internships are widening the class divide and making it harder for someone from a blue collar family to become a white collar worker.
This is great, but I wonder whether the same agencies with this pious stance on unpaid work experience are willing to take on graduates for paid roles full-time without industry experience.
The core issue is that in a cost competitive industry, people with no experience simply do not add enough value to clients to be paid. Ultimately payment for grads/students with no skills comes out of the pockets of equity partners or client – either option for which is unacceptable in the long-term.
The solution is partnerships with universities which align academic and practical training to put graduates in a position to be competitive when it comes to hiring time.
The solution is not Agencies burning money because it’s the right thing to do (apparently); there is a business reality. It was fun reading this advertisement for how great the Red Agency is though.
Great article Jackie which supports the practice I’ve always believed consultancies should follow. It’s disgraceful that public relations consultancies and advertising agencies abuse young people by paying them nothing and calling them interns . Slaves would probably be a better term. These people are parasites who give their respective industry a bad name. Maybe you – or the PRIA – should name and shame them after, say, a six months amnesty.
Other than being illegal, unpaid internships are an entrenchment of privilege. If you come from an underprivileged background or don’t have the bank of mummy and daddy to rely on for whatever reason, you simply can’t afford to take one up. Rent, food and bills cost money.
If you don’t have access to any, you simply can’t work for free. So these roles end up with the usual, stereotypical suspects. And yet we wonder why there is a diversity problem in the comms industry? The sooner we lose the idea that we are helping anyone, rather than simply exploiting free labour to do tasks that businesses don’t want to do and often lead nowhere, the better.
Totally agree with you Jackie! We follow the same rules at 360 PR =)
Some even want people with experience: https://au.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=12d64b61767a6c86&from=ja&alid=5a2e24a4e4b0d4c1a6e230ca&tk=1c52v2j6233qcb4d&dupclk=0
How is this legal?
I would be reporting that job ad to the website and possibly notifying Fair Work Australia
The website (http://getnoticedcommunications.com/) of this “business” is hilariously bad. They offer “Pay Per Clock” and finish off with the tagline: You want it but don’t have time? We can do it!” our objective is getting our client’s needs meet and get noticed of course.
Bizarrely, there are no contact details at all.
I suspect an intern wouldn’t learn anything useful from these people.
Ouch, that website is a real clanger.
While it is great to see a conversation on unpaid interns, I think there’s a far broader conversation that needs to happen agency side on working hours. I’m not singling out Red here, but the sector more broadly is built on unpaid overtime – pitches, launches etc., with the vast majority of agencies not compensating their team for it. I’ve done it, I’ve asked my team to do it, but it’s unsustainable and a big drive in the current talent shortage. So before we give ourselves a collective pat on the back for not asking people to work for free, we should take a look around..
I’ve had the unpaid internship experience, and went into it with the promise of casual work after the completion of my unpaid 3 months. During my time there, they told me I was as a really efficient worker, and other interns would be amazed at the tasks I’d been given/how much I did while interning there. When I finished up they started talking about how they wanted to get me to continue on for the client I’d been working on during my internship, and how they were going to contact me shortly to formalise the contract. Haven’t heard from them since my last day in the office.
The biggest lesson I learnt from the unpaid internship wasn’t the ins and outs of PR, it was not to undervalue my own skills and experience.
People with no experience require time to train.
That’s a fact. Our universities are failing us. We don’t have a pipeline of people who are work ready.
I went into an internship for three months and came out with a job on the other side. Yes, I did client work. Should I have been paid? Absolutely not — because someone else effectively had to sink time into me to get me work ready.
It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was doable.
For all those wondering how I survived — I lived in a shitbox in St. Peters and worked in bars on the weekends. Fun times!
Oh yes, that ghastly St. Peters. Right next to that cesspool Newtown! I’m near certain that 3 days a week would cover rent and all other expenses in the trendy inner city. It’s not quite as comfortable as mother’s spare room in Mosman, but we must sacrifice some creature comforts if we want to rub shoulders in the birdcage come Melbourne Cup at the client’s expense!
So were you paid when you first started working in bars?
Yes, because working in bars is easy. Working in advertising sometimes isn’t.
And Upper Middle Class try 3 nights a week at 10 hours a shift – you can earn about $750 a week. More than enough to rent a small room, eat and travel.
What kind of bizarre world do we live in where workers get paid for easy work but not for difficult work?
Hey Henry, I hear you and I think it’s really just a case by case situation but the point Jackie is really making here is that compensate the intern in a way that is going to be mutually beneficial.
Interns regardless of the nature of the job/task should feel valued and at the very least some sort of accomplishment after their internship.
If monetary compensation is out of the question then good training or something in return for their time (while they don’t have experience and should be grateful that someone is willing to take time out of their day to invest in them, they aren’t slaves).
There are really some agencies out there that are taking the piss and it’s great to hear someone from the agency environment calling this behaviour out and taking a stand for a problem that has been going on for faaar too long.
Fun fact: some employers and industry’s actually train and PAY their staff at the same time! Weird righf? The media industry isn’t too sure how this method works yet
That’s odd.
TAFE’s role is to get people ‘work ready’. Universities role is to educate people.
A large part of the problem is the shrinking of TAFE and the expansion of profit-making universities due to the funding priorities of our Federal and State governments. Not to mention the expectations of graduands and graduates.
“Yes, I did client work. Should I have been paid? Absolutely not — because someone else effectively had to sink time into me to get me work ready”
Should you have been paid? Yes. If the company is deriving value from your labour, whether it’s “easy” or “hard”, why would you do it for free?
https://goo.gl/RXAfaA
8. weeks. of. work.
I’ve seen both sides of the coin, having placed interns for an Academic program and later, worked with an agency which ruthlessly abused the system.
The students get an immense leg-up from having the experience within a proper workplace, but a lot of the time the ‘work’ they produce isn’t worth the pixels it’s printed on. The costs to the business in time and effort to manage work from someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing can be rather taxing, so many don’t bother taking them on. Then the students can’t get real experience and we’re stuck in a vicious cycle.
As long as it’s fair and balanced, unpaid internships can benefit everyone.
I worked at a PR agency in Melbourne when I first started out where the small agency of about 5 of us would have a revolving door of interns and grads who would come in, get burnt out and be replaced.
The female managing director was hardest on the female staff commenting that “if they don’t like it, there’s plenty more of them where they came from”.
One staff member showed me the offer letter and contract that she had signed, where the MD had accounted for the meals she might get as part of client events into her total salary to make it look like she was getting more than she actually did.
Thankfully the business no longer runs but the owner is now a Melbourne City Councillor. God help Melbourne 🙂
You’d think that kind of brutal penny-pinching would end up costing more money, because you’d just alienate your staff and make them want to leave.
My daughter has a masters in Marketing and degrees in events and management, but has not been able to find paid employment in that area, has done a few freebies, but no one willing to pay for her services, it gets very depressing for her as she needs the experience but can’t get it or a job that will pay her.
She now regrets her decision in doing this study which is really sad as she was so pashinate about it once.
While there is supply of interns, this practice will continue. I started in a completely different area (IT) and there was no way those students were working for free. At uni I was paid to work in an IT company a few months and did data entry and stuffed the envelopes for the xmas cards. I learnt by observing the IT people around me and helping a little bit. In PR this would be done by a ‘free’ intern. IT university courses have people that go out to the industry and arrange for paid work experience for the students. This needs to start happening in PR. As they joke at my work now “Daddy can’t afford to send me to my agency internship anymore”.
Wholeheartedly agree. I “interned” at a PR and Event Promotions agency in my last year of uni, where not only was it not paid, I was requested to drive to Officeworks, post office and run other errands using my own car with zero compensation – this happened on multiple occasions.
The company only had 4 paid, full time staff, and over 10 unpaid interns. At one event where we managed the guest list, I was criticized and yelled at for wearing all black because I looked like “one of the theater’s employees, not the PR company”.
9 months of absolute hell to get the credits needed on my degree and have some agency experience to get my foot in the door.
If the trades can afford to pay apprentices, so can the ‘glamour industries.’ This rort came from the US and should be deported.
I am completing my fifth unpaid internship and it looks like I will be doing my sixth soon. I’m still told that I don’t have enough experience for junior roles in the marketing industry but at what point can I request to be paid for the experience that I am bringing to a workplace regardless of being titled ‘intern’ when I could be a suitable junior employee?
Hey Jackie, I strongly agree with your article! Unpaid internships are increasingly becoming a norm in Australia, where students complete 2-3 month long internships while completing full-time university just to get their foot in the door. As such, problems of inequality and exploitation can occur easily since there are no strict laws or guidelines regarding unpaid internships currently in Australia.
As an Australian student, I believe that there are other ways for us to get work-related experience without the risk of being exploited or excluded from internship opportunities. University societies and paid internships are great alternatives to get career-related experience.
I am part of Informed Interns – a student initiative that aims to promote internship awareness and offer internship knowledge to students undertaking work experience in Australia. We aim to spread knowledge and information for interns to make their best-informed choices- please check us out at informedinterns.data.blog!