Slavery To Interns - The Joy Of Working For Free

When I was sixteen I spent a summer “working” at Ceddo a film collective responsible for producing black British classics such as Burning An Illusion and We Are The Elephant. My work was unpaid and consisted of making teas, syncing up film rushes and doing anything else that the real film makers couldn’t be bothered to do. I had no money. For lunch I would buy a large fried dumpling and a Supermalt as the dough expands in your stomach if you drink the Supermalt at the same time and kills your hunger. Occasionally I would even work the five miles home as I didn’t always have train fare.

Over twenty years later I now have a decently paid job at the BBC and I am troubled by my experience at Ceddo. The knowledge and skills I gained over that summer definitely helped me get my first job in the BBC it was then only film experience I had when I applied fresh out of university. But in recent years I have witnessed an increasing number of people working for free in television the way I did. The difference is that they are not 16 working for leftwing Rasta leaning film collectives but are working for free at large multi-national media corporations. I’m talking of course about the explosion of “interns” in TV in the last few years.

I realise that internships are vital to helping people getting a foot in the door of the TV industry. An industry where who you know is often more important than what you know. But is expecting people to work for no pay really acceptable? If we found people waiting tables for free or cleaning officers for less than minimum wage we would haul the offending companies in front of a judge. But call the employees “interns” and not only do some TV companies seem to get away with it but we have applicants queuing around the block to be accepted.

Interns seems to disproportionately favour the rich (people who can afford to live without any pay) and the well connected (few internships have the same rigorous recruitment procedures to ensure against discrimination as regular paid jobs). Taken together these two things favour white middle and upper-class people.

My fear is that not only do internships work against people from diverse backgrounds getting their foot in the door the few diverse people who do get internships are being exploited.

It is always questionable when people are asked to work for free regardless of their background (black or white, able bodied or disabled). But it is a questionable practice I might be willing to overlook if it was a short term measure that led to real training and employment. Looking at the diversity figures across television it wouldn’t appear to be increasing the diversity of the workforce. Therefore the few none white middleclass people who are getting internships seem to simply be working for less than minimum wage with little to show for it at the end.

I am not advocating the end of work experience and internships I realise from my own experience that it can give people a valuable leg up. However I believe it is incumbent on larger media companies to show not only how they are recruiting interns from a diverse background but also how they are not exploiting them. If they are expecting people to work for free the least the companies could do is publish the success rates of interns finding work later on and exactly what they expect interns to learn from their experience.

At Ceddo they made me to work in the morning, in the afternoon they would give me simple artistic video editing tasks and film making challenges. If well meaning film makers could do that for a black boy who walked off the street we should expect no less from large media organisations with budgets that run into the millions.