National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships) Bill
Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Jacob Rees-Mogg
Alec Shelbrooke
My hon. Friend makes an important point, which is that there is a difference between people advertising for unpaid internships and people coming in on a voluntary basis because they have taken the initiative to see whether they could do something. However, that still removes opportunity for others, because there may not then be the need to advertise for a paid role. I will address that issue later, because I have specific points to make about the voluntary side of this and the charity sector.
Many of the interns in this place, much like those who work in private businesses, are undertaking day-to-day activities similar to those that many of us employ staff members to help us with in our offices. The fact of the matter is that, despite your commendable efforts, Mr Speaker, working in Parliament has often been a matter of “Who you know, not what you know,” and young people who are eager to work here and with the financial means to do so for free will find that there are Members taking on interns and refusing to pay at least the minimum wage for their labour.
I remember an exchange of views in this Chamber with the former Member for Bolton West. When I pushed her during an Opposition day debate on the national minimum wage on whether she would accept unpaid internships, her response was
“I have volunteers—I do not call them interns—and I have no money in my budget to pay them.”—[Official Report, 15 October 2014; Vol. 586, c. 350.]
When Members have access to a staffing budget of more than £140,000 a year, it beggars belief that a Labour Member would stand in this place and defend a practice of workplace exploitation with a claim that she could not afford to pay her staff. Imagine the outcry if large multinational firms across the UK stopped paying their workforces because of similar arguments. It is the exploitation of this “volunteer” loophole that means young people are not being paid for their labour.
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Is this not a very important point? What about those people who work for charities on a voluntary basis, sometimes doing so for decades?
Alec Shelbrooke
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, who has pre-empted another section of my speech. If he will bear with me, I will address that issue specifically.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend; I must admit that I have not looked into that. Perhaps he would like to elaborate on that later, when he comes to speak—at length, I am sure.
As I said at the start of my speech, this practice takes place in the House, and that sends the message to businesses across the country that we think that it is acceptable. I do not think it is, which is why I introduced the Bill. The broader societal issue is that interning is becoming a prerequisite for graduates looking to access their chosen profession. As was reported by the Social Mobility Commission, over 30% of newly hired graduates had previously interned for their employer. That rises to 50% in some sectors. According to the Sutton Trust, 31% of graduate interns are unpaid. Most of them are unable to claim jobseeker’s allowance or universal credit, as they are unable to accept offers of work by virtue of their internship.
That point about the ability to claim welfare is important and goes to the heart of the problem. The IoD’s model internship agreement establishes that companies expect their interns to be present during office hours; how can interns then be expected to look for work, let alone attend interviews? Although legally and technically an intern is able to leave, in reality the threat of a poor reference or the perception that leaving would create a bad impression and lead to the intern not being hired by the company at the end of the internship make that worthless. Even those who go on to work for a company are often unwilling to speak out, for obvious reasons, but when young people have taken employers to employment tribunals they have been successful: companies such as Sony and Harrods have been required to pay their former interns’ unpaid wages. However, is it right that the issue should have to go before an employment tribunal before people are paid?
I would describe myself as a trade unionist. Indeed, I was a member of the Unite union before it became more interested in internal Labour party politics than representing the interests of working people. The ordinary man or woman in the workplace is the reason I believe that representation is vital. We forget that a lot of people do not have the courage to put their head above the parapet. They may well fear for their livelihood and not want to be a target.
Alec Shelbrooke
If my hon. Friend bears with me one moment, I will come to him. I just want to build on this important point about representation in this place. All of us in this Chamber forget that we are very thick-skinned people. We have to be, given the nature of the job. We take abuse from many directions, all the time.
Alec Shelbrooke
Indeed. We have to stand up for our convictions and put our case, as I hope I am doing today. Many people in this country do not have the ability to do that, and that is why representation is important. As MPs, we should stand up for people. We can argue in this Chamber about the value of a Bill, but it is important to introduce this kind of Bill and to look at how we can change the law, because many people out there simply cannot find the courage to stand up and do so. That is why we have trade unions and Members of Parliament.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I make the rather pedantic point that unpaid interns cannot be fearful about their livelihood, because they are not earning their living.
Alec Shelbrooke
But they can well be fearful about their future livelihood.
The campaign group Intern Aware has long campaigned to encourage those who have had internships and experienced this problem to speak out. It remains the UK’s leading campaign group against unpaid internships, and I thank it for its support over the past three years.
It is right that we today attempt to give people the protection they need against hugely wealthy organisations such as Harrods and Sony. We must not forget that this is about young people submitting themselves to a process to increase their social mobility, and that their entire future is reliant on its success. It is fundamentally a Conservative principle that the state should encourage, and do all that it can to allow, people to better their lives. Successive Conservative Governments have used their time in office to allow people the social mobility to move forward, whether it be through the 1819 cotton mills and factories Act, the Factory and Workshop Act 1901, the Factories Act 1961, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, policies such as right to buy and Help to Buy, universal credit or the national living wage. The key to social mobility is ensuring that everyone, regardless of background or affluence, has the same opportunities in the working world. The driver of many of our reforms and policies is, and has been, the idea that hard work should always be rewarded.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am keen to make progress because in the course of my speech some of my hon. Friends’ points will be answered. I will come to the statistics that I have.
The young man who had worked as an unpaid intern was, for the most part, a spare pair of hands, and he noticed that there were several other interns and a high turnover rate. He called it “a conveyor belt of interns”. Working unpaid meant that he had to undertake extra paid work to support himself, as my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) said she had done during her pupillage. The young man often worked a seven-day week, daytime and evenings, in order to make ends meet. Although he says it was an invaluable experience, he feels that the industry believes that interns should be delighted and grateful that they are there, and that the privilege of being among wealthy and successful people negates the need for pay. That is an appalling abuse.
I raise these examples to align this Bill not with the politics of envy, but with the basic principles of fairness and equal opportunity. There are many former interns who recognise that their wealthier backgrounds gave them interning opportunities that were not available to their less fortunate peers. One former intern in the arts told me that she took a year out in her third year of study at a London art college to take some internships to improve her CV and therefore her chances of securing a job after her studies. In one year she interned for five different businesses, none of which paid her. She felt that she had enough financial support through her parents and that she was able to take this year out unpaid. She admits, however, that some of her peers missed out on this opportunity through fear of not being able to fund it. She notes that there was a stark difference in the ability of those who had taken a year to intern and those who went straight into their final year of study. It is almost a pre-requisite to succeed in the art world.
Of course, in words at least, professional organisations representing the industries that I have commented on so far say that they are opposed to unpaid internships. The Arts Council, UK Music, Creative Skillset and the Royal Institute of British Architects all support a four-week limit on unpaid work experience but, as we have seen from the case studies that I have described, these are just statements, not policies.
Mr Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend is being very generous. He mentions the four-week time limit that some consider justifiable. Unfortunately, his Bill does not set any time limit. That is one of its flaws.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am exceptionally grateful for that intervention from my hon. Friend, who has identified what I initially wanted to do with this Bill. However, my advice from the Clerks and from people who understand legal matters far better than I do was that it would be full of so many legal loopholes that it would be worthless. We therefore moved to the current position. I hope that is a matter that we could explore in much greater depth in Committee and reach a simpler and more robust legal definition. My hon. Friend has touched on an important aspect. I am a mechanical engineer, not a lawyer, so I have to take advice from those who are more learned.
Alec Shelbrooke
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for your advice. Indeed, I am merely painting the landscape in which the Bill is meant to encourage change. The Bill makes an important argument: we in the House today cannot ignore the fact that some people, who can come from the poorest backgrounds academically and who can work their way up to be on a level pegging, can then see their opportunities cut off because others are getting around an Act that was brought in specifically to protect them.
That is what the first clause of the Bill addresses. It describes what a workplace internship is:
“For the purpose of this Act, a workplace internship is an employment practice in which a person…undertakes regular work or provides regular services in the United Kingdom for…another person…a company…a limited liability partnership…or a public authority; and…the purpose of the employment practice is…that the intern meets learning objectives or gains experience of working for the employer listed in section 1(a); and…to provide practical experience in an occupation or profession.”
What I hope I have done so far this morning is highlight how some companies are getting round that and how the existing National Minimum Wage Act allows that.
I think we would agree that defining the “volunteer” unpaid internship at Vivienne Westwood as involving working regular hours from Monday to Friday would mean it fell within the scope of the Bill, which would protect somebody who
“undertakes regular work or provides regular services in the United Kingdom”.
I think that gets to what I hope to achieve in the Bill. I am simply trying to close down loopholes in legislation that has been very useful in protecting people in the United Kingdom.
Mr Rees-Mogg
Does clause 1(b) not create a loophole in the Bill? If somebody took on a person to do unpaid work for the purpose of being a harmless drudge, to quote Dr Johnson on lexicographers, they would be entitled to do so, because it would not be for the purposes set out in subsection (b).
Alec Shelbrooke
The important distinction that needs to be drawn is that we are talking about deliberate, advertised, unpaid internships. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) made an important distinction between people who come along, volunteer and want to work, and people who advertise for somebody to come and work for them for six months. When we see the perversion of the two words put together—“advertising” for “volunteers” to come and work—it is a bit like saying, “You need to go on a suicide mission, men. Who will volunteer?” and then telling them, “You’ve volunteered.” That makes a mockery of things.
I want the Bill to really bring these issues to the fore. I have heard the interventions from my hon. Friends, and some very reasonable points have been made, but that does not mean that we should turn away from doing anything, and I hope the Bill will start us on the route of trying to address this issue.