Internships for all? A critical review of unpaid labour and questions for marketing, public relations and advertising students in the UK.

An internship, or a period of work experience, is widely acknowledged as a way into employment (BIS, 2012). Employers favour those students and graduates who have gained work experience to those who have not (Gault, Leach and Duey, 2010). In the UK, the issue of internships has become highly controversial leading to a plethora of newspaper reports in recent years exposing injustices in internships, including unpaid labour, specifically within the more ‘glamorous’ fields of marketing, public relations and advertising (e.g. Jones, 2014). Marketing, public relations and advertising are part of the cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). Practitioners within these three fields operate as ‘promotional intermediaries’, working on behalf of commercial interests to sell not only commodities but to shape ‘values, norms and beliefs about society, markets and human relations’ (Davis, 2013, p. 29). Within the UK approximately 500,000 personnel are employed in the marketing, public relations and advertising professional fields (ONS, 2015). This working paper draws on existing literature in the cultural industries, the sociology of work, and relevant studies in three professional fields (marketing, public relations and advertising) in order to problematise internships as unpaid labour. In deciding on this topic, we respond to an agenda which calls for critical studies of exclusionary practices, particularly in the field of public relations (Edwards, 2014). From the review of existing literature, we pose research questions for empirical exploration. In 2010, the IPPR called for a fair wage for interns (Lawton and Potter, 2010), subsequently supported by the Wilson Review (BIS, 2012), and an employer’s good practice code, recognising that a fair wage is not only one of equality and social justice for all workers, but also who has access to internships (TUC, 2013). As Hesmondhalgh (2010, p. 279) notes, ‘Young people from wealthy families are much more likely to be able to afford sustained periods without pay’. Hesmondhalgh (2010) and Percival and Hesmondhalgh (2014) have examined the particular phenomenon of unpaid work within the cultural industries, demonstrating that the debate is more complex than calls for a fair wage, even though such calls are fundamental to social mobility. Critiques of free labour draw attention to the social processes that underpin not only employer-led exploitation, but the supporting processes that involve the workers themselves (non-consciously) maintaining the status quo. Such processes include ‘self-exploitation’ arising from the blurred boundaries of work and play, and ‘self-commodification’ and individualised labour, whereby success and failure are perceived as individual responsibilities to promote oneself (Hesmondhalgh, 2010). Siebert and Wilson (2013, p. 718) further problematise the notion of ‘exploitation’ in their study of unpaid work in the creative industries arguing that students’ and graduates’ acceptance of unpaid work as ‘the way things are’ suggests that workers do not ‘perceive what is happening to them as exploitation’. The concept of ‘internalised flexibility’, used to describe a generational attitude among young people towards employment conditions may also provide an explanation as to why young workers’, including students and graduates, do not challenge the status quo (Bradley and Devadason, 2008). The preliminary review above raises important questions for marketing, public relations and advertising which are unexplored within the professional fields themselves, and yet, as indicated, the responses of young people who have interned within these fields could be particularly intriguing, given their aspirations and roles in promoting the values that underpin current economic and social ideologies.