London Fashion Intern's blog

The non-starter generation: the ILO warns against a "lost generation"

Of the "we are all screwed" variety - On Wednesday, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) released a report on Global Employment Trends for Youth 2010. There isn't a single good news in it, starting with the fact that the youth unemployment rate is at its highest ever at 13%, and apparently it will keep increasing.

According to the ILO, this creates a

risk of a crisis legacy of a ‘lost generation’ comprised of young people who have dropped out of the labour market, having lost all hope of being able to work for a decent living

Young people are the drivers of economic development. Foregoing this potential is an economic waste and can undermine social stability. The crisis is an opportunity to re-assess strategies for addressing the serious disadvantages that young people face as they enter the labour market. It is important to focus on comprehensive and integrated strategies that combine education and training policies with targeted employment policies for youth.

Cartoon from Sullivan-county.com

The non-starter generation: Fashion industry internships: exploitation or experience?

In today's Guardian, Jamie Elliot asks: Fashion industry internships: exploitation or experience?

The article will not teach anything new to anyone working in the fashion industry. Elliot however indirectly asks: what would companies over-relying on interns do if they had to pay their currently free workforce?

Fashion companies are not charities. Alexander McQueen, a brand part of the Gucci Group, itself a subsidiary of PPR, is a money-making entreprise if there was any, even though Alexander McQueen is not the most profitable label of the luxury conglomerate. According to its website, PPR 2009 revenues were 16.5 billion euros. In the first quarter of 2010, the Gucci Group sales were up "by 5.3% (+3.8% in reported terms)", including "exceptional growth" for Alexander McQueen, no doubt helped by the designer's death. So by the look of it, they can afford to turn intern positions into junior ones, and to pay them a starting salary.

The second interesting point Elliot makes is the rise of interns daring to sue their employers for financial compensations. Even though he only lists two cases, this London Fashion Intern hopes that this is part of a wider trend of interns standing up to exploitation. Of course, companies will only start reconsidering their internship schemes if the money lost during trials added to the bad PR it might bring them outweighs the advantages of having an army of people working for free.

Work reader Michelle Jackson was paid £1,000 for work she had done during a six-week internship with an advertising agency after her tax office told her she might be entitled to the minimum wage.

"They put me in touch with the National Minimum Wage Helpline who investigated the agency and found they had a history of using unpaid placements as free labour," she says. "They were ordered to pay me for the work I'd done as well as any other students they had employed and not paid."

Last November, an employment tribunal ordered London Dream Motion Pictures to make backdated minimum wage payments to Nicola Vetta, an art department assistant who had been taken on by the company on an expenses-only basis.

Martin Spence, assistant general secretary of Bectu, the union that supported Vetta's case, was optimistic that the ruling would set a precedent. "We hope this judgment will draw a line in the sand and we will see more employers complying with the law," he said.

The non-starter generation: one in 106.4 chance of landing a job

Worry has kept me awake lately. This London Fashion Intern's lack of sleep and general state of panic is unlikely to improve after the publication of a High Fliers Research which, among other things, showed that "Media jobs have 106.4 applications per place". Of course, this is a slight improvement on the 1 200 people who applied for a job at The Times last year, though still very worrying.

The survey (which I can't find in full on the High Flier website, annoyingly) also showed that graduate job offers in the financial sector had bounced back. Perhaps unsurprisingly considering all the cuts going on, there are fewer positions available in the public sector. 

High Fliers surveyed 100 employers, which can only give a limited overview of the job market. Overall, each of them received on average 45 applications for each position, up from 35 in 2008. Consequence: the company surveyed closed the applications process early, meaning that unless you spent a lot of time sending CVs, cover letters and going to test centres in addition to studying and a possible part-time job, you are screwed. 

Most broadsheets (and tabloids) covered the survey this morning. Compare and contrast the Daily Mail headline and the FT's:

The chances of landing a graduate job since the recession? ONE in 270

More top jobs open up for graduates

The non-starter generation: Mr Osborne risks creating a lost generation

There is a pretty good editorial in today's The Observer about George Osborne budget choices, and its potential consequences for people starting their working life at the moment.

Government spending currently underpins demand, creating jobs and stimulating consumption, but the state can no longer afford to subsidise the economy at current levels. So the coalition rightly wants to effect a transition to a different kind of economy, less dependent on public money and debt. But to be confident of arriving at this destination, the government needs some sense of what will replace state investment as a spur to growth.

According to the budget, that function will be performed by a massive increase in private sector investment and exports. Mr Osborne reckons the proportion of growth coming from exports will increase from nought to around 30% within three years. He does not say who will finance this expansion, when banks are hoarding their cash. And he does not say what we will be exporting, nor to whom.

[...]

These are not just issues of abstract macroeconomics. Mr Osborne's austerity drive might put hundreds of thousands of public sector employees on the dole. At the same time, millions will have benefits cut, ostensibly as an "incentive to work". Where?

[...]

The last time that approach was brought to bear on the British economy, in the early 1980s, unemployment soared. The Tory calculation then was that job losses were the necessary cost of radical restructuring. But not enough was done to redeploy those whose livelihoods were lost. Many communities most affected by cuts and recession were excluded from the benefits of growth when it returned. Then, as now, the market was expected to drive the transition. But it failed to put capital in the gaps left by the state's withdrawal.

In opposition, the Tories made much of Labour's neglect of so-called Neets, young people not in education, employment or training. But in government, they have presented no strategy to include them in the labour market. Instead, the coalition's first budget risks creating a lost generation, like the one that missed its first vital step up the ladder of prosperity in the early Eighties.

A vital lesson from that period is that high unemployment carries a massive social and economic cost – in poorer health, higher crime, social breakdown – that does not immediately show up on a national balance sheet.

Either Mr Osborne has failed to factor that cost into his calculations or he thinks it is "unavoidable". Either way, he is wrong.

According to the BBC,

UK households, on average, will be about £400 a year worse off, Budget documents suggest, with the poorest 10% losing £200 and the richest £1,800, although the poorest will be hit harder than most as a percentage of their income.

So that's more financial and indirect barriers for people who would like to complete internships.

To be entirely honest, there is one measure in this budget which made me really happy: the increase in income tax personal allowances from £6,475 to £7,475. I wish it were retroactive.

The non-starter generation: The Times is also laying off people

According to Ben Dowell, "Times journalists prepare to leave paper after redundancy offer".

The move is part of the current round of changes in which 40 journalists have applied to take voluntary redundancy at the paper, with the rest of the editorial team waiting to hear about a further 20 compulsory redundancies. The Times is also planning to hire up to 10 editorial staff to replace some of those taking voluntary redundancy.

Now I didn't take any quantitative subject at uni but I'm pretty sure that the 10 people hired won't make up for the 60 employees the newspaper is letting go.

Clearly, we should expect many more internships adverts in the style of this one, posted on Gorkana on June 10th:

Sunday Times Style are looking for an unpaid intern for one month to cover a cancellation starting from Monday 14th June, working on the beauty and lifestyle desks.
Applicants should have some experience on a beauty desk, preferably on a weekly or daily title. Please email your CV and a covering letter to xxx@sunday-times.co.uk

I understand that the newspaper is understaffed and apparently losing £240 000 a day but this is no excuse not to pay people.

The non-starter generation: the Trinity Mirror lays off 200 employees

Signs might be "for the religious, the superstitious and the lower class" but they can be hard to ignore. At the moment, signs (some would call them factual evidences) that going into journalism is a really bad idea keep piling up.

Trinity Mirror laying off 200 employees across its three newspapers is the latest to date. Not only does it mean that there will be 200 less potential jobs to fill, it also means that 200 fully-fledged journalists, subs, designers and editors will now be applying for positions in the field. They most likely have the type of experience and contact book you can't compete with straight out of uni.

Have a good weekend

The non-starter generation

This London Fashion Intern has heard that more and more newspapers, magazines, radios and other websites rely on interns to fill junior positions.

In different times, those positions were meant to be your break into the system, a way to learn the ropes. The P**check wasn't great, but it existed. If you did your job properly, you had hopes of moving on to more senior positions.

If those junior positions are mostly abolished, how will we ever get to the more senior ones?

If you are an intern, no matter which tasks you do, no matter whether you call in samples or act as the boss' PA, you have no official job title. Sometimes, your internship supervisor will be very understanding and accept to name you "editorial assistant" or similar on your reference letter. Sometimes you won't even get that all-important reference letter.

Without a job title, without a proper job description, no matter how much internship experience you might have and how gifted you might be, you have little hope of getting a starting position on a media team. It is all the more true that for those jobs, you are in direct concurrence with people who have years of experience, and are often over-qualified for the position, but got fired from their previous job "because of the recession".

So how do we start? In less than six-months-time, a new and fresh intake of graduates, just as willing as we were to be free labour for a while, will join the job market. In those next six months, a few media outlets will probably make more people redundant, or cancel their jobs after they've retired. It won't be 1200 people applying for a news reporter position anymore but probably twice that amount.

Can the model of internships and free labour be sustained? How long can people go on for on nothing but travel expenses, when they get lucky? And how angry are newspapers and magazines making a whole generation of people? Considering that The Media has yet to find a financial model on which it can survive, I'm not sure it really wants to piss off a whole group of people who would normally be an automatically won readership.