Tales of the Underworld

The Politics of Non-Payment

Image: internaware.org

On any regular day the notion of unpaid internships should make any would-be graduate - suffering with even the mildest case of pessimism - break down and weep.  Not only is their life no longer their own (it now belongs to their department, their course, their tutors' marking decisions, the library), but the world will soon be unceremoniously flung onto their front porch like a wrecking ball, and the graduate in question will have no idea what to do with it.  They say there are only two things in life that are certain, paying taxes and death.  Now, in a job market that looks uncannily like the Nevada desert (dustballs and all), who knows if today's graduate will ever earn enough to cross the first tax threshold.  Is death really our only certainty?!

Forgive the severe case of pessimism (and slight morbidity) but WWP, for the first time, really did break down and weep today.  For the System (namely Her Majesty's Revenues and Customs) that had always be so kind, screwed me over royally over in both the long and the short term.  In the short term, they refused to refund me the minimum wage for the ten months work I did for a company that (illegally) never paid me a penny.  Despite the fact that this and this is going on right in front of our noses every time we switch on the 10 o'clock news (and/or check the BBC website when we've read everything on our Facebook feed), the Department of Work and Pensions  is unrelentingly refusing claims such as mine on the basis of an 'employment contract.'  You apply for an internship with a company, you create content for that company, most importantly you create revenue for that company...and your payment? 'Experience' or 'training.'  John Stewart Mill it ain't.

Our generation crave independence more than we're given credit for. Yet we are thrown like overgrown babies with BScs into bassinets and dumped at the door of businesses, a want ad for an unpaid internship tucked in our blankets.  We're expected to wait another five years in employment purgatory before we are finally allowed to fly the nest a second time. Apologies for the hyperbole; I should probably be writing semi-romantic prose highlighting the implications unpaid internships have on social mobility.  (I have, incidentally, already done that here).  But I want to dare to let a little emotion leak into this poor, malnourished blog.  The System has screwed me in the long run by expecting me to work for free.  I feel unappreciated, I feel hopeless. The desperate pleas of my cover letters make me feel embarrassed. But most of all, I feel ashamed for wanting to create a career in something I've loved doing for as long as I can remember.  The political consequences of unpaid internships are broader and deeper than I could ever explain here.  But the emotional consequences are greater than I've ever wanted to explore.

A Theory of Justice

Model's Rights

WWP is the first to admit a hatred of models.  Most are everything I will never be (read: tall) and their career involves wearing dresses worth more than my life savings.  Yet in the spirit of advent, perhaps it is important to see the models as more than deities of thinspo and envy, and realise that they are humans with rights.  More importantly, they are usually children with rights.

Back in February, the model Sara Ziff launched the Model Alliance, a quasi-union that has produced its own 'Models' Bill of Rights.'  Its aims are to undercut industry-level notions that forced nudity, child exploitation, sexual abuse and anorexia are acceptable.  Now, why this story escaped WWP's radar can either say a lot about my journalistic skills circa February 2012 (apparently tragic as even the Mail Online covered it) or the conscious ignorance of the campaign by the public and media.  For as Ziff herself succinctly put it, most 'probably see the industry as a privilege.'  And so, incredibly, this collective jealousy has excused an entire industry's law-breaking shenanigans.

It does beg the question though, as to why one career class must instigate their own bill of rights - unless I skipped over that clause in all my sales assistant contracts.  Unpaid child labour for instance must surely be covered in some form of legislation.  The problem appears to be the self-circulating cycle of the modelling world; models of around the age of 14 are employed, and when the wretched exploitation of the industry comes hurtling their way they cannot/will not speak out because of their age. Those who grow up and stay on as models become desensitized to this abuse and hence do not protest due to an artificial, constructed ignorance.  So as sad as the need for it is, the Model Alliance seems to have the right idea in acting as the middle man between malleable children and money-driven agencies. However to eradicate the problem completely, a dissolution of ignorance is what is needed.