Presentation

The Situation

A fundamental chance concerning internships has taken place in many European countries. Internships are losing more and more their educational character. Many interns work under unfair conditions; especially university graduates are often used as a highly qualified, but cheap or even free labour force in order to replace regular employees and cut costs. Labour market access becomes ever more precarious, i.e. insecure, with young people being un- or underpaid.

What are the consequences ?

There are various negative consequences of a social as well as economic nature. The youth labour force is being misused; their labour rights are not protected properly or are not even defined in EU Member State labour laws; interns do not contribute to the social security system and thus cannot benefit; regular employment is being destroyed; their consumer power decreases enormously, forcing youth to remain financially dependent on their parents for an extraordinarily long period of time; and future and family planning becomes much more difficult, taking place ever later in life. This last consequence additionally aggravates the demographic problems that Europe faces.

Facts and Figures

There has been a real internship boom all over Europe in recent years. According to a survey of the French Economic and Social Committee, roughly 800,000 interns are employed annually in France. The German Employment Agency counted 600,000 interns during June 2006. However, this figure only included the internships at one point in time, but not the entire year. Thus, only in France and Germany, there are at least 1.5 million interns each year. Projected on all EU Member States, there are several million annually. The intern offices of the European institutions in Brussels report around 28,000 internship applications each year. In April 2006, 43% of the jobs offered by companies that are registered at the German stock exchange were either internships or student jobs. Between 2000 and 2003, there has been an increase from 25% to 41% of postgraduate internships – even though 87% of those postgraduates already did internships during their studies (see DGB - Studie). Another recent German study revealed that in 50% of the cases, the internship did not help postgraduates get a regular job. In Switzerland, 49.8% of university graduates have to deal with precarious jobs (i.e. timely limited, underpaid, lack of labour rights etc.). Two years ago, it was only 35.6%. A study of the Austrian “Plattform Generation Praktikum” confirms this development : 59% of university graduates do one or several internships even though they have a diploma as well as practical experience from internships already done during their studies. 20% of these internships lasted longer than four months; one third of them were entirely unpaid and 40% paid 100 to 700 Euros. Due to the low wage, over 80% of the graduated interns remained financially dependent on their parents. The development is similar in Italy: Here, 45% of the 30 to 34 year olds still live at home because they cannot afford financial independence. Although the unemployment rate for people with higher education is comparably low, it has for example doubled in Austria during the last six years. Moreover, one has to keep in mind that interns rarely register as unemployed. In fact, they often use the internship to avoid being jobless.

CONCLUSION

Although young Europeans are ever better qualified, misuse of internships and other precarious jobs make their access to the labour market more and more difficult. This reveals a genuine race to the bottom for the European social model.

Sources : see Studies, Reports and Analyses and Press Review.