Unpaid Internships

I wish I could honestly say that unpaid internships were for suckers, but it’s not true. The basic fact of post-graduate life is that if you want to enter a profession that doesn’t drain every iota of enthusiasm and love for the daylight hours of Monday to Friday from your soul, you’re pretty much 90% going to have to be an office bitch on expenses for six months at some point in your early twenties. The privilege of the moneyed classes, interning for a substantial amount of time is free for those who can afford it, incredibly expensive for those who can’t. Take [REDACTED], our resident Hot Rant whipping boy and all round charming gringo. He’s enthused , dapper, and a pro with the franker but is he going to get a job if he works less than the mandatory year tenure on daily receipts of €10? In the esteemed words of Baudelaire: “NON.”

But why, one may ask, has this all of a sudden become a bone of contention? "Hey Tommy," you ponder, "didn’t you intern at Full Time Hobby for six months during second year? And then at Matador in the third?” Why yes friend I did. But like a child encountering a pederast on the fringes of a copse, I never got my sweets. An internship with some faint glimmer of a salaried position at its culmination is perfectly acceptable, should even (you'd think) be expected. Fattening up ones CV is a necessary tool in the quest for meaningful employment. But the shameful truth seems to be that if you want to work, like I did/do, at a record label or subversive fringe-culture oriented periodical, it’s a case of being in the right place at the right time, preferably after being on the dole for the amount of time ittakes your average starter to hit the 10k mark. To return to my point; this is all spurred on by two facts. Firstly, the company I work for (an internationally esteemed publisher of illustrated non-fiction books. Only minutes ago was I reading about ‘His Top 5 Handjobs’. It’s pretty enthralling stuff) is being restructured and, as a lowly temporary editorial assistant, I’m pretty much a dead cert to be chopped from the ranks like a deliciously stuff-able flower from a courgette. Secondly, I have an interview at Vice magazine (all tying up, no?). For an internship. Somebody wants to talk to me about not paying me a single cent for three whole months of full time effort. I don’t know what is wrong with me. If I do it and stay there then brilliant. I’ll have dragged myself up out of the quagmirious pit of humanities graduates, moaning pitifully like a hoard of lepers about ‘wanting to do something creative’ to a job envied by nearly every asymmetrically-quiffed jackass in a 2-mile radius of Dalston Kingsland. If not, I’ll have self-inflicted a metaphorical employment form of violent, unrestrained congress upon myself which will leave me out of pocket for the next eighteen months and back applying for jobs in publishing recruitment. I’ll probably take it. TH