Why interns don’t deserve pay

In the modern political firmament, is there any creature more ridiculous than the agitating intern? Interns are rising up. These one-time coffee-makers have reimagined themselves as history-makers, fancying that they are latter-day Wilberforces striking a blow against the ‘internship slave trade’. They’re demanding back pay, retrospective remuneration for all that hard graft in air-conditioned offices with nothing but a usually paid-for Pret sandwich to sustain them.

Groups such as Intern Aware, Internocracy and Interns Anonymous are rebelling against the ‘tyranny’ of unpaid or expenses-only internships. It’s naked exploitation to be asked to work for nowt, they claim. It’s ‘modern-day  slavery’, says the website of Interns Anonymous, driving the point home with a picture of a Roman slave fanning his pampered mistress. That’s just what life is like for the 21st-century intern, apparently, though presumably without the being-sold-at-public-auction bit or the threat of being fed to lions.

The revolting interns have gone running to a well-known facilitator of radical change — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — in search of justice. And they’ve had some success. Earlier this year, HMRC forced nine firms to hand over £192,808 in back pay to 167 aggrieved interns. Recently Alexander McQueen became the latest company to be chastised for advertising unpaid internships. In America, a class-action lawsuit has been launched against Fox Entertainment Group by youngsters who suffered the horror of interning on trendy movies like Black Swan without pay. Imagine spending your summer hanging out with Natalie Portman and other Hollywood bigwigs. Oh, the humanity!

Of course it’s easy to mock modern youth. And that’s because what they’re doing and saying is preposterous. They present their campaign as a blast against The Man, but the intern uprising is motored more by a nauseating sense of entitlement and capacity for self-pity than by any of the workplace-improving ideals of yesteryear.