Creative serfs

Key Insights:

Internships are often used as little more than slave labour

No statistics are taken to measure how much is performed by interns Extended internships lower the value of the core qualification

Most agree that any more than a month or two and the internship becomes exploitative

Ten pm in the pockets of the creative economy. Patterns are being cut, ideas are getting hatched and pizza is being ordered. Nothing new there—if the love of creating like Jehovah doesn't attract human desk magnets, the love of a good Audi usually will.

Except sometimes those paying the pizza guy are living on tips themselves. The Meatlovers can be claimed on expenses, but the hours worked—often all night—cannot.

This is the placement workforce: the hardest-working bunch of people the government inadvertently sponsors. Schooled in the commercial arts of advertising, design, film—anywhere supply outweighs demand—they are sometimes paid nothing, sometimes flicked a hundy at the end of their 80 hours.

New Zealand is a country where Do for the love of it will always get more airplay than Money, that's what I want. But even the unassuming want to eat, and the ones getting paid in food vouchers wouldn't mind flatting with someone other than mum and dad.

"People who don't get jobs are lacking in talent, personality or commitment … they have flawed characters"

The problem lies not in the two-week try before you buy, but in the indefinite take before you turf. There's no government allowance to cover an extended period of gainfully employed unemployment and, because the placement system is largely unregulated, there's little to stop a trial period turning into an era.

And it does. "I could have been a doctor by now," laments an advertising unfortunate who's been on placements for six years. We advise him to give up—no salary is going to pay for that bitterness.
While six years is most likely indicative of a wrong career turn—maybe you should have been a doctor—six-month stints are more easily explained with … what? We tracked down those who know.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE SCARRING

"To me it's an absolutely ethical issue. The design industry should not under any circumstances exploit people." —Peter Gilderdale, head of design, AUT.

It's hard to get everyone to agree on one thing, but most peopleIdealog talked to were united on this: internships are a good idea. And this: sometimes.

For film director and AUT Associate Professor Welby Ings, 'sometimes' means: "One, the intern is gifted and committed; and two, the organisation sets clear parameters and shows genuine interest in growing [the intern's] ability.

"What's not fine," he continues, "is all of these companies using interns as a source of unpaid labour—when they just wheel them through one after the other."

"To me it's an absolutely ethical issue. The design industry should not under any circumstances exploit people."

Some interns, however, are fine with being on the placement conveyer belt—as long as their heads are a bit fuller on the way out. "I think you're either not getting paid but you're learning so much it's just like studying, or you have a proper job," says AXIS Adschool graduate Andrea Price.

The proper job. The dangling carrot. Industry educators think it should either be offered or removed from the radar as soon as skills have been noted. A couple of weeks should do it, says AUT head of design Peter Gilderdale. "Two weeks is long enough to find out if someone is right."

Sticking with it

Mike Ramsay was lucky—his first placement paid enough for him to pay board "while also giving me the freedom to choose between bussing into the city, or eating a scoop of chips and a potato fritter."
His second placement was along the same bus-or-food lines, but it got him a job. After six months.

Still, Ramsay doesn't see this as a negative experience. "I don't think I was a shit writer when I started," he says. "But I wasn't fully prepared for copywriting, so I'm grateful for the training."

And while he has centre stage, there's someone else Ramsay would like to thank: "I'm also grateful that I had a girlfriend who was willing to feed and house me while I did this. Luckily I got the job the same week I knocked her up."

Cameron Brown can testify to the truth of the old adage: if you keep going you'll get there in the end. The end, unfortunately, follows about 660 days of working for "token gestures".

After 18 months of internships at two major Auckland agencies, Brown moved onto a third. Now he's on the payroll. Although he reckons he still earns "less than a fry-boy at Macca's", Brown is pleased he stuck it out. "There's no routine to my job and that's the way I like it. We all have to do a job and if you can find one that isn't like a factory, that makes it feel less like work."

Sod this

AXIS Adschool's top student of 2004, Andrea Price, spent six months as an intern at a big Auckland agency. "Come in and we'll see what happens," the agency had said.

The answer was nothing much. "We didn't have a lot to do, quite honestly," says Price. "'Generate your own work' was the philosophy. 'Win awards and we'll hire you.' But we weren't learning anything and I don't think they ever took us that seriously."

So Price headed to the Fallon agency in faraway Minneapolis after winning yet another accolade, Best in Show at the Crowbar Awards in Singapore. "I did a month at Fallon and it was so different to here," she says. "They kept interns totally in the loop, paid them and told them how long they would be there. We were treated really well."

But after catching a glimpse of what working life could be like at an agency, Price wasn't prepared to work for nothing again, and now satiates her creative thirst with writing and film work. "I came back to New Zealand and just left advertising."

While the advertising tutors think it's more like three months, everyone preaches the virtues of a predestined judgement day.
"The agency might say 'Okay we'll make a decision at the end of the month'," says AUT head of advertising Paul White. "Then they push it back. Sometimes after three months people get told, 'Okay your placement starts today'."

And what does 12 weeks of commercial creativity get invoiced at these days? "Most people start out on zero," says White. "Then after about three months they get a survival allowance of $150 a week. I don't know any other industry that asks somebody to work full-time for nothing,"
Mr White, meet the design industry. And then over here we have film and TV...

"In this industry it's expected you'll work for free for the first couple of years," says South Seas film and television graduate Tom Radford, now the unpaid intern coordinator at Alt TV. "You're told at film school you'll spend at least a year just building contacts."
Ketsana Traymany made a few contacts of her own when she graduated from Unitec in 2005 with a Bachelor of Graphic Design. She did the rounds of Auckland design agencies, but found them "already full of free workers".

"Most of them said I'd have to show I was keen by working for free," she says. "I wouldn't, but it's become accepted now because many people are desperate."

But how did things get to a point of desperation? These days, if you get a job soon out of an advertising course "the planets have aligned", says AXIS Adschool director David Bell.

"Employing junior creatives has become exceptionally rare," he says. "It's a buyer's market."

But buyer's markets exist only when there is an abundance of produce—and in most other fields the buyers are begging right now. Are our education institutions sending too many creatives to the market?
Alt TV's Radford thinks so. "South Seas took in 20 students ten years ago and now they take in 120," he says. "When you come out there's a glut of graduates. It's a common complaint. A few of us mentioned it to the head of school last year and to a certain extent he agreed with us. But at the end of a day he's running a business."

"What unpaid internships are saying is that it's only after you've worked for free that you are worth anything"

But South Seas head of school Gerben Cath doesn't back his alumnus when Idealog contacts him. "We do not have any significant problems regarding graduates doing extended work for nothing," he says.
Other course leaders insist that if there is a problem it's with a student's out-take, rather than a school's intake. "People who don't get jobs are lacking in talent, personality or commitment," says Adschool's Bell. "They have flawed characters."

Long-time film producer Dan Salmon puts it more gently: "If you go on working for free for years in film, and nobody's offered you paid work, you're probably in the wrong business."

THE WAY IT IS

"Working for free has become part of the New Zealand culture in a big way." —Welby Ings

However it was sparked, the placement system is now firmly plugged into New Zealand's business grid. And it's short-circuiting.
"When you have a lot of people working for free it lowers the skill level," says Radford. "It's very hard to retain people, so you're constantly having to retrain people."

Gilderdale, AUT's head of design, believes free labour is also lowering the intrinsic value of qualifications. "What unpaid internships are saying is that the three or four years you just spent studying are worth nothing and it's only after you've worked for free that you are worth anything. From an educator's perspective, that stinks."

Work & Income staff have been known to kick up a bit of a stink about the placement system too. But what's someone working a 60-hour week for chocolate-covered peanuts to do? Trade sleep for another job at McDonald's?

"It screws with our salaries ... it's got to the point where you can't really negotiate because someone else will do it for free"

"I was getting a lot of pressure from my case worker ringing me at work all the time," says one-time advertising intern Mark Irving. "It got to the point where it was like 'Back off lady, I'm about to break!'"

"We were encouraged by the agency we were working at to go on the dole," says fellow ad intern Price. "It was hard because WINZ was constantly ringing, trying to get me other work. I tried being honest with them at first, told them what I was doing, but that just meant I wasn't going to be able to carry on with the internship."

It seems that would depend on who you are talking to. If, for example, it was Bronwyn Saunders, chief media advisor for WINZ, Price may have been told she could carry on with the internship—but only up to the maximum WINZ work experience period of four weeks. Or one-sixth of what Bell and White say is the average advertising internship.

WINZ has one other major work experience criterion: "The person must not be in paid employment." That means if your company's finance department is generous and flicks you $200 at the end of the week—which might add up to around $3 an hour—there's a good chance of being smacked on the hand for earning too much pocket money. Former intern Cameron Brown is one of the many people Idealog talked to who is still making repayments to WINZ after being "hit up" for earning money through placements. At least Brown did eventually land a job with his employer.

So ongoing WINZ assistance is out. And so are most paid part-time jobs. What then, should an intern do for a crust? "Well, agencies encourage interns to eat all the food in the cupboards," says White.

And if those cupboards are bare, there's always mum and dad. "The only way I could do it was to live at home," says ex-ad intern Adrian Maidment. "It was hard. I mean, I was 30!"

"Starting out I was just young and eager—and living at home," says actor Leisha Ward-Knox. "Now there are realities, bills that have to be paid. That's when you lose that romanticism. I really need to get paid now. It's important."

"There is always this promise of 'a good networking opportunity'. But there are good networks and there are rubbish ones"

It is important—and not just to those doing what Ings terms "sweatshop labour". Blank invoices are also hurting salaried junior creatives.
Traymany, the Unitec graduate who wouldn't work for nothing, did a couple of rounds of her industry before she was offered a job by a design agency—which she never heard from again. "I later found out someone had gone in the same week as me and offered to work for free," she says.

Fellow graphic designer Shaila Awadha agrees unpaid placements are "definitely" harming the market for junior designers. "It screws with our salaries too," she says. "It's got to the point where you can't really negotiate because someone else will do it for free."
Oh come on—it can't be that bad. Peter Spencer, who has run an advertising recruitment agency for a decade, is paid to know these things. We'll ask him. "I can't remember the last time we placed a junior creative," he said. Even after he offered to do it for free.
Spencer put his concern about unpaid labour on the record this year at the CAANZ (Communication Agencies Association of New Zealand) AGM, saying: "Unless we can find a better and fairer way of treating graduates, they will steadily become fewer and less talented, as those who value themselves consider alternative careers."

Great—saying such a thing at such an event sounds like a giant step for creative-kind. But Spencer fears his words went unheard. "My timing wasn't good," he admits. "The bar was already open."

WHERE TO FROM FEAR

"Companies should realise that by putting work in front of fresh eyes they could potentially bag that all important new account. That's worth paying for." —Rush Fay, junior graphic designer
Clearly Michael Jackson hasn't looked at the man in the mirror as much as he claims to have done, but maybe we can. Come on, it won't be as bad as it would be for him.

Earlier this year Bell, White, and Colenso creative director Richard Maddox sent out something for all CAANZ-affiliated ad agencies to reflect on. Their proposed Junior Placement Code of Conduct gently suggested parameters—four weeks minimum and three months maximum—and a hundred bucks or more a week "to avoid any hint of exploitation".
Was it noticed? "They said 'Thanks, we got it'," says White.

Although the Code of Conduct went out on their letterhead, don't look to CAANZ to regulate the industry it represents. CEO Mark Champion says: "I take the approach that each business will run that business the way they see fit."

Bell is also hesitant about any sterner form of industry self-regulation. "Regulate? In theory it's a good idea," he says. "But the agencies could just say it's now become too hard to have juniors around at all—so you're killing the golden goose.

"Fewer people would get jobs. But," he concedes, "those who got them would be taken more seriously—and be more secure."

"Working for free has become part of the New Zealand culture in a big way"

Maybe more can be done if we wind the problem back even further … remember the days in the old school yard? "Schools should do a market survey to see if there are enough jobs out there before they start these courses up," says a graduate on a six-month unpaid placement. "But they won't, because they want the money."

Of course they do. Who doesn't? But what if students were a bit more selective about where they spent their dollars? A spot of Google-before-you-go-go?

"I think we all need to do a bit more research into schools and companies," says AUT's Ings. "Before people agree to go anywhere, they need to check it's not just a vacuum."

The thing to remember, he says, is that not all work experience is good. Sometimes it's just work, and sometimes it's an unrewarding experience. "There is always this promise of 'a good networking opportunity'. But there are good networks and there are rubbish ones."

"Graduates should be trying out agencies too," says Bell. "You don't marry the first person you sleep with—sleep around."

But if you're going to go a-brain-whoring, try to do it with a bit of self-respect. Magazine designer Meng Coach is a big believer in teaching design students the value of their skills. "A lesson my tutor taught me was that if you do work for free or at a discounted rate, always provide a full invoice so the company knows what it would have cost if you'd charged them."

Good advice, but Gilderdale's is even simpler: don't do it. "If people refuse to [work for free] en masse it won't survive. It only happens if they buckle under and agree to what is an untenable thing."

Gilderdale's money and mouth are clearly aligned. "I had a company from Tauranga call me up earlier this year wanting someone to work for free for three months," he says. "I told them where to go."

"These companies [are] using interns as a source of unpaid labour … they just wheel them through one after the other"

Hey, good idea. Have you thought of that, interns? Just tell your boss where to go. Say, the Department of Labour—it'll see him right. "In short," says the department's acting Auckland manager, Annie Newman, "when companies in creative industries take on young graduates on a 'trial' or 'temporary' situation, they are obliged by law to pay them at least the minimum wage [$11.40 an hour].

"People who have worked in creative industries and believe they have not been paid correctly can contact the Department of Labour info line for further advice and guidance on..." Ahem. Thanks Annie, but no one who wants a job is going to do that.

Because people are scared, people are poor—and it's not that bad anyway. You know ... "not compared with England". We heard various versions of this claim when researching this story, leading us to wonder: when did we become a country that follows other countries—and not even in the right direction? Our history books boast of leading the world in social change: the first to install an eight-hour working day, the first to bring in a social security act and the first where women could vote for more of the same.

And even if you're not fussed which way your country's moral compass is pointing, you should be concerned with the direction of your business—if for no other reason than if you don't, it will cost you in the end. As recruiter Spencer says, unless we pay our potentially lucrative talent, we will lose them. In fact, we already are.

"The best writer of the whole year in 2005 got to the end of the year and said 'Fuck this I'm not going to work for free'," says White. "She never worked in the industry."

Need one last reason to whip out the chequebook? Studies have shown brains are a lot more productive on salmon than pizza.
Gena Tuffery is Idealog's senior writer. She wrote 'Tribal counsel', about the book 8 Tribes, in Idealog #10

Should I stay or should I go?

Go if your bank manager insists you change your graduate account because you're no more a graduate than him—and you still haven't got your first job.

"People should move on after three months," says AXIS Adschool director David Bell. "Maybe they're thinking Well, a bird in the hand ... but it's usually a dead bird."

Go if you were promised you'd be working with some big names and the closest thing to it turns out to be a new production assistant called Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen-bergerdorff.

"People will throw impressive names around and seduce graduates into projects that sound a lot greater than they are," says AUT film professor Welby Ings. "In film, people are doing pitches all the time. They know how to talk something up."

Stay if you're doing work for big clients—when you're making money for your company, you're buying yourself a job. But be patient, it might take a while for the sale to go through.

"One of my graduates worked at an agency doing work for major clients," says AUT head of advertising Paul White. "He got a job, but it took 18 months of working for $100 a week."

Stay if you've been given a firm date to work to. "Come and do the job for three months is fair," says White. "Uncertainty is not."