WG – policies for europe – Ensuring Minimum Renumeration for Interns

Cluj-Napoca, Romania 30 September

ENSURING MINIMUM REMUNERATION FOR INTERNS PRESENTED BY PWG PfE

Young Europeans across the continent are facing the problem of regular unfair treatment while undertaking an internship or traineeship. In most of the environments, it is commonly accepted that the performance of trainees’ duties actually equates to the amount of work carried out by regular employees. In result, the profit delivered to the employer is up to a comparable amount as to regular employees. Furthermore, it is a common scenario where internship programs are low-paid, unpaid or the trainees are granted with a low scholarship.

At the same time, students’ lives are intrinsically linked with seeking their livelihoods as well as funds to afford their degree course. In turn, trainees receiving a low income resort to seeking financial aid from parents, personal savings, government grants and even running into debt. More often than not, trainees work voluntarily or constrained into part-time or full-time jobs. The distraction that often arises from the burden of finding and maintaining a regular paid student job, which is not deemed to add any professional and academic value, decreases the opportunity to pursue an internship.

Eventually, that results in a decrease in opportunities granted to students who do not have the financial means to pursue an unpaid internship.

We believe that two inseparable elements can be considered to grant interns an allowance or remuneration for work they complete.

Firstly, the grant of an allowance will benefit both parties of the contract. This refers to the employer who identifies the long term investment rewarding the intern.

Through financial compensation, the intern might have more motivation to work over an unpaid traineeship. In turn, this will equip trainees with more significant experience. On the other hand, since it costs the employer money, better training and more qualitative tasks to fulfill would be provided. Ultimately, the return on investment will be higher since in many cases, interns start to work for their former employer from the moment they graduate.

Secondly, the relevant element that should be considered is shifting from public to private funds. Funding from programmes such as Erasmus+ and other public funds are so far responsible for compensating such inequalities. Yet, we believe that shifting the

responsibility on employers makes them more aware of the job and tasks carried out by the intern. Employers will spend more time evaluating the trainees’ work, which will in turn improve the quality of the work and the dedication offered by the student.

Moreover, we find the application for this allowance from a public fund as an extra burden on the intern. To incentivize the employer to work with interns, we would also recommend the Member States to create a tax benefit or even a total tax-free system for employing interns. All of the final results should be clearly proved by the evaluation forms.

We, European Democrat Students (EDS), the official student’s organization of European People’s Party (EPP): • acknowledge that internships have so far been commonly viewed as volunteering and not employment; • take into consideration that internships are factual performance of the work for the benefit of the employer; • wish to promote high social mobility and encourage further engagement in students’ internships and vocational trainings; • believe that a compulsory final evaluation will give a broad overview and point out strengths and weaknesses of the pursued traineeships; • recognize the need to regard our demands as a long-term investment.

Call on the European Parliament and EU Member States to: • introduce an obligation for employers employing students

working longer than one week under their command, to pay a minimum allowance according to the legal systems falling upon them, for the time spent and work done to the profit of the employer, irrespective of the students’/interns’ obligation to carry out this internship in function of the studies they pursue; • grant tax benefits or totally free this remuneration from taxes in order to stimulate the employers to employ students and interns; • grant benefits exclusively to employees holding a title of student and aged below 25 years or all graduated engaged in an internship up to 3 years after graduation; • form a legal framework whereby it would be beneficiary for employers to employ, teach and reward the intern in such a way that the intern will be stimulated to work in the future for this employer; • provide a legal framework for training that would grant a possibility for an internee to improve the specific knowledge required within the framework of the job; • introduce professional compulsory evaluation process after the termination of the internship.