{"id":1156,"date":"2015-04-09T10:53:34","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T17:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2017-03-09T15:04:49","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T23:04:49","slug":"uninternships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2015\/04\/uninternships\/","title":{"rendered":"UN Agencies: Defend your “internships”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"graphic<\/a>I love the United Nations, especially UNDP. I’ve been proud of my association with such in Germany<\/a>, Afghanistan<\/a>, Ukraine<\/a>, and online. I hope to be associated with them again.<\/p>\n

I am also a big advocate for internships, paid and unpaid, at the UN and other mission-based organizations.<\/p>\n

But I’m bothered by many<\/em> of the calls by UN agencies for unpaid interns to work 40 hours a week. And how many people are undertaking full-time unpaid internships at UN offices and have NOTHING about their terms of reference in writing at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Currently, formal recruitment messages from United Nations agencies for full-time unpaid interns talk about all of the tasks these volunteers – yes, volunteers, because they are UNPAID – will be responsible for, but rarely say what kinds of skills-development\/career-development support an intern can expect. They also never<\/em> say why these tasks have been deemed as most appropriate for an unpaid intern<\/strong>, as opposed to a paid consultant. I asked someone at a UN agency in an office where I was working\u00a0why a particular role was designated for a full-time unpaid intern instead of a short-term, paid consultant or as a\u00a0paid internship,\u00a0and he said, “We don’t have the budget to pay someone.” Yes, I fumed. Involving volunteers – even if you call them unpaid interns – to save money is never<\/em> the primary reason to involve such! NEVER<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0Unpaid interns are volunteers, and if you are involving them because you don’t have to pay them,\u00a0you are, in fact, being exploitative<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

If this keeps up,\u00a0UN\u00a0interns may use the dollar\/Euro value of volunteer hours that\u00a0UN Volunteers, IFRC, ILO & others<\/a>\u00a0are promoting to sue UN agencies for back pay – and there is growing legal precedent for them to do so (see the links at the end of this blog).<\/p>\n

Also, think about how your full-time unpaid internships are\u00a0limited to only certain economic classes, excluding some people because they can\u2019t afford to give you that many unpaid service hours. Are you thinking about how to ensure a variety of qualified people can undertake unpaid internships with your organization, not just those that can afford to? One way to address this: make the internships only one or two days a week.<\/p>\n

I established my own policy when I worked for the UN Volunteers programme<\/a> in Germany that\u00a0all staff in our department had to adhere to regarding involving unpaid interns. This was NOT an agency-wide policy, just the one I established for our department:<\/p>\n