We get plugged in the Sunday Times

Another fantastic weekend’s coverage for unpaid internships.

The Mail have followed up on last Sunday’s scoop that the Tories were flogging city internships to raise party funds.

David Cameron is to ban internships with top City firms being sold for thousands of pounds to wealthy Conservative supporters for their children after the practice was exposed by The Mail on Sunday.

They quote a senior Tory aide who said:

You can rest assured that this kind of auction will not be part of next year’s event. It was badly misjudged.

Misjudged? It goes to the very core of what is wrong with the graduate job market at the moment.

In the story the Mail quote the email we leaked in 2009 which revealed Philip Hammond as is poisonous best:

Tory Cabinet Minister Philip Hammond has defended using an unpaid intern alongside salaried staff, saying in a leaked email in 2009: ‘I would regard it as an abuse of taxpayer funding to pay for something that is available for nothing and which other MPs are obtaining for nothing.’

Other coverage this weekend includes the fantastic campaign group Intern Aware getting plugged on the Today programme. Listen here 1 hour 56 minutes in.

And finally Interns Anonymous’ own Alex Try got quoted in the Sunday Times. Jamie Oliver has apparently claimed our generation are “too wet to work”. He obviously hasn’t met any of the thousands of people slaving away at unpaid internships.

Graduates are also struggling to land proper jobs even after working for free. Alex Try, who graduated with a 2.1 in history from Manchester University in 2008, said: “Jamie Oliver doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” He argued that tens of thousands of well qualified young people are fighting so hard to get jobs that they are working without pay, either as “interns” or on “work experience” placements.

Try, who co-founded the Interns Anonymous website because so many of his friends were having to work for nothing, believes the phenomenon is eroding jobs.

“Entry-level jobs are being replaced by unpaid internships,” he said. “This isn’t just in desirable industries — you are seeing it in all sorts of firms, even people being PAs.”

It is an insidious development, he believes, because most internships do not lead to proper employment. It was only late last year that Try finally landed a full-time post after moving to London.

Phew! Role on next weekend!

Update:

No soon have I written this that we spot our friends Internocracy on the BBC News channel. More great exposure!