Forging signatures, shouting in the corridor and replacing workers: the other side of interns

BarcelonaVíctor’s first experience as a student in practice was at the age of 16. He was taking the bridging course to enter an intermediate degree in administration and the tutor encouraged him to have a first contact with the world of work. There was a notary who was urgently looking for an intern. “That already caused my alarms to go off a bit,” he admits. But what he found in the office had nothing to do with the educational experience he expected. A worker explained to him what his tasks would be: “They did transfers and registrations of vehicles. I received the papers from dealers and individuals that had to be sent to the DGT. They put me in a room alone for four hours and I had to check them, seal them and sign them with the notary’s signature, which I was taught to do,” he recalls.

The internships were unpaid and Víctor also did not receive any compensation for transport, although he had to travel to another municipality five times a week. He was hardly spoken to by his superiors and there was an unwritten rule that he did not leave until the pile of papers to review was finished. “An intern is a person who wants to learn, you can’t make him do the work of a worker. He needs someone by his side to teach him. I’ve never been with anyone who explained to me how to do an audit or how the procedures worked,” he says. This situation endured for a couple of months, until the pandemic broke out and he and another fellow intern decided to take the case to the Labor Inspectorate.

This week the majority unions, the UGT and CCOO, have endorsed the latest draft of the Intern Statute proposed by the Spanish Ministry of Labor, with the aim of avoiding the same abuse of the figure of the student in practice that Victor suffered. The text – which still does not have the green light from the employer – establishes that interns will not be able to exceed 20% of the workforce or work at night, and that they will have to be covered for the expenses they incur during their stay at the company This is to ensure that non-work placements are truly linked to a study plan and are not used to replace structural worker positions without which the work could not proceed.

When Berta was an intern at a third sector foundation dedicated to the care of children in vulnerable situations, the ratio of contracted employees to trainees was one to eight. In the center there was only one social educator who could only be with the interns in the mornings, when they defined the pedagogical program. “In the afternoons there were three groups of children and she could only be in one. The rest of us were left alone without anyone to supervise us or guide us on how to solve complex situations,” she says. They were third-year internships and, in theory, they were supposed to be observational, but both she and her colleagues ended up doing the same work as the staff worker. In addition, the organization asked them if they could work fewer hours to stretch the scholarship until June – they had to finish in April to avoid coinciding with the exams – because if they didn’t they would run out of educators to attend to the service. “At the time it was a wafer of reality, but now I also think that thanks after that bad experience, standing alone in front of a classroom wouldn’t do me any good,” she admits. She would have preferred, however, not to have been left “alone in a cage” and to have received minimal remuneration.

Students acting as employees

It is the same total absence of guidance that Greta (fictitious name) complains about after her experience in an audiovisual production company in Barcelona. The internships were remunerated – 300 euros for half a day – but from the first day it was clear to her that she would not be doing the tasks of an intern. His superiors commissioned him to pre-edit a documentary they were producing, a job he did from home and on his own computer, without any mentoring. In fact, there was no other assembler in the company, so this entire load fell on her as a student intern. “Then they asked me to do a dossier, an assignment for a graphic designer that I had never done in my life,” he adds. Seen in perspective – he was then 23 years old and now he is 25 – he is aware that he said yes to many things because the context pushed him to do so: “You end up eating it because you don’t have anything else and it’s the ‘only way to enter this world’. And he adds another consideration: he did an internship because he could afford it, which not everyone can do.

Marta (fictitious name) did her nursing internship in a hospital, while combining it with another job. In her case, the root of her bad experience was the relationship with the tutor, a person who spoke badly to her and treated her like a nuisance when she accompanied her in the guards. She remembers how he once shouted at her in the middle of the hall to send her to put patients to bed and how she came home crying. “The workload was high, like any other nurse’s. It was hard because I started with great enthusiasm and got involved to the fullest,” she says. She also regrets that it was not taken into account that she worked in the mornings and that she usually ended up working longer than expected.

While waiting for the employer to clarify its position, the second vice-president of the Spanish government and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, was convinced this week that the president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, agrees with her in the fact that “practices without the proper guarantees are not correct”.