Many students, eager to gain their first professional experience, accept low-paid or unpaid work. Their goal is to boost their future employability. This practice is known as hope labor. Does it benefit the recipients or those providing the work?
Understanding Hope Labour
Hope Labour refers to unpaid or underpaid work undertaken in the present to gain professional experience with a view to future employment opportunities. This practice is widespread in the digital, blogging, and consumer review industries.
Companies benefit greatly from work done for free, and it has become a widespread norm in the job market. This phenomenon primarily affects students seeking internships or graduates entering the job market. This practice greatly affects young people seeking experience or wanting to develop a skill to land a job in a particular field. Unfortunately, some sectors of activity rely heavily on free labor, which contributes to the discouraging of hiring, since low-cost activities are the accepted norm among various stakeholders.
This phenomenon obviously extends to unpaid internships, as well as civic service and volunteer work. There are even companies whose business relies on an army of interns. This is often the case with startups and NGOs.
Unpaid work and lack of recognition of the worker
A job is based on the use of labor power. However, unpaid work corresponds to a denial and non-recognition of this power and therefore of the status of worker. This can be illustrated in the associative work provided free of charge and which is referred to as volunteering and not work. In the case of an intern, it is more a question of being in training than in a job. This also extends to the blogger whose work is not recognized by saying that he expresses his passion. This denial also affects certain unskilled jobs like housekeeping, where unpaid work becomes a non-recognition of competence.
One might wonder why internships or civic service are free or poorly paid? The reason is that they are not considered work in their own right, and therefore we do not talk about remuneration but about gratification . An activity is not work in itself and therefore remuneration is not a determining factor. We are talking about voluntary work or domestic work, etc. Where the sacrifice of income is normal.
Internships are therefore included in Hope Labour and are seen as a step to take in order to prepare for one's professional career and land a real job. This practice boosts the desirability of the worker's status. Unfortunately, entire sectors operate at the expense of individuals, particularly students, interns, and recent graduates. Interns replace other interns in a continuous mechanism that generates a certain precariousness in the labor market.
On the other hand, students and young people who engage in these activities often find themselves in a precarious situation. This led in 2005 to the creation of a collective in France, called Génération Précaire, whose goal is to challenge the free work of interns who run several companies without compensation. The efforts of this collective led to the adoption of the Equal Opportunities Act in 2006. This law made the internship agreement mandatory and imposed the payment of internships lasting more than three months. Then, in 2007, the minimum amount of compensation was set at 379 euros, before a waiting period was imposed on companies to prevent the proliferation of disguised employment. In addition, the maximum internship duration was set at six months within the same structure. Other steps have been taken to protect interns, notably through the setting of working hours and the granting of leave rights. Actions aimed at protecting young people, but which remain insufficient to eradicate Hope Labour.
