PR’s New Year’s Resolution should be labour honesty

By , December 19 2011, 2:35 pm 1 Comment

2011 has been a year when PR agencies have finally rallied against the exploitation of the use of work placement people and interns on a freebie basis. Many have joined the PRCA in condemning the use of what amounts to slave labour and instead pledged to pay trainees a reasonable, albeit minimal, wage for something that benefits (or should benefit) both agencies and job-hunters.
2012 is a year when we should be going further as an industry. Yes it is likely to be a very bleak year. Yes profits will be thin at best for a lot of agencies. But equally, agencies need to stop propping up pressured profit lines by applying work experience people and interns to doing work that should really be done by an experienced staffer.


Even if we’re paying people rather than convincing them to work for free, it doesn’t mean we should be reliant on them for delivering client work.
PR is hardly alone in this regard. Many another marketing sector has relied on what amounts to very cheap if not unpaid labour to shore up its flabby nether regions.
And many PR agencies may deny that they do this. Even so, I write this on an early Monday afternoon and have already read three CVs today from would-be account execs who, despite the inevitable artistic licence, have been doing things during work experience stints at agencies that are if not account manager tasks then certainly senior account executive level. They require expertise, some experience and most of all judgement, and it’s unfair for someone other than a regular member of a team or a more experienced freelancer to be put in that position.
It’s great to expose trainees to work at the coalface. We should absolutely continue with work experience schemes, internships and apprenticeships that teach people things which they can realistically only ever learn on the job. But there is a line to be drawn between beneficial experience and passing too much of the work to someone who’s frankly out of their depth without armbands. It’s a risk for clients, and so a risk for agencies, and from what I’ve heard recently too many continue to play with fire.
In the meantime I shall plot some New Year’s Resolutions of my own. Proofreading my posts better, going easier on the points of contention and cheering the f*ck up up might be good ones to start with.

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  • http://www.prsa.org/ Keith Trivitt

    Well said, Steve. The ethical use of interns is an issue that the global public relations profession, and indeed, much of the global business community, must address more vigorously in 2012. Certainly, the effort by the PRCA on this matter is admirable, as are other, more specific initiatives initiated by individual PR firms and in-house comms teams to stop hiring unpaid interns.

    Here in the US, we at the Public Relations Society of America have been equally exploring this growing issue.
    Earlier this year, we issued an update to our Code of Ethics (http://ow.ly/874tq), making it clear our belief that it is unethical to not provide some type of compensation — whether monetary or through college credit — to interns. We have further addressed this issue in a series of commentary pieces, including a letter to the editor of The New York Times (http://bit.ly/vVvZWN), imploring the American business community to take a hard look at this matter and to take steps to eradicate the use of unpaid interns.

    As we said in that NYT letter to the editor, we have a responsibility to prepare the next generation of professionals for more prosperous career prospects than ours. Hopefully, commentary such as yours will engender a more rigorous discussion with the profession that achieves this goal.

    Keith Trivitt
    Associate Director
    Public Relations Society of America