3.1 One of the central objectives for this project was to develop a better understanding of the range, nature and prevalence in Australia of arrangements for unpaid work experience.
3.2 We should say right away that we have found very few sources of comprehensive and reliable statistical data. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), for example, has from time to time investigated the value of ‘unpaid work’ in the Australian economy, concluding for instance in 1997 that it was equivalent to almost half of Australia’s GDP. But studies such as this were concerned primarily with ‘services produced by households for their own consumption (e.g. meal preparation, child care) and volunteer and community work (e.g. care of aged relatives) provided free of charge to others’.1 They did not seek to measure the value of unpaid work undertaken for businesses. Similarly, while the 2006 and 2011 Censuses have contained questions relating to unpaid work, these were limited to asking about unpaid domestic work or care for others, and about ‘unpaid voluntary work through an organisation or group’. The Census Guide for this last category explained that it could include ‘assisting at organised events and with sports organisations; helping with organised school events and activities; assisting in churches, hospitals, nursing homes and charities; and other kinds of volunteer work (e.g. emergency services, serving on a committee for a club, etc.)’.2
3.3 The ABS has also investigated rates of participation in voluntary work, the
characteristics of people who volunteer, and the types of work they undertake. But
‘voluntary work’ is defined for this purpose to mean ‘the provision of unpaid help willingly undertaken in the form of time, service or skills, to an organisation or group’. It specifically excludes work experience, unpaid work trials and student
1 Unpaid Work and the Australian Economy, 1997, Cat no 5240.0, ABS, Canberra, 2000, p iii.
2 ABS, ‘Measures of Unpaid Work’, http://abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/
factsheetsmuw?opendocument&navpos=450 (accessed 11 November 2012).
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placements.3 For reasons explained in Chapter 1, the wider area of voluntary work is outside the scope of our research.
3.4 Similarly, while the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) collects and reports a great deal of information about training and apprenticeships, its focus is predominantly on formal training contracts registered under State and Territory training legislation, and/or courses undertaken with vocational education and training providers.4 Although we briefly explain the nature and role of training legislation in Chapter 5, we are predominantly interested – once again, for reasons explained earlier – in work experience undertaken outside the requirements of these arrangements. NCVER has, however, published some useful research about work experience undertaken by secondary school students. This is outlined later in the chapter.
3.5 For the most part, therefore, we have had to rely on more anecdotal information.
Fortunately, there has been a great deal of this – especially since this research project was publicly announced in April 2012. In the mainstream media alone, that month saw 31 print articles, over 16 hours of radio coverage and over eight hours of television coverage devoted to the issue of unpaid work.5 Many people rang into radio stations or posted comments online to tell their own stories about unpaid work. There were similar reactions in the same month to various follow-up articles.
These included one in an advertising industry magazine; 6 another by ABC producer Rebecca Armitage, discussing her own experience with internships;7 and also one by the Ombudsman himself, explaining the reasons for the FWO taking an interest in the subject.8 A more recent investigation by Fenella Souter, published in the Good
3 Voluntary Work, Australia, 2010, Cat no 4441..0, ABS, Canberra, 2011, p 63.
4 See NCVER, Australian Vocational Education and Training Statistics Explained, July 2011, http://www.ncver.edu.au/publications/1967.html (accessed 11 November 2012).
5 The statistics are taken from Fair Work Ombudsman, Annual Report 2011–2012, p 75.
6 J Kennedy, ‘Does ad land exploit its interns?’, B&T, 12 April 2012, http://www.bandt.com.au/
news/advertising/does-ad-land-exploit-its-interns (accessed 11 November 2012).
7 ‘Interns toil for free, but they shouldn’t toil in vain’, The Drum, 17 April 2012,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-17/armitage-the-fierce-world-of-washington-interns/3953404 (accessed 11 November 2012): see 3.60.
8 N Wilson, ‘Experience and exploitation: defining internships’, The Drum, 19 April 2012, http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3960252.html (accessed 10 November 2012): see 6.92.
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Weekend magazine, contained a number of stories – some of which are reproduced later in this chapter – and prompted a further round of comments and debate.9 3.6 Quite apart from fielding a constant stream of inquiries from journalists about our
work (and in the process learning from them about what goes on in their own industry, as explored later in the chapter), we have also had many unsolicited contacts from individuals eager to tell us about their own experiences. In some instances, we have sought and obtained permission to pass some of those stories on, where we considered them to be especially revealing or noteworthy. Certain
information too is publicly available, such as the advertisements for unpaid internships highlighted later in this chapter, or information about government programs.
3.7 We have also been able to obtain helpful information and perspectives from a
number of the organisations that we contacted, as detailed in Chapter 1, or that took the initiative to get in touch with us. In some cases these organisations have been willing to pass on results of their own investigations, or to give us estimates as to the prevalence of certain arrangements. A particularly important source of information has been the FWO itself, which as explained in Chapter 1 allowed us to interview some of its staff and afforded us confidential access to the results of various investigations.
3.8 Finally, and again as already mentioned in Chapter 1, we conducted a number of small-scale surveys of our own, to gain an understanding of what is going in parts at least of the higher education sector. As will be explained, some of these surveys threw up some striking results.
3.9 In order to discuss what we have found, we have broken up the remainder of the chapter, to deal with first, what is in a sense the simplest situation, the ‘unpaid trial’.
After briefly looking at certain types of government assistance program, we then move on to examine the use and encouragement of various kinds of work experience in the education sector, with particular attention to the extent to which such
arrangements are becoming common both as part of, and beyond the requirements of, education and training courses. With that done, we go on to examine what kinds of internships and other forms of experience can be identified in a range of different
9 ‘All work and no pay’, Good Weekend (Sydney Morning Herald/The Age), 13 October 2012, http://www.theage.com.au/small-business/managing/all-work-and-no-pay-20121015-27luu.html (accessed 11 November 2012).
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industries and sectors. We say something about the significance of the issue for non-residents working in Australia under various kinds of visas. Finally, we draw what conclusions we can from the data available to us.