[kictanet] [labor issues] why Kenya should urgently BAN unpaid internships

Wed Apr 3 15:11:58 EAT 2019

 Many thanks for your thoughts Ali. 
Indeed, words in most languages can have multiple, totally unrelated, meanings (e.g. "saw" the noun/hardware, "saw" the verb/cutting, and "saw" the past tense of "see"... or in Swahili "paka" the cat vs "paka" as in to paint) so in this case the appropriate focus would be on the vocation-oriented definition of "intern" (though I can see material for contextual innuendo in the two meanings hehe).
Some well known intellectuals on twitter are getting stuck on written definitions and relying on logical fallacies which is not intellectually sincere. Are definitions cast in stone? Can they have a shelf-life? Don't they change with time? 
Fact: Definitions only document meaning as it evolves over time; they are not the source of meaning. The general rule of thumb is that Informality precedes formality.
Thankfully the etymology (origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning) of "intern" shows that the meaning and usage, in professional context, has indeed been evolving.

According to an online source (link below), the term is believed to have been documented as a noun circa 1879 for the teaching and medical professions, and then extended to other profesions around 1963. It was formally recognize as a verb circa 1933 within the medical field.
Prior to that, and going back as far as medieval times (in western cultures), people learned through apprenticeships and although you did not get "paid" in the narrow sense of the term, your boss provided you with free *accommodation* and *food*. Such contextual nuances around the apprenticeship system are (conveniently) ignored by advocates of unpaid internships.
In African culture (link below), apprenticeship was a very POSITIVE community experience. People had EMPATHY for one another and collective gains were favored over individual gains. Not caring whether someone had food or a safe place to sleep was unheard of. Lets face it, cold blooded, greed motivated exploitation of the youth within a community is an alien concept in most (if not all) of pre-colonial Africa. 
In traditional China and (I believe) India the apprentice is technically "adopted" and the relationship is parent - child, but in vocational context. There is mutual love, concern and caring even if the apprentice is treated harshly. It never crosses over to predation.
We are Africans. Unless we want to give up our core identity, the quest for meaning in everything we do (and the policies we support) has to be done within the context of our Africanness. Even as we adopt poitive aspects of foreign cultures in a cosmopolitan world, we can strive to retain the best aspects of our indigenous cultures. For example if the industrialized world had emulated positive African philosophies like simple contented living in harmony with nature, we would not have existential problems like climate change, WMDs, world wars, economic inequality and so on. 
Imported meanings are not rules cast in stone. We can, if we want to, define our own modern, African, definition of the word "intern" in a way that that protects our youth from abuse and exploitation. 
The youth are our children and our future. Let us not raise a generation of bitter, angry and resentful people. It's not a smart thing to do.
Thanks & have a great day!
Patrick.
Patrick A. M. Maina[Cross Domain Innovator | Independent Public Policy Analyst - Indigenous Innovations]
Links:
1. Etymology of the word "intern":https://www.etymonline.com/word/intern

2. Traditional apprenticeship in Africahttps://www.academia.edu/11682853/Revisiting_the_role_of_traditional_apprenticeship_in_traditional_Africa_vocational_pedagogy

3. Weird history of internshiphttps://www.businessinsider.com/the-weird-history-of-how-internships-came-to-be-2016-

    On Wednesday, April 3, 2019, 9:01:10 AM GMT+3, Ali Hussein <ali at hussein.me.ke> wrote:  

 Patrick 
The great debate happening online on this issue is missing a fundamental component of this narrative. That the whole concept of being an Intern has been lost in translation. Fundamentally what is an intern? 
Depending on where you sit here are two definitions:-

   - 1.a student or trainee who works, sometimes without pay, in order to gain work experience or satisfy requirements for a qualification.   
      | synonyms:    | trainee, apprentice, probationer, student, novice, learner, beginner; person doing work experience"he worked as an intern for a local magazine" |

      - 

verb   
   - 2. Confine (someone) as a prisoner, especially for political or military reasons."the family were interned for the duration of the war as enemy aliens"   
      | synonyms:    | imprison, incarcerate, impound, jail, put in jail, put behind bars, detain, take into custody, hold in custody, hold captive, hold, lock up, keep under lock and key, confine; More   

 |

 S0 based on the two above which one do we think most fits the situation today? :-) And what do we need to do to restore the Institution that arguably can produce the best associates in any organization.

 I leave it here for us to discuss and decide.

Regards

Ali Hussein

Principal

AHK & Associates

Tel: +254 713 601113

Twitter: @AliHKassim

Skype: abu-jomo

LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim

13th Floor , Delta Towers, Oracle Wing,

Chiromo Road, Westlands,

Nairobi, Kenya.

Any information of a personal nature expressed in this email are purely mine and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the organizations that I work with. 

On Wed, Apr 3, 2019 at 1:07 AM Patrick A. M. Maina via kictanet <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:

Greetings Listers,
There is a (misplaced) belief that unpaid internships are a "win-win" because they incentivize employers to create opportunities (and incur potentially unrecoverable costs) for on-the-job training of fresh graduates, who would otherwise not have a real-world platform for gaining experience. 

The argument often posited in support of unpaid internships is that the intern has more to gain, as it is unlikely that a fresh graduate will create more value for the employer than s/he draws from the internship. Further, it is assumed that once they have some real world experience, the graduates will have better chance at getting a paid job elsewhere.
Here's the problem with that kind of thinking:
1. Phantom Jobs Paradox: A 3 month internship most likely involves entry level assignments with very limited bounds of autonomy or direct commercial impact (e.g. Web Dev, Gathering & Compiling, Graphics design, User support, Customer Service, Reception, Office admin, Project Assistants etc). Now, given the rigid way that the labor markets work, in order for a candidate to realistically leverage the experience earned during internship, s/he will have to apply for a paid job that is very similar to what s/he did during the internship.. but wait... those are the exact same jobs being offered to unpaid interns - so the ex-intern is locked-out and remains jobless because no paid jobs exist for the experience s/he gained while working for free! 

Why would a rational employer - whose goal is to maximize margins (within a very difficult / hostile business environment) - be interested in paying an experienced ex-intern, when they can simply get a fresh unpaid intern for free, train them within hours or a couple of days, even as other unpaids hold the temporary slack? This where we are headed - if not there already. The youth are "working" but they are still technically unemployed because they are not earning a living. 

The unintended consequence here is that employers have figured out (as they were bound to) that they can use unpaid interns to profit from free labor (with the "bonus" of dodging "headaches" like PAYE, NSSF, NHIF and Px filing), and this is incentivizing them to keep rotating unpaid interns - in perpetuity. It is even worse if Government subsidizes the stipend - creating an artificial band-aid relief that does not add sustainable value. Friends, that is not job creation.

The risk here is that these policies are creating a growing, frustrated, resentful (and increasingly angry) pool of young, unemployed former interns - who feel used, and don't understand why their "investment" in work experience did not pay-off with a real job, as society had "promised". This is already being voiced on twitter (link below - #payinterns). 

While attempting to solve the youth-unemployment problem, in good faith, policy makers could be unintentionally creating a simmering political time bomb. Something to think about and address (urgently).

2. Sub-optimization problem: As stated in my article on Modernizing Tertiary Education, we have an obsolete education system which churns out graduates without taking ownership for jobs creation (comfortable in the outdated, buck-passing silo culture that believes jobs creation is someone else's i.e. private sector or government, problem / responsibility).

3. Demand vs Supply: The unpaid internship model requires a high-growth economy, which must create a greater demand for jobs each year than the available pool of candidates (>approx 800,000 - 1 Million new *real* vacancies for paid jobs annually). This incentivizes companies to compete for the experienced candidates. The fastest way to do this is to create a rapid growth environment for MSMEs and startups. But the approach should be intelligent and evidence driven. 

Data driven evidence (from the US, see link below - but relevant locally - which can be confirmed by analyzing performance of local youth entrepreneurship programs) shows that the older generation (age 36 - 69) are the best targets for MSME stimulus initiatives, with higher chances of sustainable success, whereas ages 18-29 have the worst rate of startup failures - which makes sense, because experience truly counts in business and - the learning curve in business is super-steep(!). 

Data clearly shows that it is wasteful to throw money at the youth when they don't have the skills to manage / multiply it; the grit to persevere; and broad experience to draw on - and these are not skills that can be taught in an entrepreneurship class. 

The smarter way is for Government to encourage *experienced* older founders to start businesses and get government funding + growth support on condition that they hire our youth for high quality paid apprenticeships. The minimum headcount and/or salaries can even be set by Government for those who receive funding. This should happen within a designed ecosystem framework (interested policy makers are welcome to contact me for more details on how to go about this).

>From a root-cause perspective, what is lacking in youth-oriented programs is strategic design for sustainability. We need to move from NGO-style interventionist paradigms to evidence driven master-plan design paradigms. Youth-targeting programs should be compulsorily derived from the master-plan (Vision 2030 / Big 4) and have precise, meaningful and measurable traceability back to the master-plan, in terms of real contributions towards getting the country closer to the vision. 

The end game must be clear - what does the 2030 economy look like (e.g. in measurable terms such as % unemployment, median wage, GDP, sector contribution, Stock Markets, balance of trade etc)? Or will we just wake up in 2030 and find everything has magically fallen into place? How do we know where we are right now in terms of Vision 2030 overall (and this is not about project status but macro-level metrics)? Are we 10% there? 60%? 30%? How do we know the status is reliable (e.g. can things be seen, is there data, and does on-the-ground sentiment reflect it)? What is working? What is not? What are the lessons so far? How will we know we have arrived (e.g. if we get there early)? How do we know if we are off course? Is there a data driven dashboard tracking Vision 2030?

Here's a quick recap of problems with unpaid internships:
1. It encourages exploitation of young people as free labor;
2. Creates a loophole for companies to dodge PAYE for certain types of jobs;
3. It creates phantom jobs - busy young people who are technically unemployed (not earning a living);4. It unfairly locks out the poor. Those who can't afford to work for free (where do they get fare? or food?);
5. Increases political risks by creating a pool of angry, disillusioned youth;6. It is evidence of poor economic policies (interventionist instead of evidence driven master-plan design).
Brgds,Patrick 

Patrick A. M. Maina[Cross Domain Innovator | Independent Public Policy Analyst - Indigenous Innovations]

Links:
1. European Parliament bans Unpaid Internships 
 https://www.neweurope.eu/article/european-parliament-bans-unpaid-internships/
2. Older entrepreneurs more likely to succeed: 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2018/08/05/proof-that-the-most-successful-entrepreneurs-are-older-ones/#762ed9e742dd
3. Does Kenya's Youth Enterprise Development Fund Serve Young People (Maurice Sikenyi)
https://bulletin.ids.ac.uk/idsbo/article/view/2874/ONLINE%20ARTICLE
4. Worrying trend of gambling youth + 500,000 in CRB blacklisthttps://sokodirectory.com/2019/04/76-of-kenyan-youth-are-gamblers-500000-blacklisted-on-crb-a-time-to-worry/
5. Why youth and women enterprises fail in Africa (Prof Michael Chege)
https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/business/Why-youth-and-women-enterprises-fail-in-Africa/2560-3977712-ujiwftz/index.html
6. Hashtag Payinterns (Kenya) on Twitter 
https://twitter.com/hashtag/payinterns?src=hash

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