Interns at French businesses threaten daylong protest

By Jethro Mullen - Europe - International Herald Tribune: "Corporate interns in France are threatening to strike Thursday to protest what they view as increasing exploitation by employers.

The Web site organizing the strike, www.generation-precaire.org, claims that French companies are using poorly paid interns to fill jobs that otherwise would go to full-time employees, thereby limiting the ability of young people to secure meaningful employment.

The practice, the group says, has become more commonplace in the past two years as the French economy has floundered and unemployment has hovered around 10 percent.

"Businesses have realized that it makes more sense to take on interns than to employ people on proper contracts," said Jean-Marie Chevalier, a professor of economics at the University of Paris-Dauphine.

The government has no hard statistics on employment of interns, but Chevalier has calculated that of the 300,000 internships each year in France, about 60,000 are for posts that should be filled by a full-time employee.

As of this past Sunday, nearly 8,500 people had signed the group's online petition demanding government action to improve the legal status of interns. The group is organizing the protest through e-mail and text messages sent to mobile phones.

The mounting discontent sheds light on the growing role that interns have come to play at companies in France and elsewhere in Europe.

Unlike employees on short-term contracts, whose compensation and working conditions are roughly similar to those of full-time employees, interns have no clear status under French law. Some are not paid. From zero, pay tends range up to the legal minimum for other workers of ?1,357, or $1,603, per month. Interns rarely receive employee benefits.

Young job seekers, eager to get work experience and despairing of finding full-time jobs, say they feel they have had little choice but to accept whatever is offered to them, even if it means drifting from one badly paid internship to another.

"I kept doing internships because I wanted to be working," said Olivier, 29, a lawyer with degrees from the University of Strasbourg and George Washington University in the United States, who had five internships in two and a half years. He did not want his last name used for fear of retribution from his current employer.

France is not the only country where unrest is stirring among interns. In neighboring Germany, one Web site, www.fairwork-verein.de, is calling for a minimum wage for interns. That site, along with another in Germany, www.students-at-work.de, allows interns to air their grievances and give online ratings to employers.

Kurt Vogler-Ludwig, the German correspondent for the European Employment Observatory, an agency that monitors labor market trends for the European Union, said the issue was becoming critical. "Young people are being used," he said. "The training objectives of internships are getting lost. Companies are using it as some kind of peripheral labor force."

French government and business are taking notice. In a report published in July, the Conseil Économique et Social, a government advisory body, stressed the need for a re-examination of the statutory conditions of internships in France.

At a monthly press conference on Nov. 15, Laurence Parisot, the president of Medef, the French employers' confederation, announced that Laurence Danon, head of the organization's "New Generations" commission, would take charge of the issue immediately.

One company, Danone, the French food group, pays interns with a masters degree at close to the minimum wage, or 1,150 a month, according to Marina Vlassova-Tonneau, a spokesperson. Danone also offers a reasonable prospect of subsequent employment: In its operations department, 80 percent of posts are filled by former interns."