Technical duties were arranged into eight-hour days, wages that didn’t reflect real work, and minimal supervision for trainees. The rights and advancement of the youth labor market have rarely stood alongside the figure of the intern in many years of labor discussions.
“After a year of internships, responses stopped coming,” reports a graphic design student who takes extracurricular internships to earn money. “They asked me for the most technical job that nobody wanted to do,” she adds. While pursuing an undergraduate degree, she found herself designing T-shirt models that never saw the light of day. “It dented my self-esteem and I began to question whether any of this mattered,” she notes.
The Department of Labor is drafting a Scholarship Statute aimed at curbing the misuse of internships and reimbursing expenses such as materials or transportation. “We recognize that non-labor internships do not have to be paid, because the goal is education, not production,” says Adrià Junyent, youth director at CC OO.
Current estimates place the number of trainees in the country around 450,000, according to a study by the union, even though there is no formal national registry. “Records will exist when participation contributes to Social Security,” Junyent adds. This is a key point in the draft, though it had already appeared in a pension reform package issued in July 2021. At present, the government approves a maximum period of three months for internships.
A CC OO representative highlights a 2013 Eurobarometer finding that 60% of non-work internships are misused. “In many cases, internships that do not involve employment cover core roles, which lowers the cost of labor,” argues the CC OO leader.
Íñigo, a 23-year-old computer science student, has completed 350 hours of curricular internships from 8:00 to 13:00 and 16:00 to 17:00. “You enter the company with little information about what’s expected, and the tasks are often not clearly defined,” he explains. Despite four weekly trips by public transit, each lasting about a quarter of an hour, there was no travel reimbursement. In another case, a student received some teacher follow-up, while some classmates admitted having no guidance at all. The new rules also seek stronger cooperation between universities and companies. “There is limited ongoing contact between students and instructors. Even after the evaluation ends, there should be interest in what the student has accomplished,” says Eduardo Magaldi, spokesperson for RUGE-Revolución Ugetista.
Another study by RUGE highlights that the youngest non-labor internships may be displacing nearly 300,000 jobs. “There are instances where up to 70% of interns fill positions that could have been filled by paid employees,” Magaldi notes. The draft also proposes capping intern numbers based on company size: small firms with up to ten employees could host between one and five interns, while larger firms would limit interns to a percentage of the workforce.
“The Scholarship Charter defines a catalog of rights, including maximum working hours and vacation entitlement,” says Nicolás Hernández, head of the Public Universities Student Representatives Coordinator (CREUP).
Junyent said the Ministry of Labor convened the first social dialogue table to draft the charter on April 22, with plans to present the final draft to the Cabinet by the end of the month. Opinions among unions emphasize that extracurricular courses should not substitute the official curriculum and highlight the need to clamp down on fraud, especially in deregulated internships. Proposals include significant economic sanctions for companies that engage interns in roles without proper oversight, providing transport subsidies for students, and expanding inspection capabilities. Some changes hinge on whether they are enacted as regulation or law.
All sides agree that the primary objective is for students to gain meaningful education during their time with a host company; otherwise, the remaining provisions would be of little use.