Turning altruism into exploitation
Today a new campaign ‘Justice for Interns / Volunteers’ is being launched by charity workers hoping to end what they see as the exploitative practices of many charities. This got me thinking about the circumstances under which it is OK for charities to use volunteers and unpaid interns as a source of free labour and when is it morally reprehensible.
Any attempt to weigh up the rights and wrongs of this common charity practice, is of course, a normative endeavour and therefore must have theory of justice at its heart. Not wishing to get bogged down in intricacies surrounding ‘veils of ignorance’ and the like let us assume that most people would agree with a notion of justice which, on the whole, follows the argument that ‘an outcome is just if all parties impacted by it would agree to it, if they did not know the outcome before hand.’ For example, two people who did not know the outcome of distributing a pie between the two of them would both agree for it to split in half. Exploitation then would take place if A forced B, through whatever means, to have a smaller slice.
John Roemer provides a formal definition of capitalist exploitation in the form of “B exploits A when B takes unfair advantage of a situation in which A is placed by a lack of access to resources” This, therefore, suggests that:
‘Charities exploit volunteers and unpaid interns when they take advantage of their lack of access to entry level opportunities in the charity sector labour market.’
Yet how can we judge if a charity is ‘taking advantage’ or alternatively enabling a volunteer to fulfil their altruistic wants. There are, I think, three clear suggestions that a charity is guilty of the above definition of exploitation.
- Using volunteers or unpaid interns who, it would be reasonable to assume, are providing their labour for free in the hope of career progression. One would expect most charities to be able to differentiate between people applying for unpaid work because they hope the post will further their career prospects and those who have no interest in a career in the sector but have some spare time which they wish to donate.
- Lack of entry level positions, but existence of unpaid internships or voluntary positions is a clear suggestion that that unpaid positions are being treated as entry level positions, rather than as a way for people to altruistically donate their time. Meaning that the charity is clearly taking advantage of the lack of labour market opportunities in order to reduce fixed labour costs by not remunerating the labour of those in a structurally weak labour market position.
- One prominent labour rights charity which is active in campaigning against ‘exploitation’ argues that its use of volunteers does not count as exploitation because it does not accumulate capital. If this were true then it would be a fair argument. However, the problem is that all charities, including those which are not for profit, seek to accumulate capital. Capital accumulation is the expansion of capital overtime, there are of course many forms which the capital expanding can take – not just money-capital. The charity in question seems to have gotten a little confused, and is mistakenly viewing profit and capital as the same thing.
Capital accumulates through investments in assets such as infrastructure, technical systems and of course human capital. If a charity were not accumulating capital it would fail to reproduce itself and would disappear form the world.
All charities seek to make such investments, whether, most obviously, by building up reserves in the form of money-capital, or transforming money-capital into other forms of capital such as property (such as by purchasing an office or new IT systems), systems of production (such as developing their supporter network so as to increase future revenues), and of course human capital (through employing more staff in order to increase capacity or to retain valued staff members by increasing their remuneration). This means that charities are not only in the business of collective capital accumulation, but if they are paying staff wages above subsistence (or in other words above a living wage) then they are also fuelling private capital accumulation – meaning that those at the bottom of the charity sector labour market are being exploited in order to increase the capital accumulation of those at the top.
I agree that if a charity were not accumulating capital then it would be unreasonable to expect it to be paying its staff, as it would be fighting for its very survival but if a charity is accumulating capital by building up its reserves, investing in property or resources both physical and human then it is hard to argue that it is acting justly. Especially, when we consider the wages of some directors and senior managers of even leftwing charities – an indirect result of the savings made from not paying those at the bottom .
Charities claim that to end the exploitation of interns and volunteers would mean a massive reduction in opportunities for people looking to enter the sector. This seems as unlikely as the claims of employers at the time that the national minimum wage would cause mass unemployment. The truth is that interns and volunteers are carrying out core functions which must be done, at the moment they can just be done for free – so they are! Paying interns and volunteers would not only reduce exploitation but would make the charity sector more egalitarian as it would force the redistribution of wealth from those at the top to those at the bottom.
The launch meeting of ‘Justice for Interns / Volunteers’ is taking place at School of Oriental and African Studies, Room B104 6pm-8pm Wednesday 18th July .
The Green Party use them.
Can’t be so bad…
Just to add: I deplore exploitation and strongly oppose the government’s forced-labour policy for welfare recipients. This factsheet from WorldVision (http://www.worldvision.com.au/Libraries/DTL_fact_sheets/Factsheet_Labour.pdf) defines exploitation as labour obtained from a person under threat, whether real or perceived. The factsheet lists different forms of exploitation (slavery, forced labour, bonded labour, etc), and gives examples such as withholding someone’s passport, threatening to report illegal status to the authorities, refusing to pay a previously agreed wage, etc.
Alex, thanks for your reply. I don’t think that good ends can justify immoral means, but I also don’t think it is immoral to accept gifts of labour. What if a charity delivered meals to the elderly, had a fleet of used vehicles donated by rent-a-car companies, and was run by a few well-paid managers who oversaw a staff of volunteer drivers? The charity would fail the ‘assets’ and capital accumulation tests, because the cars would be worth quite a bit collectively and another car could be accepted each time another volunteer driver was found. There would be no paid entry-level jobs, because all the drivers would be volunteers. Some drivers would be well-off and just helping out between jobs; others would be poor and hoping to move into a manager position one day. The managers would make more than minimum wage. Would you force this charity to pay its drivers, even though that would reduce the number of meals delivered? If the charity had two hundred volunteer drivers, would you make it have one hundred paid interns too? If a well-off volunteer was unemployable because he’d been very irresponsible in his life, but his work with the charity improved his character and proved his ability to handle responsibility, and he was subsequently hired by someone, has his altruism become a benefit to his career progression so the charity now owes him back pay? Just a few things to think about. Things are never as simple as they seem!
Alex, if you want to flesh out your reply about exploitation and free will, you might consider Serena Olsaretti’s work on voluntariness (http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24996-liberty-desert-and-the-market-a-philosophical-study/). I agree that it’s obvious that things can be bad even if freely chosen and this provides a framework that is sometimes useful for explaining when and why.
P.S. Unpaid work just seems to be a special case of low paid work- there’s nothing special about being paid £0 vs £>0. But the ‘no volunteering for career progression’, and ‘no volunteering instead of entry-level positions’ rules don’t apply in these cases (because some-one in a low paid entry level position is obviously motivated by their career and is already in an entry level position!). So these rules don’t really tell you very much. In consequence though, your argument can be extended much further, such that plenty of low paid employees are being exploited as well (as you’d expect).
So do you do your own job for free? Your reply stinks of middle class hypocrisy.
Everyone seems to have missed what is for me, the biggest issue with unpaid internships. I don’t think unpaid internships are justifiable at all, not because they are hard for the unpaid interns, though that’s true, but because they exclude job opportunities from everyone but the upper-middle class who have parents in London.
I honestly can’t imagine how anyone can afford to work for nothing in London, incurring maybe £10-15k of debt in 6 months of an internship. But then I could never imagine how anyone is rich enough to send their kids to private schools. The truth is in both cases, some extremely privileged families can.
That’s who these interns are. And so that’s who takes the entry level jobs, and therefore who goes on to work in charities. My (left wing) charity has a much higher amount of employees from private school than is proportional to the population, and in my experience other NGOs are worse. So working class people are shut out, that’s the biggest injustice. In fact, if they can hack it for a while, with some subsidy from the parents, then unpaid internships are excellent for those lucky enough to get em. Christ, you need a PhD to get some of them these days, they’re gold-dust!
The wider cultural impact of this is the worst bit. NGOs are full of children of the wealthy and private school goers. Just like journalists with their unpaid internships (70% of whom went to private school), the media with theirs etc etc. And what’s the result? That our culture is being created and recreated by people who’ve never been on a council estate, never known how poverty actually feels, never known how disempowering capitalism is. Even the people supposed to be challenging the status quo; NGO staff are themselves from these backgrounds.
Is it important? I think so. Is there any wonder journalists can do the kind of sick hack jobs on ‘povs’ you saw Allegra Stratton do on that single mother lady on Newsnight? Is there any wonder that few journalists ever blow the gaff on corporate power, private schools, etc? Is it any surprise we’re now seeing clueless NGOs like Barnados, actually joining the Work Programme?
That’s where the injustice and the societal damage lies for me.
Alex – just becuase something isn’t an essential core task, doesn’t mean it isn’t benefical to the charity.
This is the same principle as in the TUC’s volunteer charter
“The involvement of volunteers should complement and supplement the work of paid • staff, and should not be used to displace paid staff or undercut their pay and conditions of service.”
http://www.tuc.org.uk/workplace/tuc-17329-f0.pdf
Firstly, on Ben and Acanthium’s argument that the ends justify the means, I think that it’s impossible to know the ends (in this case whether a charity will be effective – I’m probably more sceptical of charity then the two of you) where’s the injustice of the means (unpaid labour) is known. Therefore, it is problematic to justify a known and unjust means by reference to an unknown justice. Rather the means (as the only known) can only sensibly be justified in reference to their intrinsic justice. This is the problem with the consequentialism implicit in utilitarianism and in practice why I find it of little use.
On exploitation and free will, Acanthium argues that “A person isn’t being exploited if they freely choose to exchange labour for experience” if that were true then economic exploitation would not exist. For example a child in sweat shop is freely choosing to exchange their labour for poverty wages, they are quite free to get a job somewhere else. So exploitation is not about being free choose but about taking advantage of the situation others for ones own gain. In capitalism workers need access to the means of production in order to live, they don’t have control of the means of production due to historical conditions, but capitalists do, therefore, capitalists can exploit workers by appropriating a large segment of their labour as profit in return for access to the means of production. But of course workers are always free to go and sit down and starve if that is what they choose.
Mark I think the problem with thinking about this issue in terms of core functions is that all volunteers carry out core functions, otherwise it would not be beneficial for the charity. What do you define as as non core task? So I think this requirement would end all voluntary work.
But I actually do think that people should be able to volunteer with charities. So this why I took the approach above. I would ague that charities should have to pay a living wage to all interns and that for every volunteer that a charity has on their books they should have at least 0.5 interns, it should be made clear to volunteers that the role is purely altruistic and not part of their career development. Though I think that a charity should be able to opt out if they are failing to accumulate capital, one way to measure this would be simply by auditing their assets (including human) and if they were marginal (say less than £100,000) then they would be allowed to opt out.
Dave I need to do some work but I will return to your points later today, sorry
Acanthium – on the question of motivation, the argument was made in the original post that using volunteers or unpaid interns who are providing their labour for free in the hope of career progression is exploitation. I agree with you that a person isn’t being exploited if they freely choose to exchange labour for experience.
Anything but the smallest charity that relies on a volunteer to do its accounts is potentially placing itself in a very precarious position. The difference between a volunteer and a paid staff member is that a volunteer could walk away tomorrow with no sanction or contract to bind them. That might be OK if the charity had no staff, but for a larger charity, a responsible board with a duty of care to its staff and donors should really have a more reliable way of ensuring something as critical as bookkeeping gets done…
I think motivation is a major factor in determining whether a worker is being immorally treated. A person isn’t being exploited if they freely choose to exchange labour for experience, or for the pleasant feeling of helping others. But a person dependent on government aid, who is forced to work for a private organisation (slave-labour as Ben put it)- that is immoral in my view. Whether any of these workers ‘replace’ a paid worker is irrelevant. (How do you define ‘core’ functions anyway?) A retired accountant who chooses to serve as unpaid bookkeeper for a charity is replacing a paid bookkeeper, but the charity isn’t immoral for accepting that work. As a donor, I would be annoyed if a law was passed prohibiting the charity from accepting that gift of labour, as I would prefer my donation to go to the beneficiaries rather than to the retired accountant who was willing to volunteer.
I am not sure I get the argument that what determines whether a volunteer is being exploited or not is the personal motivation of the volunteer.
Surely the most important issue is whether the volunteer is substituting for a paid member of staff – ie if no volunteers was available is the task so important to the functioning of the charity that an employee would have to pick it up?
Volunteers and interns can only be justified if they are delivering additionality, rather than core functions. Otherwise the organisation should be paying someone to do it.
I don’t see the relevance of exploitation. Why argue the long way round: “unpaid internships are exploitative, exploitation is by definition wrong, therefore unpaid internships are wrong”?!
I think everyone would agree that charities which could pay their interns without any impact on delivery should do so.
The more pressing question is whether all charities should be forced by law to pay their interns the minimum wage, given that in some cases the funds needed to pay interns could be spent on the charity’s beneficiaries (Ancanthium raised this in the first comment).
All things being equal, if one donates to an effective charity, it would be better if all of it were spent on vital resources, which couldn’t be obtained for free. Otherwise one is putting the interests of interns over the far, far more fundamental interests of others.
On the completely irrelevant (but still fun) Marxist debate about exploitation: you can still keep Marx’s theory of exploitation even if the LTV is false. The LTV is wrong because the L bit is arbitrary (as both Cohen and Roemer have shown): you can use any commodity you like as a unit and so you can use any unit you like to express the basic Marxist idea that the worker gets back less in wages than they produce. That’s classical Marxist exploitation and as Ben says, is a descriptive thesis. But Ben’s criticism is misplaced because Roemer’s new conception of exploitation that Alex cites is a distinct and explicitly normative thesis.
Obviously Roemer’s conception of exploitation requires us to import our own conception of “unfair advantage” so Roemer’s definition of exploitation doesn’t really get us anywhere. Ben could happily employ it and say that any utilitarian-exploitation of unpaid labour is fair or one could deny that any unpaid labour is ever fair, whatever you prefer. I don’t think you can conclude any case where a charity takes advantage of a poor job market is *unfair* advantage though. It seems that there are lots of good/bad things about paying/not paying people to do certain jobs, which need to be weighed up against the available alternatives… and once you’ve weighed them up, that will tell you whether it’s “taking unfair advantage” or not, you can’t work out a neat rule in the abstract to tell you whether a person can do work for free without being exploited.
But my argument is that paying interns wouldn’t, in most cases, impact on delivery but would rather rebalance the pay structure which has become top heavy as result of labour market asyemetry.
I dont why one would need to draw upon a theory of exploitation at all. Whats at issue is not whether charities exploit unpaid interns but whether they are right/wrong to do so, and in turn whether they should be stopped.
On that point, not wanting to sound like a stuck record, it surely depends on the consequences. You “find it hard to see how exploitation of those at the bottom of the labour market can be justified”, but hasnt addressed the justification I have offered. If the best way for a charity to service the needs of poverty-striken individuals abroad is to employ unpaid interns and pay big managerial salaries, then surely thats more than enough justification.
As Ive already alluded of course, to this might not be the best way of achieving results, it depends on the charity and the circumstances. Some charity work is doubtless not important enough to justify unpaid interns, and the negative impact on our political/working culture their existence has. Other charity work however helps people who are incomparably worse off than most unpaid interns.
Hi Ben,
the problem with Marx’s definition is that it’s based upon the ‘labour theory of value’ which is no longer a tenable theory.
Therefore, a new theory of exploitation is necessary – this is what Roemer in ‘a general theory of exploitation’ comes up with, however, his formulation relies upon a normative element, as we have to judge what is ‘taking advantage’ this is why GA Cohen develops a socialist theory of justice and also critiques the idea that Marxism isn’t normative in ‘If you’re an egalitarian how come you’re so rich’ This Wikipedia gives a brief description of Roemer and Cohen’s thinking under the exploitation and justice headings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Marxism
Given wages received by senior managers at charities I find it hard to see how exploitation of those at the bottom of the labour market can be justified.
Cool article Al, very topical and well expressed.
I don’t want to get too bogged down in Marxist terminology but briefly:
A labourer generates surplus value when the exchange value of labour is lower than its use value, since this would means that the worker cannot have received back the full value of their work. “Exploitation” is the unequal exchange of labour for goods and it is exploitative because it means that a person works for more hours than is required to produce the goods they consume.
On this definition used by Marx/Roemer, “exploitation” is neither good nor bad- it is not a moral term but rather a technical, descriptive one. So whether charities are “guilty” of exploitation in this moral-connotations-free sense is separate to the question of what is right.
As to the question of whether charities are not just exploitative in the Marxist sense but also morally wrong in their behaviour, this will depend on the circumstances. Certainly in cases where the charity is helping people who are incomparably worse off than the interns it exploits they are not acting immorally- rather, preventing them from doing so would take some justifying. I suppose the cynicism towards charities generated by their exploitation of interns, and the loss of public donations this damage does to their images (both individual and collective) is a factor, though once again it depends on the charity and how much this argument applies to their particular balance-sheet. The danger that action on unpaid internships would prevent charities from doing their important work as efficiently seems to me to be a bigger dilemma than whether unpaid internships actually benefit interns or not.
Needless to say these arguments do not apply to ineffective charities, nor to private companies which claim that their slave-labour work experience programmes are beneficial to young people (we need as a matter of urgency to rid our society of the latter).
Sometimes it’s not even altruism turning into exploitation, many charities like British Heart Foundation used forced labour in traditional volunteer positions.
If a young person chooses to exchange ‘unpaid’ labour for ‘free’ job training in a certain sector, that creates a win-win situation in which both the young person and the employer benefit. If some young people agree to withhold their labour until employers agree to pay for it, then I wish them well; and there are probably some employers who will pay. As a donor, though, I prefer charities with lower administrative costs (I want my limited funds to go toward the charity’s beneficiaries) so I donate only to charities that rely mostly on ‘unpaid’ labour.