For this month's podcast, we're talking with Simon Collinson, a former ebook developer, a small press publisher, and Content Sales Analyst at Rakuten Kobo, about an issue important to the health of the publishing industry, and especially important for those new to the industry: unpaid internships. We find out how he got involved in the #PayInterns campaign, why companies don't pay interns, some success stories, and how you can get involved in this issue.
More reading
'Let them read books': why publishing needs to pay its interns
The PW Publishing Industry Salary Survey, 2018
Quill & Quire: 2018 Salary Survey: The good, the bad, and the hopeful
Transcript
Ainsley Sparkes: Hello and welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I'm Ainsley Sparkes your host for this month. This month we're going to be talking about internships and publishing, specifically unpaid and underpaid internships. Internships have a long history in the publishing industry. They're often touted as a way to gain relevant work experience at an entry-level and as a way to get a foot in the door. But recently many people have begun to shine a light on the unethical practices of requiring low-level employees to work on menial tasks for little or no money and the inequitable outcomes when only those who can afford to work for lower unpaid internships are the ones to get a foot in the door. One of the people drawing attention to this issue is Simon Collinson. We sat down to talk with him about how he got involved in the Pay Interns campaign, why companies don't pay interns, some success stories, and how you can get involved in this issue.
Simon Collinson: My name is Simon Collinson. I am a former ebook developer, a small press publisher, and Content Sales Analyst at Rakuten Kobo here in Toronto. So, that's my day job. But previously I worked in the UK, at a small publisher called Canelo and did freelancing ebook production. So, I've kind of worked in various parts of the industry but mostly on the digital side.
Ainsley: And so what got you started on this pay interns issue?
Simon: Yeah, so I moved over to the UK from Australia where I'm from originally, you might hear from my accent, in about 2014 to study book publishing. So like a lot of people, I was doing a master's degree at one of the universities in London and kind of trying to get into the book publishing business. I basically experienced first-hand how hard it is to make ends meet when you are trying to do an unpaid internship alongside your study. Maybe you're eating up your savings or maybe have another job to try and make ends meet. I did two unpaid internships and it really affected me financially for quite a while. So, it was purely first-hand experience but also seeing all of my classmates and all of my friends going through the same thing. And I think it's worth noting, like I had two privileges really. I had the privilege of having savings, which a lot of people don't have obviously coming into higher education. And I also had some financial support from my family. And then on top of that I kind of had the ability to talk about money socially. You know, I am a straight white dude so I can talk about money and it's not quite as confronting for people as it might be coming from a woman of colour or someone like that.
So, I kind of had all these advantages and I still found it really tough to make ends meet while I was studying my degree in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, much like Toronto, much like New York. And I realized that it just really wasn't equitable and it wasn't sustainable and I got really upset about it and I wrote an opinion piece about it for The Bookseller, which is the trade magazine in the UK, if you don't know it. And it ended up being one of the most read pieces for the year and something like a dozen people emailed me to say, you know, "I'm really glad that somebody is speaking about unpaid internships." It turned out there were a lot of people in my position or who'd recently been in my position who felt the same way and who felt that they'd been exploited or that, you know, their internship hadn't been all it was cracked up to be.
Since then, I've kind of relished every opportunity that has come my way to speak about internships and I've been fortunate that I've had very tolerant employers. One in particular in the UK that have kind of been a little more, I guess understanding about my need to speak on these things than some other employers would be. And I know that pretty much everyone in the industry has had the same experience of doing two or three or four unpaid internships, but very few people feel that they are secure enough to actually speak out about it publicly. And so it allows more senior people in the industry to feel as if it's not a problem because they don't hear their interns complaining about it. So, I felt that I should take advantage of my privilege in various different ways to kind of raise that issue and speak about it and try to change some things.
Ainsley: Good for you. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people agree, but I don't feel like they have the power or the platform.
Simon: Well, it's a little bit of a critical mass as well I think. You know, I think to be the only person — and I am not claiming that I am by any means, there are lots of other people in other organizations that have been campaigning on this front for a long time — but to be one of the only people in your peer group sort of saying, "No, I won't do this free." Or you know, "I won't come and stuff envelopes at your press for nothing." It feels very vulnerable and it feels like it'll harm your career. So, I think the more people kind of speak out about it and I've seen encouraging signs from a lot of people kind of, of my generation in particular who are kind of being a little bit more assertive in saying, "Look, no, this isn't okay." But it is definitely something where a lot of people would like to change things but don't feel that they're in a position to do so.
Ainsley: Or you feel like you can take a stand but the only person you're going to be harming —
Simon: Is yourself. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I would never judge anyone for not speaking out or not challenging the conditions of their work because the reality is that it's, you know, the job market is not tilted in your favour as somebody trying to get into book publishing especially at that most junior level. So, I think it's important that as people move through their careers, they don't forget that experience and they don't think that that's a kind of immutable feature of publishing because it's not, it doesn't have to be like that.
Ainsley: When you say unpaid internships, do you also mean underpaid?
Simon: Yeah, I would define, I mean it's essentially the same thing. I think unpaid internships are particularly egregious, but I think there's kind of this consensus among a lot of publishers like, "Oh, we'll pay a stipend of a few hundred dollars." Like that's good enough. That's not good enough. It really has to be minimum wage or under the auspices of a very structured university program where you have very clearly defined goals and outcomes. Those to me are the two kind of legitimate types of internship and really the latter I think should be paid as well. But realistically speaking, I think getting that structure and those kind of goals in places is the first step. I think unpaid and underpaid are kind of two points on the same spectrum, but they're both towards the unacceptable end.
Ainsley: So, what are the reasons that you hear most often from publishers for them saying that this is the case, we have to have unpaid interns? I mean, what are their rationales?
Simon: Yeah. Well, I mean you hear lots of things. I think the most common one I hear from everyone is the internship is a valuable experience and that it will help the intern get a paid job later on, either at the press where they're working or somewhere else. And there's a certain element of truth to this. You know, internships are highly sought after. It does eventually lead to a full-time job. But actually the thing is that doesn't really have anything to do with whether they're paid or not. You know, it's a false dichotomy really. The fact that something's valuable doesn't mean that it has to be unpaid. So, you know, a job doing machine learning work at a bank is valuable experience too, but it's also very well paid. So, I think that to me, that argument doesn't really hold water.
I think if the work has value for the employer as well as for the intern, which of course it does, otherwise they wouldn't bring people on, then it should be paid. It's a minimum wage job at the very least.
I guess the other thing I hear is that, "We can't run our business without interns. We have all of these small administrative tasks that need to be done. We don't have enough hands." And I can sympathize with that. I run a small press myself with a couple of friends. It's called Tilted Axis Press in the UK. And we have struggled to make our books heard and to get the publicity done and to get the books made and all of those things. But we made a decision right at the start that we wouldn't have unpaid interns at Tilted Axis. And for us it was a matter of principle.
And honestly, I think if you have all of these many, many administrative tasks, and the one thing that I kind of always go back to as a metaphor is, you know, people stuffing books in envelopes to send out the publicity purposes. I think every single intern in publishing has done that. I think it's really worth reexamining how essential those things are to your business. You know, because if you have all of these tasks that don't contribute enough to actually pay the way of the minimum wage, but you feel that they're core to your business. Well, are they really? Will your business survive without them? And often the case is that they will. They kind of— they're things that are additional to the core operations of the press, but they want to get them done cheaply and look, every business wants to cut their costs. Publishing's not special like that. and I think that's the core thing. There's nothing special about publishing that entitles us to free labour. And that's a hard thing to grasp because we have so much cultural capital but you know, there's really no reason why we should feel entitled to other people's labour, especially people who are in a precarious financial position.
I think the thing I want to say is like, it's very easy to understand why people end up in the situation of having unpaid interns. Because if you're running a small press, you know, we get this at Tilted Axis, a couple of emails every week, somebody wants to come and do an internship or work experience with us. Often we get universities coming to us and saying, "Look, you can have our students. You don't have to pay them anything."
You know, it's very, very tempting to kind of take that and not kind of like not really look the gift horse in the mouth too much I think, and not think about the kind of broader implications of what you're doing when you accept this free labour. And then I think it's important that, especially if you feel that you have progressive principles, but even if you don't, I think it's important to kind of resist that temptation to take advantage of all this free labour because taking advantage is what you're doing.
Ainsley: Yeah. I mean I think a lot of small presses, to your point, would say that they don't have a lot of money. They need interns to help keep their business going so they can't afford to pay them because they have so little money as it is. What would your response to a company like that be?
Simon: I think if you feel that you have something that is genuinely valuable for an intern to learn, that goes beyond kind of administrative tasks, that really aren't all that valuable for someone to learn. If you have something that's really valuable, maybe you can get them involved at some editorial work, maybe you can teach them how to make ebooks, maybe you can get them to run a little publicity campaign. Kind of define it that way and structure it that way. And you know, I think there are lots of publishing courses that encourage the publishers that they work with to kind of define these structured internships. And I think generally speaking, if an internship is going to be unpaid or poorly paid, then that needs to be, you know, the value that people claim they're giving the intern really needs to be kind of documented and structured.
Case in point, I went to law school back in Australia and when I was training to be a lawyer we did what's called articling here. And essentially what you get given, at least when you're a law student, is you have a booklet of all the different tasks you need to do. You essentially have to do this list of 30-something tasks over the course of a month or two. You do also get paid for this, but it's part of the structure of showing that you're being taught these practical skills. You have this booklet that the university provides you with and you need to kind of go away, do the task under the supervision of a more senior solicitor. They sign off on it, they give you feedback, they'll say what you did well, what you could do better. And then at the end of it you have this booklet that's full of this kind of proof of work and also kind of practical advice for how to make yourself a better lawyer.
So, I would love to see a structure, something like that, like a set of tasks that an intern coming out of a course that's tied to a university could prove that they were able to do. And I think that also enhances their employability as well. But I think you know, a lot of people say, "Oh, well I don't have the time to do that." Well, then you don't have the time to manage an intern well either. So, to me it's kind of there's two poles and monetary payment and structure. You can probably, if you're really short on cash, find some compromise between those two things. But inevitably it will mean kind of dedicating more of your time to helping the intern learn.
Ainsley: That's an interesting point that you could think of internships as an extended education where you're not necessarily getting paid, but you're neither paying for that education.
Simon: Yeah. And the problem with that approach is that too often you see people using that as the excuse, but really what the interns are doing, they're not learning anything from. And I don't have a problem with an internship that's, you know, really structured and something you're getting course credit for, you know, something where it is part of your education. I think there's some ethical dilemmas around the way universities and publishers work together with students on that. But I'll leave that aside for another discussion. But I think if it is truly an extension of your education and you really have a set of goals about what you want to learn, you know, then great. But I've seen many, many, many internships where the intern's just a warm body who's there to answer the phone or deal with emails or unsolicited submissions and to me that's not okay. And you know, I think if you think an intern is learning a lot from three months answering your phone, then you know, they're not.
Ainsley: No, but even a model where they have a big project where they do learn a lot, it wouldn't be perfect. It wouldn't be very equitable still, right? Like when you go to education in a formal institute, there's ways of getting financial support if you need it.
Simon: Absolutely. Yeah.
Ainsley: And this wouldn't come with that. So, it'd still be only available for people who could afford to support themselves.
Simon: That's right. And I think there's a big question around the kind of the level of training that we demand of entrance to publishing, especially given that it's a low-wage industry. We tend to now demand a master's degree level of education, which I think is probably not really necessary, but it's kind of an educational arms race that, you know, it's just another mechanism by which we kind of winnow the candidates down. In the UK, Penguin Random House actually removed the requirement that people have any kind of tertiary degree. They essentially said that, you know, they found that they had creative smart people coming from all walks of life who hadn't done any tertiary education at all and they kind of made that official policy a year or two ago. So, that's something I would love to see. I think the structure of publishing now and the existence of all of these degree programs and full disclosure, I teach in one of them, so I teach at Ryerson. So, it's something that we should think about critically. I think it is separate from the internship problem there. But yeah, you're absolutely right that equity is a really big problem around access to internships because of course people who are privileged will also have the financial resources just like I did to do an unpaid internship. And that's not something that is really going to be helpful for efforts to hire more diversely or anything like that.
Ainsley: Well, that point leads into a tweet that I saw from @jesskblack on Twitter a little while ago using the #PayInterns hashtag. She wrote, "Unpaid internships are not only unethical, it's inequitable." Can you explain a little bit more about how they're inequitable in addition to being unethical?
Simon: Yeah. Yeah. So, I think if you look at the survey that Publishers Weekly did in the U.S. last year, I think it was, they found that the industry there was still 86% White. And, I can't remember the exact figure from the Quill & Quire survey, but it's not a long way away from that. So, I think you have to ask why when there are so many people from all walks of life who want to get into publishing, why do we keep seeing the same demographics? And I think access to kind of the financial support that you need to do these unpaid internships is a big discriminator in that aspect. Yeah, I think to me it's just kind of obvious if you put these class, and a lot of it has to do with class as well, because there's kind of a racialized aspects to it and there's also class. And class is kind of the third-rail, certainly in the UK. I think it's becoming less so, but the extent to which the publishing industry is still quite a classist place is something that hasn't really been explored or addressed much. And I think the best way you can get a sense of that actually is if you read At Random, Bennett Cerf's book. Have you read that?
Ainsley: No.
Simon: It's a wonderful book and it's very, very funny. Bennett Cerf was an incredible kind of raconteur and wit I guess, but what you read between the lines and you know, basically it's like a memoir of the founding of Random House. And the thing that you learn from reading that book is just the kind of casual way that the wealth of all of his peers is described. So, essentially publishing in those days was still a venue for rich white men to kind of have fun and play around and spend some of their money. And it's changed a lot since then. There's still a long way to go, but if you go and read At Random and I encourage everyone who works in publishing to read it, you'll kind of see where our industry came from. And it's not that long ago that it was still like that. So, there's still kinda hangovers from those days that we haven't yet dismantled I think. But yeah, I think, you know, there are other little things as well that you know, one of the things that some of my friends in the UK told me was, you know, every publishing event revolves around alcohol and for people who don't drink for personal or religious reasons, that kind of shuts them out of a lot of things. So, that's a separate topic. But just to kind of illustrate, there are lots of structures and assumptions in the way the industry works that we don't really challenge necessarily.
Ainsley: So, did you start the #PayInterns hashtag?
Simon: No, I just jumped on and I don't want to take credit for other people's work. There's lots of people that have been working on this for years. There are some great Twitter accounts now, there's some real political activism, especially in the US and you see some representatives in the US are really kind of taking action on this. And, there's a few in the UK as well. I think Canada actually has a pretty good approach to this. I think they've been a little bit more aggressive about enforcing their labour laws. So, case in point, you know, there were two magazines that were having unpaid interns couple of years ago and the Ministry of Labour to kind of shut them down and you know, I think they even raided their offices and shut those programs down. So, I think it's good to see that the Ministry of Labour here is paying attention to that, at least in Ontario. I think Canada generally is probably a bit more progressive on this front certainly than the UK was and maybe even the US.
Ainsley: So, have you seen much success from your...I don't want to say crusade, but...
Simon: Well, again, I wouldn't, I don't want to take credit, but there are definitely, to me it feels like there's been a little bit of a shift in the air in the last couple of years. I think it's gone from something where people were scared or embarrassed or ashamed to talk about it in public. And again, that goes back to, you know, this class thing I was talking about, you know, talking about money and talking about salaries which seem to be kind of crass or classless. But I think we've got it to the point now where it's acceptable and okay to have a public discourse around whether interns should be paid and it's not something that is career destroying for someone anymore where in the way maybe it was three or four years ago in some places. I mean it's still, I'm not underlining the risks. I'm not saying that you should go out and start kind of attacking people on Twitter. And I think you have to put your own career, safety of your own career first. But I do think that there has been a bit of a change in the atmosphere and there's less willingness to accept. And that's, honestly, that's part of the concrete strategy that I and others had in talking about this publicly on Twitter and kind of individually singling out publishers and kind of calling them out essentially.
And it's a very aggressive tactic and I know it doesn't always win people friends, but what it does is it kind of delegitimizes this as a way to run your business. So, a couple of successes that we've had, these are mostly from the UK. But one internship that I did, which was initially unpaid, was for a small literary press and they kind of, to their credit, they did a review of the process after I was there. And this third party interviewed me and said, "What should we change?" And I talked to them about it and they ended up changing their kind of rotating quarterly intern program, which was unpaid into a paid traineeship that lasted for a year. So, that was a great success. There was another big publishing group that one of their interns, they advertised an internship that was paid at a hundred pounds per week. I flagged it with them. They took it down, they reviewed the ad, and reposted it with a bit better salary.
There was a small literary press and a magazine publisher that I was hounding for years. It kind of became a running joke between me and them and some of my friends. And eventually they partnered with this fantastic group called Creative Access in the UK which works to help kind of find internships and fund them specifically for like Asian and minority ethnic candidates in the UK. That's a really, really valuable organization. I went off at another scouting agency on a mailing list. I was on one of these private industry mailing lists where people arrange drinks and every three months they would come along and ask for another intern and it was clear that they were kind of just hiring an intern every three months and then getting rid of them and not paying them. I called them out and they cancelled that program.
But my favourite one was a big illustrated book publisher. One of their imprints advertised an unpaid internship. And I, again, I and others called that out on Twitter and the managing director of the group actually got in touch on Twitter and said, "Look, this is not how we run our company and we're going to change that and I'll speak to the director of this imprint." So to me, that's a couple of instances where public pressure has at least got people to stop advertising something that's illegal, if not to actually reconsider and change. And I think the other thing to remember about this is that the big companies are quite afraid of the legal implications of having unpaid internships. That's why you generally tend to see a lot of the stuff actually at the small end of town now.
But these days, the big five, I would say there'd be very few of them that don't pay their interns because they are scared of lawsuits and as they should be. And so you know, if you find that an imprint of a large publisher is doing something dodgy with an unpaid internship, often it's something that hasn't been done kind of with the blessing or the authority of the senior management and it's something that they don't want to get in trouble for. So, that's another tactic. You know, use people's own rules against them. I think there are lots of different tactics and you know, aggressive calling people out is the right one in some cases, empathetic emails to people kind of trying to help them find alternatives is a better approach in other cases. But it should always be with a strategy towards de-legitimizing the practice of unpaid internships in the long-run.
Ainsley: How can people get involved to try and make change in this?
Simon: The thing I always say is, I think, just keep an eye out on what's going on and look at job ads and see, you know, is this internship appropriate? Is it acceptable? And if not, reach out, you know, consider reaching out to the person who posted it and maybe try to change their mind. But also like if your own company is hiring unpaid interns, then talk to the senior people and kind of try and start a dialogue about it with them. And often the cases that, you know, I have friends and who've kind of been in this position and talk to their leaders about it. And often the cases when there's internal opposition to something, it's much more powerful than someone like me just kind of banging along on Twitter because it's very easy to say, "Oh, it's just some crazy Australian guy who's just like this."
It's much harder to ignore when it comes from your own staff members. So, I think, use your power as an employee at an organization and try to help people understand why unpaid internships aren't acceptable. But yeah, I think even as a junior employee, you have more power than you realize. And it's something where if there's a group of you, you know, I'm stopping short of saying unionize, but you know, there's some benefit in leadership, "Look, you know, like we don't want our company to be hiring unpaid interns." And I've heard of successes that way and at least it gets people thinking about it. And often the way these things persist is if it's just kind of always been that way and, "Oh, we inherited this internship program from the previous managing director and nobody's ever complained about it before." Well, be the first one to complain about it as much as you can given your comfort level with conflict. Conflict is hard and it's especially hard in this business so you know, don't feel that you aren't helping if you're not comfortable with conflict. I'm not very comfortable with conflict, but I seem to end up in conflict all the time and just try to support your classmates or your colleagues and see if you can kind of help them.
Ainsley: And a lot of publishers have anonymous surveys that they do yearly. I mean, that might be a good opportunity if you don't want conflict.
Simon: Anonymous feedback I think is one of the most powerful mechanisms for change within companies, especially corporate, bigger corporate companies, you know, but those questions are much more raw and real in getting at people's kind of real fears and anxieties than the kind of anything that they're comfortable saying even to their managers. So, I think having like that as a release valve almost, is really valuable. And I think, you know, I think anonymous feedback is something that all people in senior positions should listen to very carefully. There are lots of venues for that. Obviously there's Glassdoor, there's bigger companies will generally have a kind of established structure for that. But it's something that I think is really important. So yeah, use those opportunities if they're available to you. I want to try and avoid people thinking that this is entirely a critical or a negative thing. I think it's a positive, it can be a positive thing for our industry. And I think, you know, the better you treat your interns, the more you pay them and the more you value them, the more likely you are to be able to retain good people and then kind of lower the kind of brain drain from the industry that is kind of a common feature of our business.
And I think really can be a positive thing. And I want to highlight that there's been so much positive change in this area in the last couple of years. I think people are starting to wake up to the problems that these have caused, but often it's important that we kind of keep up the pressure and keep helping people understand that this is something that needs to change and it needs to keep improving because we are in competition with other industries for talent. We shouldn't think that we're a special kind of sideline from the rest of the world where you know, we've kind of got this unending supply of talented people. There are other industries that want people and that treat them much better than we do right now.
Ainsley: Well, thank you for coming and sharing your thoughts and your experiences.
Simon: Very happy to speak about it. Thanks for having me.
Ainsley: Thanks to Simon Collinson for joining us for this month's episode. You can find links to the things we discussed in this episode in the episode notes. I'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge that the BookNet Canada's staff, board, partners, and our makeshift podcast studio operate upon the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, and Huron Indigenous Peoples, the original nations of this land. We endorse the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. And we hope that our work, including this podcast, helps to create an environment that supports that shift. We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support to the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
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