Labour’s plan to make work pay has a student-shaped hole in it

And given that universities are huge employers and we know that students are increasingly earning while learning (or rather, earning instead of learning), Labour’s rebranded Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering A New Deal for Working People will have all sorts of implications if the party wins on July 4th.

Change could be coming soon. At Labour Party Conference in September 2023, Deputy Leader Angela Rayner said that she would “personally” table the legislation implementing the plans within 100 days of taking office.

One big headline is a commitment to the introduction of a “real living wage” by changing the Low Pay Commission’s remit to account for the cost of living, alongside median wages and economic conditions.

The current minimum wage rates are £11.44 for 21s and over, and £8.60 for 18 to 20s – while the current “real living wage” calculated by the Living Wage Foundation is £12.00 outside of London, and £13.15 in London.

I doubt that anyone will have costed up the implications for universities and their SUs and will be issuing government grant money to cover the increases.

It’s also worth remembering that the Welsh student maintenance loan is linked to the minimum wage – so a switch to a Real Living Wage could impact student loans there too.

There won’t be an outright ban on zero-hours contracts – some changes are coming to end “one-sided flexibility” instead – and “day one” rights will improve, including protections against unfair dismissal, parental leave, and sick pay.

There are to be better protections for whistleblowers, flexible working will be the default from day one unless infeasible, improved carers’ leave and bereavement leave rights are coming, and electronic balloting for industrial action will be allowed.

But there is a deeply disappointing line in a document purporting to deliver a “new deal for working people” – and that’s on unpaid internships.

The talent of tomorrow

The good news is that unpaid internships will be banned – which Labour says will be “good for social mobility” and will ensure that “the talent of tomorrow get the vital skills and experience they need to succeed.”

There’s no point re-referencing here the countless reports over the years that have pointed out the way in which unpaid internships help to reinforce social hierarchies in any number of professions – suffice to say that the Social Mobility Commission’s “State of the Nation” report from 2016 found that that around a third of graduate internships were unpaid, and graduates from outside London who were unable to stay with their parents while working in the capital often faced significant cost barriers to participating in unpaid internships (and even paid internships) given the higher accommodation and living costs.

And while work experience was becoming crucial to securing a graduate job, work experience opportunities were not fairly distributed across the country. A survey showed that 62 per cent of businesses in London had employed an intern, compared to 28 per cent of businesses in the Midlands, 39 per cent in the East and 33 per cent in the North.

So a ban is great news.

But not if you’re a student

The problem is the qualifier line:

…except when they are part of an education or training course.

My first jerk of the knee on reading that was “well in that case you’ll need to sort out the student finance system”, but of course there’s precious little chance that that is coming any time soon.

And on the assumption that even if a review of said system eventually appears, it’s likely that fudges that assume that full-time students will also undertake work alongside their studies appear in any calculation, for any student on a statutory placement, that’s a problem.

Any number of studies have been carried out on the “supernumerary” (or equivalent outside of health) status of students undertaking compulsory placements – but it really comes down to this.

If we think the hospitals, schools, NHS trusts, local authorities, businesses and charities that host unpaid student placements could survive without students doing things, then fair enough.

But in most cases they clearly couldn’t. And so to the extent to which a student’s labour has value to the employer, the principle should be that these “working people” are both paid for that labour, and protected with rights in the same way that other employees are.

In Ireland, student nurses and midwives are to receive 80 per cent of the starting rate during placement. In Australia, the Albanese Government has announced that it will pay students undertaking compulsory work placements across teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work disciplines.

The principle in the Theresa-May commissioned Taylor review of modern working practices was that if the employer is “obtaining something of value from an internship”, they are most likely to be a worker and entitled to the National Minimum or Living Wage.

It’s not one that’s been adopted by the Labour Party – yet.