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Commenting on proposals announced recently by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) that interns should be paid a £2.50 hourly wage, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:

'This proposal would allow unscrupulous employers to ignore the national minimum wage (NMW), since the concept of internships is not defined in law.

'The idea of a minimum wage rate for training has already been tried and it failed. In 2006 the government abolished the NMW development rate after it was found to have been widely abused.

'The TUC is strongly in favour of good training schemes, but we must always be on our guard against rogue bosses who want to use unpaid interns instead of paid workers.

'We urgently need more rigorous enforcement of the NMW to ensure that so-called interns are not exploited and abused.'

NOTES TO EDITORS:

- The 1998 NMW Act originally included a training rate for adults in the first six months of employment, dependant on the employer providing at least 26 days of training. This was reviewed in 2005 and abolished in 2006. The TUC's 2005 submission to the Low Pay Commission reported that it was easier to find abuse of this provision through poor training or no training at all than it was to identify employers who used it properly.

- For more information about internships please visit the TUC's site www.rightsforinterns.org.uk

- All TUC press releases can be found at www.tuc.org.uk

Contacts:

Media enquiries:
Liz Chinchen T: 020 7467 1248 M: 07778 158175 E: media@tuc.org.uk
Rob Holdsworth T: 020 7467 1372 M: 07717 531150 E: rholdsworth@tuc.org.uk
Elly Gibson T: 020 7467 1337 M: 07900 910624 E: egibson@tuc.org.uk