The Irony of Unpaid Internships: A Review of Labour Law and Human Rights

The dynamics of the current labour market, marked by fierce competition, have given rise to various deviations in industrial relations. One of the most crucial to examine is the phenomenon of unpaid internships. In the Indonesian employment context, corporations continuously produce a narrative that romanticises internships as a platform for education, talent formation, and motivation for cross-generational knowledge transfer. Through this lens, the accumulation of practical experience, the formation of professional networks, and graduation certificates are constructed as substitutive compensation that is equal to, or even claimed to be better than, the payment of an allowance. This practice, when analysed through the sociology of labour, is an instrument that heavily exploits the psychological and economic vulnerability of entry-level job seekers, both final-year students and fresh graduates. Due to high information asymmetry and imbalances in the job market, these candidates are driven, or more precisely conditioned, to surrender their time, energy, and productive dedication for free in order to secure a pseudo-portfolio that is promised to smooth their career path. This corporate rationalisation is in direct contradiction with the ratio legis and the basic philosophy of labour law. In its existence, labour law is present as a social engineering instrument to provide firm protective intervention to workers who are in an inferior position due to unequal bargaining power when dealing with capital owners. Therefore, normalising an operational system where an individual is required to submit to a chain of command, is bound by rigid working hours, and is burdened with ever-increasing targets like a full-time worker without any material reward, constitutes a denial of human dignity that opposes all forms of exploitation of human labour by other humans. In labour law, the terminology of internship has juridical parameters constructed by the state to mitigate the risk of exploitation under the guise of education. The essence of an internship is work training organised in an integrated manner under the guidance and direct supervision of an instructor or a worker with competency qualifications in the production process of goods and/or services within a company, in order to master specific skills or expertise. It should not be reduced to a zero-cost recruitment instrument to complete daily administrative or technical operational tasks. The ultimate goal of internship arrangements is the creation of skilled, certified, and adaptive human resources, where this phase is positioned as a transitional phase before the individual enters into a binding employment relationship. However, in the current industrial reality, the conceptual boundary between an intern who is juridically a learner and a worker performing contractual obligations has been blurred through engineered internal policies and corporate institutional restructuring. Many business entities, from giant multinational corporations to medium-scale startups, design unpaid internship programmes where the job descriptions, key performance indicators, and chain of command for interns are identical to those of employees on fixed-term or permanent contracts. The only differentiator is the removal of the intern’s financial rights. This contradictory situation creates a high-level juridical deviation; corporations freely enjoy the surplus productivity squeezed from the sweat of intern labour to boost commercial profit margins, while the fundamental obligation of the corporation to distribute an allowance is circumvented and completely eliminated. This exploitative distortion necessitates a reinterpretation by legal authorities regarding the material prerequisites of an internship programme so that the industrial relations ecosystem does not fall into the practice of modern slavery. Testing this practice against the hierarchy of laws and regulations in Indonesia reveals the reality that unpaid internships in commercial corporations clearly contradict the prevailing positive law. The Labour Law, as amended by the Job Creation Law, has laid the specific foundation for regulating internships in the chapter on job training. The legislators explicitly stipulated that the rights of internship participants include the right to receive pocket money and/or transportation money, social security, and a certificate of competency. The presence of the phrase ‘receive pocket money’ in the legal formulation is a sanctioned mandate that is imperative in nature.