Work experience, 'craft graduates and Monica Lewinsky

It used to be called 'work experience', but now we’ve borrowed the Americanism ‘intern’, with all its Monica Lewinsky associations, to describe today’s crop of whingeing ‘craft graduates’.

The problem seems to be that it’s graduates coming into the workplace looking for ‘craft jobs’ like journalism or photography, where their degree is of no practical use and they are effectively thrown into direct competition with younger (obviously) school leavers who (presumably) have no unrealistic expectations of their birthright.

Is it a middle class problem? Well, The Guardian is pretty middle class and in a very long (well it IS the Guardian) feature they focus on a crop of ‘interns’ who, it seems have all been exploited in the real world of work.

Unsurprisingly, they are all in those ‘craft’ jobs, where a degree is of no practical use: journalism, fashion PR, ‘script-writing’ (for heaven’s sake), photography and the like.  There’s also an ‘intern in ‘politics’, as if that’s a proper job!

‘Humiliated, harassed, expected to do 12-hour days, often for nothing – an intern's lot is seldom a happy one,’ bleats the article’s stand-first.

The Guardian even goes so far as to protest that, “this isn’t about rich kids versus poor kids (or the "sharp-elbowed middle classes", as Nick Clegg keeps insisting

See what you think about the examples given: The Guardian