Is the situation picking up for unpaid UN interns?

The plight of unpaid interns hit the headlines last year amid uproar over a United Nations intern living in a tent in Geneva. Seven months on, the situation appears to have changed very little – or has it? “I guess it was a good experience; you get to network and learn new things,” explains Teuta Turani, a young Albanian woman who has just finished a six-month unpaid internship at a UN organisation in Geneva. In 2014, there were an estimated 4,000 UN interns in New York and Geneva, mostly unpaid. A 2013 survey by the Geneva Interns Association found that 68% of interns received no salary at all. Three months ago, Turani started a blog on Instagram and Twitter to highlight some of the issues she was facing as an unpaid UN intern in Geneva. In her photos, she uses a pair of empty shoes to illustrate the ‘invisible’ legal status of UN interns, and the impossibility for many young people from poorer countries to work there due to the high costs. While acknowledging ...