The Road From Serfdom: Unpaid Internships Under Fire

AS MORE CVs glitter with university degrees and straight A-grades, companies have devised a new tiebreaker for admission to the best jobs: the internship. Careers in finance, the media, politics and other popular fields now often begin with a temporary stint lasting from a few weeks to upwards of a year. The government reckons that at any time up to 70,000 interns are toiling in Britain. Yet about a third of them are unpaid. This gives rich, London-based candidates an edge.