Are unpaid UN internships a good idea?

Link post

Disclaimer: I am outside of the world of international organisations. I am a scientific researcher at university. I am writing this post to open a discussion.

Introduction

UN is an international organisation with the following main goals:

maintain international peace and security
develop friendly relations among nations
stand up for human rights
promote better living standards and social progress

Here a more concrete list of examples of what UN wants to achieve. For example, I am all in reducing social inequalities within and across countries.

Working at such an international organisation such as UN can therefore facilitate achieving these goals. To achieve these goals we probably need competent people. As the world is complex you also want a sample of people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. To be safe, UN tries to attract the best talent offering jobs with good salaries, compared to average civil service jobs, perks, and prestige. As any job, there are problems. Nevertheless UN jobs can be a really good opportunity.

UN Internships

UN internships are an important way to facilitate people entering UN affiliated careers, higher the chance of getting a UN or international organisation job after. They train you. They boost your CV. They are an amazing opportunity to network, and perhaps enjoy your time.

Given the above points, there are a lot of incentives in becoming a UN intern.

On the other hand, if UN has the incentive to attract the best competent people for the future, and be really a good representation of the world population then it has to lure in the greatest number of people.

One very successful way to attract people is financially supporting internships.

This UN page says UN interns are not paid, and “living expenses must be borne by either the interns or their sponsoring institutions”.

According to this 2018 report 83% of UN interns are unpaid. It is six years old. The situation might be different today.^[1]

Let’s assume that currently the different UN agencies flip a fair coin to fund you. Does this guarantee a fairer representation of the world population? Not. But it might higher the chance of encouraging more people to apply.

Problem

Here is speculative. Usually the people I have met that seek, train, and get these jobs include people with three European surnames (but also humans will tend to seek paths taken by family members), or from privileged backgrounds.^[2]

Then, they are the ones that have higher chances getting jobs at other organisations, advancing their careers, maybe landing a UN or some other nice job with good salary and perks.

Situation: at UN and affiliated organisations we have the most privileged people trying to solve world problems and seek diplomatic solutions.

Why is literally these people that know how to solve e.g. hunger, or war conflicts? And how can I be convinced that it is privileged people that are going to solve world problems?

Let’s assume many of them are competent. Would you get a surgery from a competent physician, or from a passionate competent physician that wants to alleviate human suffering?

This situations sounds to me a lot similar to the European aristocracy. A group of people thinking that they know the solution of the problems of the socio-economically struggling people believing the know better.

And what I am afraid of is ending up with a power preserving structure with personal incentives that are not aligned with solving world problems. People that want to maintain exclusivity without incentives in solving world problems, because anyway there is a lack of empathy to the struggling.

Possible counterarguments

Here is a list

there are too many applications, personal connections for the privileged and advertising unpaid positions are the best ways to weed out applicants.
- this fails to address fair representation that an organisation like UN should do.
- also, it does not address the suffering of poor young people.
UN internships are a training should, hence they should not be paid.
- But again, see above point.
UN internships are also based on merit. Many people applying have already past high-school experience available only to the rich (e.g. mock UN debates)
- Fair point. Probably the strongest point in this list. But I would argue then there should be different criteria for evaluating people.
UN does not need the most competent people. UN jobs are not that complex to require the best people.
- I can not really comment on this point.^[3]
UN’s success rate to solve world problems is not great, and the current situation is a mess. Perhaps better create a new organisation or go somewhere else if you care about these problems.
- Can not comment.
You should have checked which people end up getting UN jobs, instead of starting from interns
- yes, but starting from the premises given here this is one of the possible realistic scenarios.
UN has some other valid reasons in having unpaid internships
- Do you know some?
  - To close the loop with an example that shows how many of these people are oblivious to people’s problems: if most of the UN internships are unpaid this might not be to the lack of funding, plenty for our beloved diplomats, but a lack of intention. If many of the UN people did paid internships, and they were fine, why other people should got them too?

Conclusion

Finally. What am I advocating and wish organisations like the UN implemented?

I would like an organisation like UN to have a fair representation of people, from the poor to the rich.

By fair I mean a representative subsample of the population probability density function (pdf).

And I also think merely increasing funding will not solve the problem of unfair representation at UN.

You want more applicants. Way more applicants.

Assume I have a population of people, poor and rich, with some pdf $p (y)$ of being rich or poor. Now, assume I have a large enough number of similar $M$ job openings. My goal is to have a fairer representation in my $M$ . It does not have to be perfect (this is indeed an example that does not account for many factors, e.g. human behaviour, assumes lots of similar jobs, and so on).

Assume the following: I only fully fund $x %$ of the jobs. Assume this affects the probability that an applicant may apply with some probability $q (y, x)$ , depending on how rich they are $y$ , and the percentage of $x %$ jobs (basically in this case $M x$ ).

First question. Did UN think about an optimal $x %$ ? For example, if 80% of people do not have money, and 20% have enough money, you may be ok in funding only 80%.

Second question. How to choose applicants? In an ideal world where people are all competent on the same axis, I would just subsample something similar to $p (y)$ across my $N$ candidates. So, had UN thought hard about this subsampling process? Maybe in the beginning it does not have to be optimal (actually I think some sub-optimality is fine). But there should be some way to select people on their potential, that does not only account for personal connections (that are a good way, but fail in scenarios where merit is not very well defined), and CVs. This already happens in places like ENS (though one might argue that most of the people that get in there are good because of better training opportunity as kids).

P.S.

One of the goals of writing this post is to challenge myself in debating with others, change my point of view, and learning how to write better. So, I would really appreciate public or private honest feedback.

^
Note that from the 2018 report,
- For former unpaid interns, only 22.8% were offered a contract after their internship.
- For former paid interns, only 94.7% got a job. Very high chance. But not sure why.
- Underpaid interns, 65.4%.
But it seems there is a rule: “that interns are not eligible to apply for, or be appointed to, positions at the professional level for a period of [two to] six months following the end of their internship.”, see page 55 of the report.
I wonder if this rule is more for agencies not paying the interns. Not clear to me.
^
Some of the people that have done internships at these places themselves confirmed that them and most of the interns are quite financially comfortable. No matter their country of origin (e.g. Africa or Asia), they can lead very nice lives in the most expensive European capitals.
^
Personal story. Someone close to me used to give private lessons to the kids of a FAO diplomat. They had free housing in a very expensive neighbourhood, free schooling at private institutes, and budgets for several things. For example, the private lessons were funded by one of these budgets. The guy was not one of the brightest people, neither he was kind. He came from privilege, and nevertheless he was there trying to solve world hunger.