Why you should never accept unpaid labor (especially as an academic)!
Unpaid work (including work in exchange for co-authorship) increases social inequality, devalues your work and lowers a prestige of your profession. I have witnessed these effects on academic groups and even complete research fields, on fresh graduates and experienced scientists. Here is why I do not accept any applications for volunteering or free internships at IDL, and why you shouldn’t accept free work either.
Unpaid work is irresponsible, ignorant and immoral! It’s a strong statement, but I feel it needs to be said.
I have been both someone who was asked to do work for free, and someone who was offered a free contribution (usually young scientists who want to gain more experience). And while I advocate against both, offering free work and receiving it, I feel it is our responsibility, managers and group leaders, to protect the vulnerable, ensure equal opportunities and protect the prestige of our profession or research field.
The problem of unpaid contributions
Unpaid work includes unpaid internships, volunteering to progress your career, work for an authorship or work for a credit. It can take many forms, but I would like to specifically point out the one common for academic settings.
The problem of an expectation of unpaid contributions hits academics particularly hard, where it is often expected from a student/researcher to keep contributing to the project even after they have left the institute. Other times, unpaid contributions are exchanged for authorships, or students are blackmailed into continuing their work after they graduated, otherwise they will not be on the list of the co-authors.
Why is unpaid work a problem?
- Unpaid work increases social inequality and pay gaps
Unpaid work provides opportunities for those who can afford not having income, and taking them away from those who have to provide for their families. This issue is particularly critical to fresh graduates, who often are asked for experience, and can only gain it though internships. As a result, while graduates from richer families get the training they need, those in need have to take on unskilled work to pay the bills.
- Unpaid work devalues education
I once heard someone tell me: “PhD students are losers who couldn’t get a real job”. I was a PhD student at the time, the girl that said it was a few years younger, fresh Master graduate and probably was paid more than me. Why did she say that? Well, because academics do so much work for free, that even if they wanted to demand a pay for their work, the average value of a scientist per hour is less that that of a translator or a private gym trainer (both very valuable professions, but they don’t require 5 years of post-graduate training in academic institution). In fact, I found that freelancers with only Master’s degrees are able to negotiate better pays than holders of a PhD.
- Unpaid work lowers prestige of your field
There are endless stories of academics who lost their jobs, and now are on unemployment benefits, still doing free work for their previous employer. What do they think about their research field? Well, they think it was a mistake to choose it. They pity young scientists who just entered the field. And then those professors and group leaders struggle to attract a new talent and lower the overall quality of research delivered in the field, the research institute or a group. In fact, I found that the research group leaders who ensure fair pay to their contributors are more successful, work in the fields with high prestige, and publish in high impact journals. I can’t claim any causality here, but there is most certainly a correlation.
How can we contribute to the solution?
One valuable lesson I have learned from my academic PIs — your success rests on success of your mentees. They taught me by example that “mentorship” means helping to find a way to success, guiding and being the biggest advocate of your mentee. And this includes making sure that people that work in your field are compensated fairly for their work.
And if that’s not enough for you, next time you get something done for you for an opportunity to be a co-author, think that this person might be falling into a financial dependency from the state benefits, from the partner, from the parents, and think whether the work that was done for you is really worth nothing but the name on the paper?
As more senior, more established, more protected, it is our social responsibility to make sure that we, at the very least, do not make things worse for future generations, and hopefully make it better, more accessible for those who are vulnerable and unprivileged.
Be responsible! Pay for work that you receive!
