Students paddle Utrecht canals calling for internship allowances

It's Friday morning, October 13. Two students paddle kayaks behind a motorboat carrying the leaders of ISO and the two youth branches of CNV, who were holding a bag with a euro symbol on it.

The message: students have to paddle awfully hard just to get by and internship allowances could bring them relief. “Every student deserves the chance to do an internship without having to worry about money”, said ISO president Demi Janssen. “Because of unpaid internships, students who are already struggling financially have to take on even more debt or work themselves to death to make ends meet.”  ISO and CNV also started a petition to make internship allowances mandatory. It has been signed 10,000 times so far.

Several studies show that internship remuneration is not the norm in the Netherlands. A recent survey revealed that one in four interns enrolled at universities of applied sciences do not receive an internship allowance. Trainee teachers in particular often have to make do without compensation. A survey published last year demonstrated that this is also true for more than half of research university students.