Somewhere between finishing your degree and landing your first real job, there is a stretch of time that nobody really prepares you for. You apply for internships, you get one, you show up and do the work — and in a lot of cases, you do it for free. You tell yourself it will be worth it. You add it to your CV. Then you apply for the next one.
It is such a normal part of young professional life that most people do not stop to question it. But the more you look at how internships actually work — who gets them, who can afford to take them, and what happens when they go wrong — the harder it becomes to see the whole thing as simply paying your dues.
In December 2025, the Malta Model United Nations Society (MaltMUN) published The Price of Experience: A Policy Framework for Fair Internships in Malta, the organisation’s first-ever policy paper. Led and co-written by Social Policy Officer alongside a team of five researchers, it draws on international human rights law, comparative EU analysis, and a direct survey of 35 interns to look honestly at how Malta’s internship system is working — and where it is not.
What it found is not particularly surprising if you have been through the system yourself. But having it documented, sourced, and put on paper is a different thing entirely.
What interns actually said
The paper surveyed 35 people who had completed internships in Malta or abroad, and the picture that comes through is one most young professionals would recognise. In Malta, 68% of placements were paid, which looks decent on paper until you remember that means roughly one in three were not. For internships done abroad, two-thirds were unpaid entirely.
One respondent had interned at the United Nations. They pointed out the obvious irony of working without pay for an organisation whose core mission includes ending exploitative labour, and noted that they were only able to accept the role because of financial support from family. It is a small detail, but it gets at something the paper keeps returning to: unpaid internships are not just an inconvenience, they are a filter. The people who pass through it are often not the most talented or the most motivated — they are just the ones who could afford the entrance fee.
The issues went beyond pay. Around half of respondents said their tasks were always connected to their field of study, while another 38% said only sometimes, leaving a portion who spent real stretches of time on work that had nothing to do with why they were there — filing, shredding, keeping someone else’s inbox organised. On mentorship, a quarter of respondents said they rarely or never received adequate guidance. One described being told by their manager that they were missing knowledge that schools no longer even taught. Another said they were handed complex assignments with no explanation of what was expected, and then criticised when the work did not meet an invisible standard.
The law does not really cover this
Part of why these situations keep happening in Malta is that the legal framework simply was not built to deal with them. Malta’s main employment law, the Employment and Industrial Relations Act, does not define internships as their own category, which means an unpaid placement can be classified as vocational training and quietly placed outside the protections that cover regular employees, including minimum wage. The Education Act adds another layer of ambiguity by framing internships as training experiences focused on learning outcomes rather than productive work, without requiring any payment. In practice, this gives employers a lot of room to run unpaid arrangements without technically breaking any rules, as long as the internship looks educational enough.
There is no Maltese court case that has directly tested any of this, which means the ambiguity has never really been pushed. Enforcement falls under the Department for Industrial and Employment Relations and Jobsplus, but filing a complaint means naming your employer in a small professional environment where you still need references and future opportunities. Most people do not bother, and the system stays exactly as it is.
Europe is trying to fix this, slowly
Malta is dealing with something that affects young people across the continent, and the EU has been working on it — just not at a speed that helps anyone currently in the system. Around 1.5 million young Europeans are in internships at any given time, and the EU cannot simply ban unpaid ones outright because employment policy is largely decided at national level. What it can do is push for minimum standards through legislation, and after years of campaigning from youth organisations, that process is finally moving.
In October 2025, the European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee backed a proposal for binding rules requiring written agreements that specify pay, tasks, and learning objectives for every intern, with placements generally capped at six months. The Parliament’s stance goes noticeably further than the Council’s earlier position, which had narrowed the scope of the original European Commission proposal and weakened the criteria for identifying exploitation. Negotiations between the three institutions are ongoing, and even a final agreement would still leave member states significant room to decide how they implement it — making domestic reform essential regardless.
What the MaltMUN paper also flags is a tension that sits awkwardly close to home for anyone working in civil society or international organisations. Research has found that 80% of internships in EU-level NGOs were unpaid or below the national minimum wage — meaning organisations whose entire purpose is to advocate for rights and fairness are often relying on free labour to function. Malta’s National Youth Council (KNŻ) has been pushing back on this at European level alongside the Youth Forum, but the structural incentives that keep unpaid internships in place are not going to shift on their own. The European Youth Forum’s own research found that a six-month unpaid internship costs the average young person in Europe more than €6,000 when living expenses are factored in, and that nearly 70% of respondents said they could not afford to take on unpaid work at all — which raises a fairly direct question about who the current system actually serves.
What the paper is actually asking for
The MaltMUN paper is not just a critique — it also presents a specific set of proposals for Malta, organised into four areas.
On the legal side, it calls for EIRA to be amended to include a proper definition of internship, split into three categories: educational placements within formal degree programmes; short voluntary internships under two months; and extended internships over two months, which would be classified as employment with full labour protections. For that last category, the paper proposes compensation starting at 60% of the statutory minimum wage and rising to 80% after six months, with mandatory written contracts across the board.
For enforcement, it recommends a National Internship Registry where all placements must be registered, alongside an independent Internship Ombudsperson with the authority to investigate complaints confidentially and publish findings. Labour inspectors would be given dedicated resources and the power to impose fines between €5,000 and €15,000 for violations, with a specific focus on sectors where problems tend to concentrate — NGOs, media, legal services, and political institutions.
Regarding financial support, the paper proposes an Internship Accessibility Fund that provides monthly grants of €400 to €600 to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and wage subsidies covering 50 to 70% of intern wages for qualifying NGOs and small businesses. The logic here is that some organisations genuinely cannot afford to pay without support, and reform that does not account for that just ends up eliminating placements rather than improving them.
Finally, a voluntary Fair Internship Malta Certification would recognise organisations going beyond the minimum, paired with a mandatory requirement for universities to properly vet their placement partners, drop the exploitative ones, and start teaching students their employment rights before they even walk through a company’s door.
The bigger picture
The paper makes the point that internship exploitation is not just an individual problem — it shapes the labour market more broadly. When organisations can fill roles with unpaid interns, the incentive to create actual entry-level paid jobs goes down. When only people with financial backing can afford to take the experience required to get hired, the notion that careers are built on merit starts to look pretty thin.
Malta’s size, the paper argues, is actually an advantage here. The professional community is sufficiently concentrated that reform is realistic and can be properly monitored. What has been missing is not the infrastructure; it is the political will to use it.