I was lucky enough to be an intern for Chase Manhatan (as it was then called), and they paid what I thought was pretty good money back when I was a student in London.  We have always used interns at TigerSpike. Thank god because one of our first jobs for Big Brother was built by unpaid interns.

At the time we just started and made very litle money. No one in the company had salaries. Not the interns, not the management. We had a points system so when we won work we paid whoever was involved in the sale and production. It wasn’t such a bad system in the beginning.

Yes, it was probably illegal in Australia not to pay (especially as was with us unpaid for 2 years), but had the long arm of the law come down on us, we would have had to let him and the other interns go, and we wouldn’t be where we are today – (employing over 30 people across 3 offices). The interns who worked for nothing are still with us, and are being paid now, and we are moving one of them from Sydney to London, so it all worked out in the end

I suppose my attitude towards this is fairly right wing. Problem is that if we got all lefty about it and had to give a ‘living wage’ to everyone, then we just wouldn’t have been able to hire anyone, and things would have been very different.