by Our News Desk

ED MILIBAND pledged yesterday that Labour would put an end to exploitative unpaid internships that only the richest can afford.

A Labour government would bring in a law to ban unpaid work experience longer than four weeks, Mr Miliband told people in Lincoln as he sketched out the details of the party’s youth manifesto.

Mr Miliband condemned the scandal that for sought-after jobs “you’re often asked to work for free, often for months on end, sometimes even a year.

“It’s a system that’s rigged in favour of those who can afford it.”

Labour would make sure that such placements would pay at least the minimum wage, opening them up to people who can’t rely on the financial support of well-off parents.

Unpaid internships put careers “in the arts, media, fashion, finance and law out of reach for huge numbers of highly able young people,” he said.

“It’s not fair. It’s not right. So we’ll put a stop to it.”

The Centre for Labour and Social Studies praised the party’s “important move in challenging exploitation.”

The think tank said: “Ending unpaid internships would improve the prospects of millions of young people and forge more balanced relationships between employer and worker.”

But it urged Labour to go further, including boosting the minimum wage to the living wage rather than its paltry pledge of £8 an hour by 2020 and by abolishing university tuition fees instead of Labour’s planned cut from £9,000 a year to £6,000.