Unpaid and highly paid internships expose widening inequality in Switzerland

The first rung on Switzerland’s career ladder now depends on a lottery: one intern earns thousands of francs, another earns nothing. Across the country, internships increasingly determine who gets a foothold in the labour market—and who is forced to finance the privilege of working. The divide is starkest between commercial employers and parts of the non-governmental sector. Some placements offer salaries, supervision and benefits. Others offer only a line on a CV.

The consequences are immediate. A student with family support or savings can accept months of unpaid work in Geneva, Lausanne or Zurich. A student without that safety net cannot. What is presented as a gateway into employment therefore becomes a filter based on private wealth.

The issue is not new. In Geneva, UN interns protested low pay in 2019. Yet the underlying structure remains intact: Switzerland has no federal law that sets a common standard for intern remuneration. Cantonal rules and collective agreements fill the gap, producing a patchwork of protections.

That regulatory vacuum turns access to professional experience into a high-stakes gamble. And as competition intensifies, the gamble is shaping an entire generation’s relationship with work.

A pharmaceutical intern near Geneva can receive up to CHF 3,000 a month before benefits are counted. Thomas Villaman, training in medical communication at a multinational company in Meyrin, earns between CHF 2,000 and CHF 3,000 monthly. His package also includes free meals, tea and coffee, and access to a gym.

His placement has the features of a genuine training position: a supervisor, a defined project and a report linked to his master’s degree. “I have a supervisor and a project to work on,” he says. “I’m going to write a report, a short thesis for my master’s degree.” The position, he explains, is intended to provide additional support rather than replace a permanent job.

At the upper end of the market, the source cites internships paying as much as CHF 3,500 per month. These placements do more than cover rent, transport and food. They allow young people to build savings while acquiring experience that employers demand.

That advantage compounds quickly. Paid interns can afford to stay in expensive employment centres, accept strategic opportunities and wait for the right next step. Their unpaid peers face a harsher calculation: work for free, borrow money or leave the race. The internship market is not merely unequal. It rewards those already equipped to enter it.

For some NGO interns, six months of work produces no salary, no allowance and no meaningful training. Nina, whose surname is withheld, says her Geneva placement quickly became a nightmare. She describes an organisation with no employees, where interns carried the workload while the manager was absent.

“I’m working in a place where there are no employees,” she says. “All the work is done by interns. And the manager is completely absent.” The training promised at the start never materialised. Instead, she accumulated overtime and shouldered responsibilities that appeared far beyond a temporary learning experience.

Her decision to speak out is deliberately political: she wants to “stop normalising these unpaid internships.” The warning reaches beyond one organisation. When unpaid work becomes routine, young people are pressured to treat exploitation as an acceptable price for experience—particularly in prestigious sectors such as international affairs, development and human rights.

Geneva’s high living costs sharpen the contradiction. The city hosts major international institutions while many aspiring professionals struggle to fund the basic cost of remaining there. An unpaid placement can therefore exclude precisely the candidates who lack independent means, narrowing the sector’s social and economic diversity.

Without enforceable standards, the promise of training can remain just that—a promise. The burden falls on interns to expose abuses individually, while organisations retain the power to define what counts as opportunity.

In Lausanne, applications now overwhelm the number of available internships—and employers hold the leverage. The Federation of Student Associations says the imbalance allows companies and organisations to impose almost any selection criteria. “Employers can set whatever criteria they want,” a representative explains.

That pressure transforms internships into a wage war at the bottom of the labour market. Candidates compete not only on grades and skills but also on their ability to accept little or no income. A full-time unpaid placement requires savings, family assistance or another source of support. The result is a direct assault on equal opportunity: the strongest CV may belong to the person who could afford to work for free, not the person with the greatest potential.

The economic incentive for employers is powerful. A natural cosmetics start-up in Neuchâtel employs two interns alongside seven employees. Its boss defends the arrangement as a budget necessity and says an intern costs, on average, two and a half times less than a junior employee.

For small firms grappling with Swiss costs, that gap can look like survival. But multiplied across the economy, it risks replacing entry-level jobs with revolving temporary labour. The question Switzerland must confront is blunt: when does a training opportunity become ordinary work at a discount?

Internships promise a bridge into work, but no statistical evidence proves that repeated placements reliably lead to permanent jobs. That uncertainty makes the current system especially alarming. Young people accept short contracts, unpaid months and excessive workloads on the assumption that sacrifice will eventually pay off. The source offers no proof that the promised payoff arrives.

Sociologist Dominique Glaymann describes the wider transformation as a “staging”—an artificial manipulation of the job market. Positions once intended for junior employees, he argues, are increasingly filled by interns. Employers gain a flexible, low-cost workforce, while graduates cycle through temporary roles with no guaranteed progression.

Switzerland now faces a critical policy choice. Cantonal rules and collective agreements may address some cases, but they do not create a consistent national baseline. A framework could distinguish genuine education from ordinary productive work, require supervision and training, and ensure that full-time labour receives meaningful compensation. Transparent data would also allow policymakers to measure whether internships actually lead to stable employment.

The alternative is continued drift. Paid corporate placements will keep opening doors for those who can already access them, while unpaid work will quietly ration opportunities by family income. Switzerland’s labour market can preserve internships as a route into employment—but only if it stops treating inequality as an acceptable entrance fee.