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What’s The Dots policy on advertising unpaid jobs?

A bit fed up of seeing unpaid ‘jobs’ advertised on The Dots jobs board and in community questions.

E.g:
Check out Illustrator on The Dots! https://www.the-dots.com/jobs/156109

Hilariously, this particular ‘non-profit’’s mission is to ‘amplify the voices of young creatives’...not pay them though.

Charities are allowed, by law, to sidestep minimum wage requirements – I still think it’s a problem to do so though, esp when targeting juniors rather than approaching people with stable incomes to volunteer pro-bono hours. I don’t know...what are people’s thoughts on this?

I remember the early days of working in the industry and being so keen that I’d consider working for free, but looking back those were always bad experiences, and it’s just really disappointing to see the growing trend of people taking advantage of young creatives.
Esther Shelley
Esther Shelley
Freelance Designer

Replies2

  • Esther Shelley
    Esther Shelley
    Freelance Designer
    @Geoffrey Bunting looking forward to reading your article – more needs to be done on this and it’s just being talked about in a vacuum if larger communities like The Dots don’t take a stand. Seems like a relatively easy fix to me: put a numeric salary field on the job ad form and make filling it mandatory. If collaborations are such an important part of the community, why not create a separate collaborations board where people can specifically access that content...

    Free work & unpaid internships perpetuate middle-class gatekeeping in the creative industries, as these aren’t feasible opportunities for those without extra support – I’m currently mentoring with Arts Emergency whose mission it is to level the playing field, and personally I see eliminating free work to be an important part of that.
  • Geoffrey Bunting
    Geoffrey Bunting
    Journalist & Book Designer
    It is the nature of any community of creatives - like The Dots - that clients will start to become involved and, as such, be aware of our concerns and worries within our respective industries. The result is that they are modulating their language around the idea of free work to manipulate that - I'm actually in the process of writing an article about this very thing. The Dots doesn't appear to be keen to police this, and I'm not sure they're wrong given how valuable this space is for actual collaboration requests. But certainly, I would love to see something that forces clients to be upfront about their budgets and intentions.

    Lately, I've been seeing some very dubious posts from people looking for free work - full of red flags. The response is pretty resounding, young artists are desperate for work; any work. However, some of the clients we're seeing coming through now are less cheeky professionals trying to get some free work (who are still really bad) and more the kind of people you'd see on Facebook, with little respect for the platform or the people on it, who want to pick fights and want to make it very clear that they have absolutely no value for creative professionals. I think that latter point is what is worrying me.

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