Tbh it’s both. It’s much easier finding a shit job and also much easier finding a decent job; at least the whole process is much less of a hassle. I know people who have decent jobs in London and Paris and they started lining up interviews like a year or 2 earlier, and after they got the job they had to wait for another year or something to actually start working and get paid, which is pretty ridiculous. The job market is much more competitive so you either need connections (which apparently is a good thing in the West but a bad thing in Taiwan) or you need to be exceptionally good.
Also, in Europe, there’s always a long period of internship phase for most graduates where the employers are free to pay you something way below the minimum wage, or even nothing. I know a ton of people who have worked on these internships for 6-24 months before they finally start receiving normal pay. I also applied to one in Paris and the pay was something like 3.50 euro per hour. No I’m not kidding. It was 3.50 and I didn’t get it, so there were more than 1 applicants. Oh and the job description said you need to be fluent in French (which I wasn’t) and English AND preferably an Asian language like Mandarin Chinese or Hindi.
Unpaid or badly paid internships are common in the legal profession. In most industries it’s not acceptable and I think it’s illegal in many countries. Anyway there are all sorts of 'job activation schemes ’ which employers can sometimes abuse that is correct .
In Taiwan , yeah , there are a shitload of (badly paid) jobs especially for young people. Also Taiwanese have basically no competition from immigrants for local jobs, except for labourers and production line supervisors and English teacher probably . Taxi drivers and retail staff are 99% local, which is never seen in developed countries as a rule.
No it wasn’t a legal internship, it was a journalistic internship. And it’s hardly exclusive to legal, I know plenty in marketing or business-related fields who do/did this.
It is a rule in Asia. Most taxi drivers and retail staff in Japan and Korea are local too (though there have been more foreigners working in services in Japan recently).
Yep but not for a year usually. Journalism and law are the two big ones for this kind of unpaid work . At least it’s worth it for law. For scientists we also do this but it’s called ‘research’.
