Position Brief | 6 Min Read

Internship Purgatory or How I Learned to Love Increasing Shareholder Value

An internship, in the version taught in every economics textbook, is a bridge: a young person crosses from classroom to career, a business gets a trial run on cheap labor, and both sides learn something useful before anyone signs a real contract. That was the pitch even in the countries that invented the modern internship. It has not been the result. In the United States, unpaid or underpaid internships have become a quiet toll on entry into entire industries, one recent European estimate puts the cost to a young person of taking an unpaid internship at over a thousand euros a month in foregone wages and living costs, a toll that falls hardest on whoever cannot ask their parents to cover it. The International Labour Organization's own framing asks the question directly: internships, head start or labour trap. In much of the world that started as a bridge now functions as a toll booth, a way to make young people pay, in unpaid or underpaid months, for a door that used to open for free.

Kosovo did not import the toll booth. It built a subsidized one and called it a bridge anyway. SuperPuna was sold as the opposite of the exploitative-internship story: the state pays, the business hires, the intern gets six months of real wages instead of zero. That framing matters, because it is why the program's failure is a policy failure and not simply a labor-market inevitability. A government spent public money specifically to fix the internship problem and produced, on its own numbers, the internship problem's usual shape: temporary placements that evaporate on schedule, employer obligations that never existed, and an experience line on a résumé that leads nowhere because the job itself was never meant to last.

Minister Hekuran Murati stood up and promised that SuperPuna, his new platform, would put more than ten thousand young Kosovars to work within a year. A year later, Prime Minister Albin Kurti stood up and announced 9,394 placements. Close enough to round up, he said, calling the forecast accurate. Nobody on stage mentioned that of those 9,394 people, only 3,108 were still working when the government's own subsidy ran out. Nobody mentioned that the celebrated 67 percent success rate in the press materials was calculated off the smaller group who made it to the six-month finish line, not off everyone who started. Measure it against everyone who actually entered the program instead, and 3,108 out of 9,394 comes to 33 percent. Two out of every three young people who went through SuperPuna in its first year did not have a job at the end of it.

That gap between the promise and the printout is the whole program in miniature.

The mechanics fit in one sentence. The state pays roughly €260 a month, for six months, toward the wage of a young person a business agrees to take on, and asks the business for nothing in return. No retention commitment. No cost if the intern is let go the day after the subsidy ends. No penalty for cycling through a fresh subsidized worker every six months instead of keeping the one who just proved themselves. University of Prishtina economist Ujkan Bajra put it plainly when the program launched: everything is left entirely in the employer's hands. Translated out of academic diplomacy, that means the only obligation on the business side is showing up to collect the check.

Here is the government's own arithmetic, in full. 9,394 people placed. Fewer than half made it to six months. About a third ended up in a permanent job. Researchers who went looking for more current, granular numbers to check the trend were refused: the ministry did not respond to repeated requests for its own program records. That refusal is a data point in itself. A program confident in its retention numbers does not need to hide them from people asking politely. Roughly twenty businesses were eventually suspended after monitoring found subsidized employees who were not actually showing up to work. The rule letting companies enroll a share of their existing staff was, in measurable cases, used to collect a public subsidy for a hire that had already happened before the program existed. A program built to grow the labor market ended up, in part, subsidizing labor that was already there.

Kosovo's press nicknamed it SuperWork or Super-Failure, a pun sitting right there in the platform's own name. Skënder Krasniqi, who directs the Prishtina Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the plain thing nobody in government wanted to: a few hundred euros a month is not enough to make a business restructure its hiring around a worker it was not already planning to keep. Strip the joke out of this paper's own title and what is left underneath is not a joke. It is a transfer of public money to private payrolls, with the exit fully subsidized, the entry heavily subsidized, and nothing at all required in between.

But Krasniqi's complaint, read carefully, points at something SuperPuna was never built to touch. Ask any master tiler in Kosovo why he cannot keep an apprentice past a season and the answer has nothing to do with subsidy design. The work is physically hard. The pay does not clear what a plumber's or an electrician's helper makes doing something easier. And the hours run long with no reliable rest built in, closer to whatever the job demands that week than to anything a labor code enforces. A €260 monthly top-up does not touch any of that. It does not shorten a fourteen-hour installation day, raise a wage that already loses out to easier work, or write a rest requirement into a trade that currently has none. The young person who cycles through six subsidized months on a construction crew leaves with an experience line that says "construction" and nothing else useful attached to it, because the placement was never structured to teach a trade, only to fill a subsidized headcount for two quarters. Kosovo's actual employment problem sits in wages, in conditions, and in the type of work on offer, not in a shortage of six-month placements, and SuperPuna does not mediate any of those three things. It was never designed to.

That gap is why calling SuperPuna a band-aid undersells the problem. A band-aid at least covers the wound. SuperPuna does not touch Kosovo's real economic position, which is peripheral to a labor market whose actual center sits in Munich, Zurich, and increasingly the United States. A country that cannot offer competitive wages, humane hours, or a durable job at the end of a placement is not failing to train its young people. It is training them for somewhere else. Roughly a third of Kosovo's population has left over the last decade, and the people leaving are disproportionately young and disproportionately the ones who might otherwise have filled exactly the jobs SuperPuna claims to be building toward. A program that measures success in six-month placements while the underlying economy measures success in how fast it can export its own labor force is not solving the same problem it is being graded on. What Kosovo needed from a flagship jobs program was not a bigger placement count. It was a steady, compounding rise in local retention, year over year, sized to actually compete with what Germany and Switzerland already pay for the same skills. SuperPuna never set out to produce that number, and so, unsurprisingly, it hasn't.

Scale is why all of this matters more than the standard complaint about exploitative internships. Kosovo has one of the highest rates in the region of young people who are neither working nor in school nor in training: more than eighty thousand of them, on the last count. Youth unemployment has run as high as one in three in recent years. A program built to answer that crisis does not get graded on effort. It gets graded on whether the people it touched are still in the country, still employed, a year later. By the government's own numbers, two out of three were not.

What should change starts with the program itself and does not end there. Report the success rate against everyone who ever enrolled, not the smaller group that made it to the finish line. If a third is the honest number, publish a third. Tie the subsidy to a real retention obligation: an employer who lets a subsidized worker go within six months of the subsidy's end loses the right to enroll a new subsidized hire for a fixed period, so cycling through people costs more than keeping them. Close the existing-staff loophole by verifying employment history before enrollment, not months after the money is spent. Publish employer-level data: which businesses took part, how many of their hires they actually kept.

None of that reaches the wage floor or the working conditions underneath it, and Baze's broader program does. A universal basic income, funded through a tax system rebuilt to actually redistribute rather than merely collect, changes the leverage on the employer side permanently: a worker who is not one missed paycheck from crisis can turn down a fourteen-hour tiling job that pays badly, which forces the business offering it to raise the wage or shorten the day, not because a regulator showed up but because the alternative is an empty crew. A Social Insurance Fund, paying a worker's wage from the day a job ends until the day the next one starts, does the same thing from the unemployment side: it removes the desperation that currently lets a bad job outcompete no job at all. That fund needs to be built with women's employment as an explicit target, not an afterthought. Roughly three in four working-age women in Kosovo are outside the labor force entirely, one of the lowest participation rates measured anywhere in Europe, and recent research from Riinvest and UNFPA puts the resulting economic loss in the billions of euros. Behind that number sit two separate failures: a large share of the work women in Kosovo actually do is unpaid or informal and simply doesn't register in the statistic, and the women who are neither working nor counted as looking for work are, in measurable numbers, the ones with the least room to leave a bad marriage, finish an interrupted education, or say no to being married off young in the first place. An insurance fund that only pays out to people who already held a formal job does nothing for any of that. One built to actively subsidize formal-sector entry for women, with childcare costs covered as part of the package rather than left for a mother to solve alone, would.

The last piece is local, not national. Kosovo's cities are losing the fight for the same reason old industrial cities across Europe are losing it: concentrated capital keeps pulling opportunity toward a handful of metro regions, and the trades that remain in smaller cities don't pay enough or look attractive enough to hold anyone against that pull. Andy Burnham, while he was mayor of Greater Manchester and before he became the United Kingdom's prime minister, built exactly this kind of local answer: technical education tracks inside secondary schools, tied directly to the trades Greater Manchester actually needed filled, so a sixteen-year-old could specialize toward a real local job instead of a national exam nobody in the local economy was asking for. Kosovo's municipalities, not Prishtina alone, need the authority and the funding to build the same kind of pipeline, tuned to whatever trade each city is actually short of, whether that's construction, mechanical work, or anything else the local economy is currently failing to staff. A community losing its young people to Munich needs its own answer to that loss, not a placement subsidy designed in a ministry two hundred kilometers away.

All three of these cost more than a wage subsidy ever did. A wage subsidy that keeps a third of the people it touches is not cheaper than a program that keeps most of them. It just fails more quietly, one placement at a time, until the only number left to defend is the one printed on the press release.