False interns in Catalonia’s Culture Department

On the night of 4 November 2026, elDiario.es published that the Labour Inspectorate considers that 207 graduates covered structural needs of the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Culture Department for two years under the guise of internships. They received 1,250 euros gross a month, kept to 35 hours a week, from 08:00 to 15:00, and worked mainly in archives, museums, the Centre for the Restoration of Movable Property, the heritage inventory, language policy and communications.

The conclusion is drawn from an inspection report accessed by the newspaper, the full text of which is not public. The Generalitat has challenged it. Nor is there yet a final judgment declaring the 207 relationships to be employment-based. Referring to ‘false interns’ summarises the thesis of the Inspectorate and the union that filed the complaint, but not a definitive judicial classification.

According to the published information, the Inspectorate is claiming 2.16 million euros in social security contributions for the period between October 2024 and July 2026. The calculation reportedly used the remuneration of a senior technician within the Administration as a reference and incorporated a 20% surcharge. An internal government document raises the cost of recognising the 207 interns as employees to over 9.7 million euros, nearly a quarter of the Department’s personnel budget. Without the inspection report and the budget document, it is not possible to reconstruct both calculations or verify which concepts each includes.

The Department of Culture disagrees. It submitted objections to the inspection report and appealed against the resolution of the General Treasury of the Social Security, which registered the interns as employees ex officio. On 29 October, it cancelled the programme. It defends the programme’s training nature and invokes a 2023 ruling by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia regarding internships it considers similar. I have not identified the number, date or ECLI of that ruling. Without the resolution, the analogy cannot be examined.

Contributions call for the same caution. In one passage the article says that the interns worked without contributions being paid and, in another, that the Treasury decided to deregister them as interns and register them as employees. A deregistration presupposes some form of prior registration. IAC-CATAC had already reported in July 2025 that contributions were being made, albeit without unemployment cover. The controversy appears to centre on the classification, the contribution bases and contingencies covered, and the legal status under which they should have been registered, rather than a total absence of registration.

Ordinary work under the guise of training

The duties described hardly fit within a single educational experience. Some interns removed staples from official documents, digitised collections, or numbered nearly 9,000 files distributed across 267 boxes. Others trained newly joined administrative staff, drafted a speech for a chief of staff, or processed files on protected heritage assets.

The variety does not weaken the evidence; it strengthens it. The person in training was assigned both accumulated repetitive work and tasks that required technical judgement and administrative responsibility. At both extremes, the result was incorporated into the Department’s ongoing activity.

An internship can be useful to the institution. Its training purpose does not require fictitious exercises, nor does it rule out work on real projects. The boundary shifts when the activity is organised primarily to resolve the entity’s needs, learning is reduced to the experience that any position would provide, and the intern is integrated under direction into the ordinary structure.

Labour case law looks at the work actually performed, not the name chosen by the call. What matters is the training programme, genuine supervision, the relationship between the tasks and the person’s training, the degree of autonomy, the integration into the team, and who gets the main benefit. It also matters whether the work would have had to be done by another member of staff.

A closely related precedent calls for precision. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled on an appeal concerning a MAEC-AECID grant, but it did not set doctrine on the merits because it found no sufficient contradiction between the cases compared. The judgment of the High Court of Justice of Madrid, which had recognised an employment relationship in that specific case, stood: the tasks had little training value and were necessary for the Agency’s normal activity. That Supreme Court decision must not be presented as a general, automatic declaration that every cultural internship is employment.

The Catalan problem was described before the file became public. In its statement of 10 July 2025, IAC-CATAC collected complaints from the interns themselves: structural tasks, a predominance of production over learning, little individual supervision, a lack of continuous training, and travel or subsistence expenses paid by those who held the internship. They had no holidays, leave, right to strike, or unemployment protection; nor did the experience count as merit in the Department’s own selection processes.

According to elDiario.es, more than 60% signed a collective claim. They asked for the internships to be replaced by training contracts with unemployment cover, holidays and recognition of experience. The department maintained that the programme complied with the law. The complaint to the Labour Inspectorate followed.

Selecting to cover a need

The 2024 rules, published in Resolution CLT/1954/2024, presented the programme as complementary practical training for people who had just finished their studies, intended to facilitate entry into the labour market. They relied on subsidy legislation. The 2024-2025 call offered 110 internships for up to ten months, from 1 October 2024 to 31 July 2025, with 1,250 euros gross per month and 35 hours per week, from 08:00 to 15:00.

The stated purpose is legitimate. Cultural institutions can train recent graduates, open up professions with barriers to entry, and transmit knowledge that is not acquired outside of archives, museums, or restoration centres. The question is how that purpose is put into practice.

According to the news report, which attributes the data to the inspection report, the rules required applicants to have finished their studies within the previous five years. The selection process assessed academic records, specific training, IT skills, and languages. Some participants held two master’s degrees in the subject, and the Inspectorate considers that their qualifications matched those required of a large part of the staff.

The combination of qualifications, fixed hours, prolonged assignment to specific units, and output incorporated into administrative operations looks more like selecting people for their capacity to work than like a training placement. This is an interpretation of the published facts; no court has yet confirmed it for this programme.

I have not located the full text of the 2025-2026 call for applications included in the file. For the following year, the Department approved a different design in July 2026: a maximum of 30 internships, 1,000 euros gross a month, and at least 200 hours of theoretical training. The official procedure page, updated in October 2026, keeps this structure. This scheme should not be confused with the calls under inspection. The press adds that some participants had barely been in place for a month when they received notification of the programme’s termination, which indicates that the cancellation also affected the new intake.

The change in design is significant, although it does not in itself prove that the previous one was illegal. Reducing the number of internships and introducing 200 hours of theory brings the programme closer to an identifiable training activity. It would still be necessary to know the individual plan, its execution, and the specific practical tasks.

A tenuous legal basis

The programme does not clearly fit within Royal Decree 1543/2011, which regulates non-employment internships in companies. That regulation requires a prior agreement with the public employment service, is aimed at unemployed young people between 18 and 25 years of age with little or no professional experience, sets a duration of between three and nine months, and establishes a minimum allowance of 80% of the IPREM. The text refers to companies and business groups, without expressly extending the regime to the departments of a public administration.

The lack of the agreement with the public employment service mentioned by the newspaper presents two possibilities. Had the programme intended to fall under that royal decree, an essential condition would have been missing. If it did not, it required another foundation capable of justifying placements for graduates who had already left an academic programme and organised on that scale. The rules chose the subsidy route, but the financial form of the aid does not determine the nature of the service provided.

Additional Provision 52 of the General Social Security Act does not offer a clear answer either. Since 1 January 2024, it has included in the system those who carry out training or academic internships linked to university studies, vocational training, higher artistic education, professional artistic education, or sports education. It covers both paid and unpaid internships; it excludes, among other contingencies, unemployment and the Wage Guarantee Fund. The Department’s internships were aimed at people who had already finished their studies. Without the Treasury’s resolutions, it is impossible to know what prior classification was used or what specific differences support the regularisation.

The draft bill for the Statute of persons in non-employment practical training, published by the Congress of Deputies on 13 March 2026, attempted to regulate this boundary. Its scope covered companies, institutions and public or private bodies. It limited non-employment activities to internships linked to regulated training or the employment system; it presumed an employment relationship when the functions of a position were replaced or the activity was not directly related to the training pathway; it required an individual plan and set a maximum of five people per tutor.

An internship for graduates who were no longer studying would have fitted that design only with difficulty. The bill did not become law. Therefore, it serves to understand the legislative response that was proposed, not as a rule applicable to the calls for applications examined.

The absence of that statute does not leave an absolute void. The Workers’ Statute and the case law on working on another’s account, subordination and training purpose allow for the recognition of an employment relationship when an internship conceals ordinary work. The future statute would have specified obligations and made inspection easier. It would not have invented the distinction between learning and occupying a position.

1,250 euros is not equivalent to ten months’ salary

The monthly internship payment exceeded the 2026 monthly minimum wage by 29 euros: 1,250 against 1,221 euros. That isolated comparison is misleading because the minimum wage is set over fourteen payments and reaches 17,094 euros per annum.

Ten monthly payments came to 12,500 euros. Ten months of the proportional annual minimum wage are equivalent to 14,245 euros. The difference is 1,745 euros. If the two extra payments were spread across the year, the comparable monthly minimum would be 1,424.50 euros.

The legal consequence depends on an employment relationship being recognised first and on whether the 35 hours correspond to the applicable full-time working day or must be adjusted proportionally. It would also be necessary to determine the relevant collective agreement or remuneration regime. In addition to salary differences, holidays, unemployment cover, and other rights could be added.

The Labour Inspectorate, according to the article, did not use the minimum wage as its sole reference. It calculated the contributions based on the remuneration of a senior technician within the Administration. This choice reinforces the thesis that the duties were compared with qualified structural positions, but the detail can only be verified once the inspection report becomes available.

Budgetary cost does not make a relationship either employment or training. It does, however, explain the incentive. Recognising 207 positions and their rights costs much more than funding internships through grants. When an administration subsequently alleges that regularising the situation would absorb a considerable part of its personnel budget, it is describing the savings associated with the model it chose.

Public culture also outsources downwards

Archives accumulate pending boxes, museums need to conduct inventories, restoration centres sustain meticulous tasks, and administrative units cannot allow files to stall. Retirements, vacancies, and the slow pace of selection processes generate a continuous demand for work.

The internship offers a quick answer: it brings in qualified people, limits spending and formally leaves the permanent staff unchanged. The word ‘training’ shifts the cost onto those who need to get into the sector. That person accepts less protection because the experience seems to open a door that the institution controls.

The mechanism is not exclusive to the Administration. The cultural sector normalises unpaid collaborations, back-to-back internships, symbolic fees, and availability with no set working hours. I examine this in ‘Working for the love of art’. When the organisation is public, the contradiction is sharper: the very institution that must comply with and guarantee rights uses legal, budgetary, and selection resources to organise work without naming it as such.

There is also a class effect. Ten months without holidays, with expenses and travel costs borne by the intern, and without unemployment protection are easier to take on for those with family support. A programme presented as a way in can narrow it. Selection based on academic merit does not correct this inequality; it can hide it under an objective classification of transcripts, languages, and master’s degrees.

According to the union, the experience did not count as merit in the Department’s own selection processes either. The Administration obtained work, and the intern did not gain an equivalent formal advantage to compete for the positions they helped to sustain. That asymmetry summarises the programme well.

Andalusia and Málaga: what I have not found

I have not located an equivalent programme between 2024 and 2026 in the Andalusian Regional Ministry of Culture, its agencies or Málaga’s cultural institutions. The result does not prove that it does not exist. University agreements, curricular internships, and inspection files may not appear as open calls or be easily traceable.

The Andalusian Historical Heritage Institute maintains specialised courses, but I have not found any internships in that period for graduates working within the organisation, although there were calls in 2001, 2003, and 2007. The residencies of the Centre for Contemporary Creation of Andalusia finance artists’ projects for three months, without assigning them internal tasks at the centre. In 2024, Málaga City Council advertised three scholarships for pupil musicians (educandos) with the Municipal Music Band; I have not been able to review the full rules. I have not located comparable programmes in municipal museums or archives, or in the provincial council (Diputación).

Aggregated statistics also make it impossible to isolate public culture. Data released in March 2026 speak of 2,688 false interns detected in 6,519 inspection actions between 2021 and 2025. They do not offer a breakdown by sector, territory, administration, or type of institution. Citing that figure as proof of a widespread practice in Andalusian museums would go beyond what is documented.

The absence of results calls for specific monitoring. Cultural institutions should publish agreements, training plans, the number of interns, tutors, duration, stipends, duties and what became of the interns afterwards. Without such data, territorial comparison is reduced to searching through scattered calls for applications.

Three tests before calling a post an internship

A cultural institution should be able to show three documents before the activity begins:

Individual plan. Learning objectives, knowledge to be developed, tasks linked to each objective, schedule and evaluation method.
Verifiable supervision. Responsible person, maximum number of interns, recorded meetings, corrections and time reserved for training.
Proof of non-substitution. Explanation of why the tasks do not cover a vacancy, an absence, a structural backlog or the normal activity of a position.

Afterwards, an evaluation should be published: training received, work produced, incidents, dropouts, employment outcomes and cost. The report cannot simply list what the intern produced. The more the result resembles an inventory of completed work, the more necessary it is to demonstrate what specific learning justified the internship.

The most useful question is simple: what does the intern learn that an employee would not learn on joining that same post? Learning an organisation’s internal channels, software and procedures is part of any job. If that is the entire training content, the internship has only lowered the name and the rights of the post.

The Catalan programme was cancelled, but the files, inventories, boxes and communication tasks are still there. To know what those internships covered, one simply needs to follow the work. If it is now done by civil servants, employees on labour contracts or contracted staff, the needs were structural. If it has been left undone, they were structural too.

On the open conversation

This article is part of an open investigation. The full inspection report, the Treasury resolutions, the 2023 High Court of Justice of Catalonia ruling invoked by the Generalitat and the official cancellation document are either not public or I have not been able to identify with certainty. If you have any of these, or spot an error, you can write to me with the link to the primary source.

The author’s relationship to the cases

I chair Kripties Fundación, a non-profit organisation devoted to social inclusion through art, and I write in a personal capacity. I have no financial or professional relationship with the Departament de Cultura of the Generalitat, IAC-CATAC or the people affected.

Interns on the staff