A movement emerges: Will unpaid internships disappear?

This summer, countless numbers of students will work in unpaid internships, in many instances for large corporations that could easily afford to pay them. Not only is this widespread practice often in apparent violation of state and federal minimum wage laws, but also it creates barriers to those who want to break into an occupation but who cannot afford to work for free.

Now there’s an emerging movement against unpaid internships (especially in the private sector), and here’s evidence of its coming out party:

Lawsuits

Well-publicized legal claims for back pay by unpaid interns have played a significant role in bringing this common practice to public light.

It started last fall with a lawsuit filed by two unpaid interns, Alex Footman and Eric Glatt, who worked on the production of the movie “Black Swan,” alleging that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated minimum wage and overtime rules.

Earlier this year, Xuedan Wang, a former unpaid intern for Harper’s Bazaar, filed a claim against the magazine’s publisher, the Hearst Corporation.

The lawsuits already are having an impact on employer practices. As Paul Davidson reports for USA Today (link here):

As summer intern season draws near, many employers are doing away with unpaid internships or converting them to paid programs amid lawsuits that claim interns should have been compensated for their work, labor lawyers say.

“They’re saying, ‘We’re not going to run the risk,’ ” says Al Robinson, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and former acting administrator of the Labor Department’s wage and hour unit.

Media attention

The lawsuits and other actions are not going unnoticed by the media. This Sunday’s front page article in the New York Times by labor reporter Steven Greenhouse is prime evidence:

Confronting the worst job market in decades, many college graduates who expected to land paid jobs are turning to unpaid internships to try to get a foot in an employer’s door.

. . . Although many internships provide valuable experience, some unpaid interns complain that they do menial work and learn little, raising questions about whether these positions violate federal rules governing such programs.

Last week, Time magazine weighed in with a piece, “The Beginning of the End of the Unpaid Internship.” Josh Sanburn posits:

In the workplace, there seem to be two long-established but contradictory rules: Everyone gets paid to work – unless there’s mindless drivel to do, of course, and then you get college kids to do it for free.

In March New York magazine proclaimed the emergence of an “intern-rights movement” and reported on its own survey of interns:

An intern-rights movement is afoot, sparking class-action suits against Hearst and Fox Searchlight; rumors of new rules at Condé Nast; a Times “Ethicist” column (headline: “The Internship Rip-Off”); and a book (Intern Nation) decrying many of the unpaid jobs as boondoggles.

Occupy Wall Street

The Arts & Labor working group of Occupy Wall Street has called upon six online job boards to stop listing unpaid internships (media advisory here):

Six major online job boards . . . were served letters calling for an end to the publishing of classified listings for unpaid internships at for-profit businesses. . . . Collectively the six job boards channel thousands of unpaid workers to for-profit businesses in a variety of creative industries including the visual arts, publishing, theater, film, television and electronic media, without regard for the ethics or legality of such arrangements, thereby undermining the overall health and sustainability of the labor market within those industries.

They’ve also produced the informational flyer featured at the top of this blog post, which can be downloaded here.

And on television…

The HBO series “Girls” features a major subplot about the challenges of unpaid internships. When a “hip” cable series picks up a story line like this, it’s additional evidence that the issue is entering the mainstream.

Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation

Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation (2011) is now available in paperback. It’s an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the social, economic, and legal aspects of this topic.

Private vs. public & non-profit

I believe it’s wrong — ethically and often legally — for profit-making enterprises with large payrolls and well-compensated executives, especially medium and large sized corporations, to hire unpaid interns. (Remember, we’re not talking about interns getting rich here. We’re talking about paying the minimum wage.)

However, public and non-profit employers are not in existence to make profits, and there are compelling reasons to encourage students and others to be exposed and contribute to service-oriented institutions. Work-study and college-funded grant programs can help to provide income for otherwise unpaid internships in these sectors.

Very promising signs

All this activity is encouraging. Students and others are challenging employers to do the right thing by paying interns who contribute their talent and energy to the work of an organization. In such instances, it’s entirely fair to expect at least the minimum wage in return.

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Personal note

Faithful readers of this blog know that I’m not a neutral party on this topic, as I have been writing and blogging about unpaid internships for many years.

Last December I met with Ross Perlin, Eric Glatt, and journalist Tiffany Ap to discuss the practice of unpaid internships and strategies for bringing this issue to public attention. In addition, I’m pleased that my law review article, “The Employment Law Rights of Student Interns,” Connecticut Law Review (free download here) has been cited approvingly in Intern Nation and by Occupy Wall Street as an informational resource.

3/9/12 addendum

Steven Greenhouse added a nice followup piece on the employment relations and social impact implications of unpaid internships, posted to the Times‘s Economix blog here. I appreciate his quoting from the comment I left to his original piece:

Professor David Yamada of the Suffolk University Law School in Boston wrote in to make a point that I had made in a 2010 article on unpaid internships, but did not discuss in my article on Sunday. Missing from the article, Professor Yamada wrote, “is the fact that unpaid internships have huge social class impacts on folks who cannot afford to work for free, reinforcing economic barriers to certain professions long associated with the well-to-do.”

A “Cozy” meeting about unpaid internships

l to r: Ross Perlin, Eric Glatt, Tiffany Ap

As some of you know, I’ve been concerned about the widespread practice of unpaid internships for some time.

These positions often exclude those who do not have the financial means to work without pay, thus creating class-based barriers to professions where the practice is very common, such as entertainment, media, the arts, and political advocacy. In addition, my own extensive legal research, published several years ago in a Connecticut Law Review article, led me to conclude that many unpaid internships in the private sector run afoul of minimum wage laws.

Meeting at the Cozy

I’m delighted that this topic finally is getting attention, and last weekend I had the pleasure of being part of an informal lunch meeting with two individuals who are making it happen: Eric Glatt, co-lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Fox Searchlight Pictures seeking wages for unpaid interns working on the production of “Black Swan”; and Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Very Little in the Brave New Economy (2011).

Joined by journalist and Columbia Journalism School student Tiffany Ap, we met at the Cozy Soup ‘n’ Burger (Broadway & Astor Place — and my favorite New York City diner!) to talk about unpaid internships and how they relate to broader issues of work and economic justice.

Gray area

Internships have occupied a gray area in education and employment relations, standing somewhere between the status of student and that of employee. In reality, however, most interns provide tangible value to their employer, and both ethics and law point to the imperative of paying them for their labor. Thanks in part to folks like Eric and Ross, we’ll be hearing more about this topic in the months and years to come.

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Related Posts

Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation explores the internship phenomenon

Unpaid interns for “Black Swan” file wage claim against Fox Searchlight Pictures

On the practice and legality of unpaid internships

Fancy internship vs. “summer job”?

Say you’re a young college student, weighing your options for the summer. Assuming you have some choice in the matter, what’s better preparation for a successful career, a summer internship with a prominent business or non-profit group, or a summer job filling shelves and running a cash register for a local supermarket?

A professor’s answer

As a university professor, my strong advice to most students would be to take the internship. Whether they are aiming for a plum job out of college, or perhaps vying for a spot in graduate or professional school, the internship will carry more weight than 10 weeks stocking shelves at the grocery store.

Indeed, it’s probably not even a close call.

But indulge me for a minute…

When I was in college some 30 years ago, most undergraduates did not expect to do a summer internship unless, perhaps, they were enrolled in a professional program such as nursing, engineering, or social work. For political science majors like me, summers typically meant doing some type of low-wage job working in a store, a factory, or the great outdoors.

I spent a couple of my summers working for a local drug store chain as a stock clerk. During an interim year between graduating from college and starting law school, I returned to the company in the midst of a terrible recession. The work involved unloading trucks, tagging merchandise and stocking shelves, and customer assistance. While I wouldn’t call the job backbreaking, at the end of a busy shift, I knew I had earned my meager wages.

I didn’t ignore the bells & whistles that might give a boost to my law school applications. I was a department editor of the college newspaper, a senator in the student government, and a volunteer for numerous political campaigns. But I understood the difference between a paying job and extracurricular activities.

What I learned

When I got to law school, I was wholly intimidated by the array of internships, fellowships, and similar opportunities that many of my classmates already sported on their resumes. I hasten to add that they didn’t flaunt these credentials; it simply was part of what they had done.

Looking back, I wish I would’ve been more appreciative of what I learned in my less glamorous minimum wage jobs. I gained a work ethic. I learned how to follow instructions and take directives. I learned how to treat a customer with respect. And I learned what it means to start at the bottom and to earn a pat on the back for the work I did.

I’m not claiming that someone can’t learn these things in an internship. And I concede that it sounds like I’m wallowing in nostalgia for a job that — in actuality — I regarded simply as a way to save money for college. But there’s something about a genuine, humble, entry-level job that teaches us some valuable lessons for the years to come.

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Related posts

Has tackling discrimination led to a more elitist society?

The Let-Me-Impress-You Club

Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation explores the internship phenomenon

Unpaid interns for “Black Swan” file wage claim against Fox Searchlight Pictures

Two unpaid interns who worked on the crew of the movie “Black Swan,” Alex Footman and Eric Glatt, are suing Fox Searchlight Pictures, alleging that the failure to pay them violated minimum wage and overtime rules.

As reported by Steven Greenhouse for the New York Times (link here):

One plaintiff, Alex Footman, a 2009 Wesleyan graduate who majored in film studies, said he had worked as a production intern on “Black Swan” in New York from October 2009 to February 2010.

He said his responsibilities included preparing coffee for the production office, ensuring that the coffee pot was full, taking and distributing lunch orders for the production staff, taking out the trash and cleaning the office.

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The other named plaintiff, Eric Glatt, 42, who has an M.B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, was an accounting intern for “Black Swan.” He prepared documents for purchase orders and petty cash, traveled to the set to obtain signatures on documents and created spreadsheets to track missing information in employee personnel file.

This is a welcomed development.  I have long argued (see link to law review article below) that most unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws and other labor standards.

In addition, the failure to pay interns leaves them more vulnerable to discrimination and sexual harassment. At least one federal court has held that unpaid interns cannot bring a claim under the Civil Rights Act because they are not employees within the meaning of the law.

This will be an interesting case. Stay tuned!

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Additional information

For more blog posts on interns and the law, go here.

To download, without charge, a copy of my 2002 Connecticut Law Review article, “The Employment Law Rights of Student Interns” — hailed by Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation (2011) as “the best single source of information” on student internships and the law — go here.

Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation explores the internship phenomenon

The first book-length examination of the sociological, economic, educational, and legal aspects of internships, Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (2011), has been published by Verso.

This is a badly needed book. As Perlin writes, internships are “a new and distinctive form, located at the nexus of transformations in higher education and the workplace.” During the past few decades, internships have become a virtual requirement for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students in many fields. Perlin estimates that “between 1 and 2 million people participate in internships each year in the U.S.”

In other words, we’re talking about a practice that involves a lot of people, mostly younger folks readying themselves for entry into a profession.

“Intern Bill of Rights”

In an Appendix, Perlin sets out his “Intern Bill of Rights,” a statement of nine provisions concerning compensation, fair treatment, legal protections, and personal dignity. It’s an excellent starting place for developing best practices and sound public policies covering interns.

“A Lawsuit Waiting to Happen”

Unfortunately, many interns are unpaid — as I have written, often in apparent violation of minimum wage laws. Perlin takes this thread and builds it into a chapter examining the many legal implications of internships.

Perlin makes special note of situations involving sexual harassment of unpaid student interns. He concludes, “This is the part you didn’t know; when something does happen, unpaid interns are largely on their own, without protection or recourse, caught in a frightening legal limbo.”

We concur!

I raised many of these legal concerns in my 2002 law review article, “The Employment Law Rights of Student Interns,” which Perlin graciously cites as the “best single source of information for American internships and the law.” You can download a free copy here.

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Related posts

On the practice and legality of unpaid internships

News flash! Unpaid internships may be illegal

The legality and ethics of unpaid internships

On the practice and legality of unpaid internships

This blog has addressed periodically the widespread, often exploitative, and frequently illegal practice of unpaid internships. It appears this topic is finally receiving needed attention. For those who are interested in learning more, here are three resources from the past year worth downloading:

U.S. Department of Labor fact sheet

Good sign: In April, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division released Fact Sheet No. 71, providing guidance on determining whether student interns must be paid the minimum wage and overtime by for-profit, private employers. It can be downloaded here.

George Washington University conference book

In October, George Washington University hosted a conference, “The Regulation of Unpaid Internships,” which included an excellent program book that can be downloaded here. It’s full of useful information.

Economic Policy Institute policy memorandum

In April, the Economic Policy Institute released a detailed policy memorandum, “Not-So-Equal Protection–Reforming the Regulation of Student Internships,” which can be downloaded here.

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My 2002 article

I am pleased that my 2002 Connecticut Law Review article, “The Employment Law Rights of Student Interns,” anticipated many of the issues being addressed today. In it, I suggested that failing to pay student interns often violates minimum wage laws and may leave them without the protections of employment discrimination laws. The article can be downloaded here.

Class matters: Student organizations at colleges and universities

Attention former collegians: Did you participate heavily in campus activities?

If so, you’d feel at home at some of today’s colleges. James Petersen, writing for the Education Life supplement to the New York Times, highlights the proliferation of student organizations on some of America’s campuses:

Organizations have gone viral. Harvard has more than 400, up from about 250 six years ago. The University of California, Berkeley, has more than 1,000 organizations. The University of Wisconsin, Madison, estimates more than 800, with a Web site that encourages students to “Discover your passions. Bring your résumé to life.” The Web site of the College of William & Mary, which has 400 clubs, boasts “endless geekery from quiz bowl to Ping-Pong to heavy metal.”

Meaningful activities

Student organizations offer marvelous opportunities to gain skills, nurture new interests, make friends, and generally enrich one’s college experience. Students learn how to work with others, coordinate projects, and organize events. For many, friendships forged while helping to run college publications, creative projects, affinity groups, student governments, and fraternal organizations lead to bonds that endure long beyond commencement.

Class differences

Grinnell and Brown are among the other schools mentioned in Petersen’s article. Get the picture? Yes, extracurricular life is especially rich and abundant at prestigious schools. Parental earnings and/or financial aid packages make it more possible for students at these schools to get involved in campus life. Their university administrations love to tout campus activities to prospective students and their parents.

But it’s not like that for everyone who goes to college, not by a long shot. Although the coming-of-age “college experience” of going off to a campus away from home has been part of the middle-class American Dream for many decades, it has been more aspirational than real for many who pursue bachelor’s degrees. Nowadays, with sky high tuition straining the budgets of even upper middle class families, and more students obliged to work to pay for expenses and to obtain internships to pad resumes and grad school applications, extracurricular life can be among the casualties.

Nat Hentoff at Northeastern

Memoirs about immersion in campus activities often come from professors recalling soggy details of life at Ivy U. or Oxbridge back in the day. However, at least in the past, it has been possible to create enriching extracurricular experiences at practically any college or university. On this point I think about journalist and free speech advocate Nat Hentoff’s memoir Boston Boy (1986), where he recounts the seminal experience of working on the Northeastern University student newspaper in the 1940s.

Northeastern has since become a “hot” school for budding collegians, but during Hentoff’s student days it was a hardscrabble college for Boston-area working class kids and others who fell short of admission to more prestigious venues. Nonetheless, the student newspaper served as his classroom and apprenticeship. Through student and faculty mentors he learned about covering the news. From clashes with the University administration, he learned about censorship. Without this experience, it is very possible that his life and career path would’ve been different.

Providing opportunities

Today it’s much harder for the typical student to replicate Hentoff’s experience at Backyard U. Many students now opt to go to community college as a cost-saving measure, thus breaking up the continuity of their college experience. Those enrolled in 4-year schools are often juggling part-time jobs and internships with their studies.

What’s often lost is a path toward finding one’s interests and even calling through the kind of experiential learning that extracurricular activities can afford.  They also provide opportunities to develop social competence and leadership skills — qualities that will help anyone in work and life in general.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not claiming that an individual is forever deprived because she didn’t get to write for the college literary journal or run for the student government. However, I am suggesting that lives can be enriched and seeds of meaningful careers can be sown through immersive extracurricular activities, and that it would behoove us to offer these opportunities to as many students as possible.

News flash! Unpaid internships may be illegal

On several occasions this blog has raised concerns about the legality of unpaid internships, despite the widespread use of this practice.  My basic point has been that many unpaid internships appear to violate federal and state minimum wage laws.

Of course, for years college and graduate students have signed on as unpaid interns with private, non-profit, and government employers.  Now, with the bad economy, many unemployed older workers are working for free as well as a way of re-entering the labor market or maintaining a presence in a profession.

Finally we’re seeing some attention being drawn to this form of exploitation:

Economic Policy Institute policy paper

Yesterday, the Economic Policy Institute released a policy memorandum authored by Kathryn Anne Edwards and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez,  recommending policy reforms concerning unpaid internships:

Despite internships’ importance to the labor market as a crucial form of vocational training and pre-employment vetting, they are only loosely regulated through vague and outdated employment law. Moreover, these regulations go essentially unenforced. . . . In light of these outcomes, this paper contends that the current system of regulations governing internships must be reformed, both for the immediate protection of students’ rights and also to maintain a strong and vibrant labor market that compensates all workers fairly.

Steven Greenhouse piece

Today, the New York Times ran a piece by labor reporter Steven Greenhouse questioning the legality of unpaid internships:

With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.

Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.

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EPI policy memorandum

Greenhouse article

Previous post on unpaid internships

My 2002 law review article, “The Employment Law Rights of Student Interns”

The legality and ethics of unpaid internships

A lot of people are working for free these days.  Many are students who are securing unpaid internships as a possible investment in a future career.  Others are unemployed and want to gain experience and contacts, so they are volunteering their time and talent.   They are heeding advice by career counselors and columnists to offer to work without pay as a way of opening doors to new jobs and careers.

From a practical standpoint, I don’t blame anyone for using the internship/volunteer route to enter or re-enter the workforce, especially in today’s difficult economy.  As an educator, I have given that advice many times to students and recent graduates.  But I do so with ambivalence.  Something is very wrong with our economic system when those who provide genuine labor are not compensated for their work.  While I can understand public and non-profit employers having to rely on unpaid interns, it is wrong when profit-making enterprises do not pay at least the minimum wage.

In addition, it’s very likely that many of these arrangements — especially the common practice of unpaid internships — violate minimum wage laws.  The Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal wage and hour statute, does allow exemptions to the minimum wage for those who meet “trainee” status.  However, one of the requirements for trainee status is that the employer “derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees or students, and on occasion his/her operations may actually be impeded.”  This is an awfully tough standard to meet.  Most interns provide an “immediate advantage” to the employer, even if the work involves relatively unskilled labor.

It’s not necessarily the small “mom & pop” businesses that are stiffing their interns.  Several years ago, in researching a law review article on the rights of student interns (see link below), I was stunned to learn that as of 2000, employers such the ACLU, Brookings Institution, CNN, Merrill Lynch, MTV, Rolling Stone magazine, Sotheby’s auction house, and the White House were among the prestigious and presumably well-financed entities whose internship programs provided no compensation.  Hopefully that has changed, but even so, today there is no shortage of other employers who happily accept free labor.

We have become so accustomed to unpaid internships as a rite of passage that we ignore the significant social and economic class implications.  Fields such as journalism (print and electronic), politics, and the arts are infamous for offering unpaid internships.  It means that these opportunities are disproportionately limited to those who can afford to work for free.

I am skeptical that there will be any hue and cry against this widespread practice.  For students, volunteer internships have become very much a part of the educational and credentialing experience, and now many unemployed folks are joining the fray.  But is the minimum wage really too much to ask for anyone who is providing genuine work contributions to an employer?

For a freely downloadable pdf copy of my law review article, The Employment Law Rights of Student Interns (Connecticut Law Review, 2002)

Working for Free: It’s Not Just for Student Interns Anymore

An article in the Boston Globe starts by profiling a laid-off executive search firm consultant who is attempting to jumpstart her job prospects by volunteering with a non-profit agency.  The article goes on to say:

At a time when companies aren’t likely to consider inexperienced applicants, more professionals are seeking ways to beef up their resumes by volunteering for work at nonprofit agencies. Many of them are unemployed, or worried about job security. Some have well-polished skills to offer, while others, like [the profiled individual], see volunteering as an opportunity to steer their careers in a new direction.

Yup, we’re seeing it everywhere: Laid-off and unemployed workers are trying to bolster their job prospects by volunteering.

Lest I be misunderstood, I want to emphasize that volunteering to contribute to one’s community is a great thing.  But volunteering because you’re without a job and can’t obtain paid work is, well, often not so great.

However, in some cases, it may be necessary, or at least a means to an end.

Before the meltdown, working for free was considered the province of the student intern.  Now the ranks of unpaid workers are swelling with those who have a lot more experience than the typical student intern.  I hope that their efforts will translate into good paying jobs down the line.  As an educator I probably will suggest to others that they consider the volunteer route to pick up experience and contacts.

But I also know that our economy has a long way to go towards recovery if this is the approach that people are taking to get back on a payroll.  After all, something has gone haywire when people aren’t compensated for their labor.

For “Volunteers discover another path in job hunt”: boston.com/jobs/news/articles/2009/08/03/volunteering_your_way_to_a_new_job/

A legal sidebar: Several years ago I wrote a long law review article analyzing the employment law rights of student interns.  I observed that roughly half of student internships are unpaid, and I concluded that many of them are in apparent violation of minimum wage laws.  No doubt some of the volunteer arrangements for more experienced workers also are in likely violation of these laws.  To download a pdf file of my law review article, “The Employment Law Rights of Student Interns”: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1303705.