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Federal Judge Says Interns Should Be Paid
An anonymous reader writes "Student interns are typically relegated to menial tasks like fetching coffee and taking out the trash, the idea being that they get paid in experience instead of money. On Tuesday, Manhattan Federal District Court Judge William H. Pauley disagreed, ruling in favor of two interns who sued Fox Searchlight Pictures to be paid for their work on the 2010 film Black Swan. The interns did chores that otherwise would have been performed by paid employees. Pauley ruled, in accordance with criteria laid out by the U.S. Department of Labor, that unpaid internships should be educational in nature and specifically structured to the benefit of the intern, and reasoned that if interns are going to do grunt work like regular employees, then they should be paid like regular employees."
The article seems to imply that this might be the beginning of the end for the rampant abuse of unpaid internships: "Judge Pauley rejected the argument made by many companies to adopt a 'primary benefit test' to determine whether an intern should be paid, specifically whether 'the internship’s benefits to the intern outweigh the benefits to the engaging entity.' Judge Pauley wrote that such a test would be too subjective and unpredictable."
It's not the judge's job to defend the internship concept.
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If you have to pay interns like regular employees, what's the point of hiring interns?
Because some of them are good enough that you will want to employ them later but you can't really tell which ones from a conventional interview.
Personally I think no-one should be employed for zero pay, interns are not slaves.
The "point" of hiring interns is to provide them with an educational experience. That's why you don't have to pay them - because they show up primarily for their own benefit and provide few, if any, benefits to the host organization. People who show and do valuable work for you are called "employees," and the thing about employees is that they have a legal right to be paid. Once upon a time, businesses understood this and hired seasonal workers (students on summer vacation) for a small salary. Nowadays every imbecile thinks that an "intern" is a source of free labor. Wrong.
If you want free labor and you're a for-profit business? Screw you. We have minimum wage laws for a reason. You are not allowed to make a profit off of someone's labor and not pay them. "Internship" is not a code word for "someone I can't be bothered to pay."
An internship should clearly be:
- For a well-defined project;
- For a limited time;
- Paid (at a basic level);
- As much work for the employer as it is for the intern.
If you're not mentoring your interns heavily, you stand no chance of developing a talent pipeline. I wrote about my experiences with an internship program here: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/18/lessons-learned-from-training-interns/
The critical aspect is that you have to have the available bandwidth to mentor and supervise an intern. You have to give them clear goals and a clear chance to succeed.
There are plenty of paid internships out there already. The paid internships are actually much more likely to get the student a real job after college, too. Also remember that the students are still paying tuition for the credit hours their internship earns them.
We need these jobs that teach kids skills, and/or allow them to start to earn money, and find out what it entails for working a job, dependability and responsibility, and how to manage money.
They can't very well learn to manage money when they aren't earning any.
Minimum wage is so low that any company who wants to grow their own talent can pay it painlessly.
The skilled trades, unlike various Elitist Fuck Corporations, pay their apprentices because otherwise said apprentices wouldn't be able to have food, clothing and shelter.Internships/apprenticeships are increasing as they are the (proven over CENTURIES) way to grow skilled tradespeople.
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If those industries cannot survive without a large pool of free labor, then they should go the way of the dodo.
Well, say goodbye to internships...
Try having a look at a country where this has long been established in law, and you'll find internships are flourishing.
What we've said goodbye to is the exploitation of free labour to do menial tasks that offered no real benefit to the intern. There's a great scheme in Scotland where the enterprise development agency funds internships for students/recent graduates at new startups. There are strict conditions attached to the money, as the internship has to be directly related to a specific project, so that the intern is exposed to the full lifecycle and gets genuine experience to talk about at interview. This gives the businesses the opportunity to take a chance on something new or different, benefiting everyone. (Normally.) In fact, there's a great history of companies taking on their interns after, as these companies are at a stage of rapid expansion.
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I always assumed interns actually performed services in relation to what their field of study is. Fashion students do fashion work like costumes, makeup, jewelry making, etc. Journalism students check facts, review articles, report on local/low importance stories. Other students perform tasks actually related to their future job. And these tasks for all interns include some grunt work such as cleaning up the shop, checking supplies, pumping the bellows at the forge, whatever is needed.
But I don't think anyone goes to college to be coffee-handler or floor-sweeper. If that is the extant of their internship experience, they should be paid like the other employees. Or better, they should report that to their professor/school, and that company should be excluded from the internship choices. When their free labor pool disappears, they will stop abusing the process.
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Volunteering at for profit businesses is generally speaking illegal. Calling it something else does not fool the law. I would imagine they have trouble finding paid internships and outside pressure like college credits requires them to do this work.
this doesnt stop unpaid internships.
RTFA.
this stops unpaid interns being used as free labor for activites that cannot be onsidered educational. two film school students being given an internship on a movie and being used as unpaid labor instead of being TAUGHT THINGS. that is the sort of thing being stopped. not unpaid internships as a whole, but those which are simply trying to get free labor and not fulfilling the educational requirement.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You are absolutely correct. Here's an excerpt from a slave owners diary in 1861:
When Dick married Hetty, the Anderson house was next door. The two families agreed to sell either Dick or Hetty, whichever consented to be sold. Hetty refused outright, and the Andersons sold Dick that he might be with his wife. This was magnanimous on the Andersons' part, for Hetty was only a lady's-maid and Dick was a trained butler, on whom Mrs. Anderson had spent no end of pains in his dining-room education, and, of course, if they had refused to sell Dick, Hetty would have had to go to them. Mrs. Anderson was very much disgusted with Dick's ingratitude when she found he was willing to leave them. As a butler he is a treasure; he is overwhelmed with dignity, but that does not interfere with his work at all.
Clearly the slave owning society feel they are being overly generous by giving an education to their property. They even gave him a choice of where to work for free! Your vision of society fits perfectly in line with the Antebellum south. (To be clear, I'm not calling you a racist, you're just pro-slavery which is actually frowned upon in most societies in the 21st century)
Yeah sorry, but no. I've run internship programs in the past, and fundamentally they all serve a single purpose: To ensure that a company can hire the best graduates possible.
Hire an intern. Pay them well. Treat them well. Give them the best training your company can provide. After their 3months -> year placement, send them back to complete their degree knowing far more than when they arrived at your company.
If you do this (and really it isn't very hard), then the intern will usually contact you before they've spoken to any other companies (which means you get the long term pay off). They'll also tell the other students in their year that you're a really cool company (which leads to more CV's arriving in your office), and they'll also tell their lecturers how great you were at training them (which usually means those same lecturers will pass you details on their best students for next year).
the one and only purpose of interning is to have the opportunity to shine. It's difficult to get hired as an employee -- there's a lot to prove and a lot of competition. It's way easier as an intern. And it's the foot in the door. You do have the opportunity to do really well, get noticed, and eventually get hired. And all you need to do is to work for free until that happens. That's pretty swell.
That's the lie they tell you, but don't believe it. They're really just using you. Statistically, in the fields that abuse unpaid internships, those with internships on their resumes get hired after graduation at a rate about 2% higher than those without.
I offered you a plain donut, you accepted a plain donut, that's the contract. Offer and acceptance. And that would probably be the last free donuts the office got.
Now in plain fact YOU didn't offer anyone a "free donut": the corporation did. This is a critical distinction.
Corporations exist solely by virtue of Nanny State interference in the operations of the Free Market.
This gives corporations--which offer internships--a vastly privileged position in the negotiations they undertake with potential employees, interns, etc.
Again: corporations are a privileged form of social organization by statute (the reforms to the Companies Act in Great Britain in the 1850's, and similar acts passed by parliaments and congresses around the world.) I own a corporation, and when I incorporated I did not engage in free an uncoerced trade with my fellow humans: I filed forms with the government that upon approval gave me as a corporate owner certain legal, state-defined and state-protected privileges that my employees do not have the benefit of.
Advocates of Corporatism like yourself tend to forget this little detail: you as the owner or agent of a corporation have the backing of the massive, coercive power of the State. Your employees do not.
So quit pretending you live in some mythical Free Market where the Nanny State hasn't tilted the scales massively in your favour. Show a little humanity and humility and decency, and remember that what the State giveth the People can damned well take away.
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Unpaid internships are used as a class barrier in many industries. It is simply too expensive for any "lower class plebs" to get into fashion or whatever, because they have to pay cost of living in some place like New York for years on no wage to get a foot in the door.
I hear similar complaints from businesses all the time: "Employees cost me X amount of money every year!"
In fact, I hear it so often, I've taken to asking them, "Then why do you have any, if all they ever do is cost you money?"
Never have gotten a straight answer...
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Unpaid internships are a scam. If the intern isn't doing work worth paying him minimum wage, what's the point of the internship? It becomes a rite of passage instead of on-the-job education.
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I think that analogy over simplifies the problem. The real issue is that the interns were promised an internship which would teach them valuable movie production skills, and instead they were given no training and used as unpaid waiters. The bait and switch is on the type of work they were promised that they would be doing. The company broke the contract and now owes them monetary compensation because they failed to provide the agreed upon compensation (training in the art of movie production).
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