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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."
If you have to pay interns like regular employees, what's the point of hiring interns?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
If interns have to get paid, there goes Hollywood, Print, and Radio media industries... Interns pretty much do everything these days.
Hello Mexicans. In corporate Amerika the company always wins.
All this means is that there will be fewer internships, thus fewer opportunities for unskilled students (or otherwise) to gain experience. Keep in mind that these students are working of their own free will.
Unpaid internships are a huge crutch perpetuating class divisions here in the US. I wonder what will change now that rich kids no longer have the advantage of being able to say "I'll work for free."
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.
In USA the internship is the only way for somebody to enter the labour force and actually learn on a job that they could not otherwise land most likely. The minimum wage laws and the socialist State agenda already made it impossible for people to take very low paid position only to be apprentices, so apprenticeship is dead in America because of the minimum wage.
Until now it was quite curious to see that a person couldn't be paid less than minimum wage even if he wanted to (in order to land his first job, where he could learn something rather than spending years in worthless education system, racking up the insurmountable debt.)
Obviously this judge thought that it is unfair to allow people to keep a loophole, where they could still start with a company at a low level by being interns and then learn and eventually progress forward, so if this stands then this would be the last nail in the coffin of apprenticeship in USA as we know it.
As always in the name of 'fairness' the government takes away opportunities. This is the same thing in this case as it is in all other such cases, including minimum wage laws, including various labour regulations that make it expensive to hire people that are just not economically viable at higher wages.
By the way, just count the number of stories in the news where government gets involved in whatever way and says: companies must do this and companies must do that, businesses have all these obligations, from taxes and health care to minimum wages and whatever benefits and conditions (free birth control for some reason, paying people in birth control?) What I want to say is that if you take a step back and look from a higher level at this, you'll see an amazing encroachment on the rights of individuals to agree with each other upon mutually beneficial conditions of employment or other forms of contracts and governments intervening in every aspect of every possible contract and business. You shouldn't be surprised at growing unemployment (and the only reason the gov't is able to declare unemployment as low as 7-8% right now is various accounting tricks, otherwise you'd know that the real unemployment in USA is about quarter of all people that can work).
You can't handle the truth.
We have learned the lessons of Kramerica and intern abuse.
Unpaid internships have always been very restricted according to labor laws. It has always been the case that many companies in the entertainment and publishing and fashion industries were breaking the law. What is new is simply that a few former interns got fed up enough with their treatment that they are ratting out their unethical non-employers ;-)
TO ARMS ! TO ARMS! Some judge is legislating form the bench that people can't freely enter into any contract they so desire !~!!
TIME FOR MORAL OUTRAGE!
Question- are all libertarians coke snorting sociopaths who long to the good old days of feudalism.
Or what?
"Fine. Here's $5000. Now remove from your resume that you interned on Black Swan ."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Does this mean the kneepad earners are entitled to back pay at the same rate as the available escorts? Hearings coming to House and Senate?
I can't comment on specifics, as I've never done an internship, but my impression is that the theory is to get the intern a little bit of exposure to the field they are trying to get into, with the byproduct of some internships leading to legitimate jobs or networking with those they interned with. However, if the internships are being used as an excuse to use these interns as nothing but grunt workers for tasks completely unrelated to their field, it seems the exercise is a waste on any but a networking level, and even then, they'd be cultivating contacts whom they will just resent anyway.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
permatemps, contractors and so on are just other ways to get work for free / low cost and in the case of some contractors like fedex make them pay the costs of your business.
some schools make you pay for the credits so work for free and pay to get credit for it.
good enough does not work for office boy interns where they don't even do real work / do stuff they are not going to school for.
Need apprenticeships with real training in the IT / field.
I worked as an "intern" for 16 months for a telecom provider, and got what I considered to be a decent wage for it. (About 3/5 the starting wage for a fresh-out-of-school programmer at that company).
If someone wants to volunteer for a position on their own time, then that's okay--but that's not what I'd call an internship position, and the system shouldn't be set up to have people needing to volunteer full-time.
Regardless of the outcome, there are now 2 interns who need to find a new career path, because they'll never work in that town again. Hollywood holds grudges, forever...
Leapfrog Technology Group abuses interns
Here is the job add with some added mark up
Fun points are up 3 months full time with no pay
and they have the balls to say "This means that if you don't believe there is any value to 12 weeks of unpaid on the job training, then this opportunity is not for you. We're looking for those individuals with long term aspirations in mind, not someone simply looking for a paycheck."
added mark up start with --
What is an Information Technology Internship?
An IT Internship is both an educational experience and a potential full time job after completion.
An IT Internship teaches students how to apply existing skills to real-world environments.
An IT Internship gives students the opportunity to learn new skills to better prepare for the competitive job market after graduation.
An IT Internship offers a variety of positions in at various types of organizations.
--point 4 is part of payed jobs
We offer internships to highly motivated individuals who want to enhance their IT exposure while working for a technology company focused on consulting and managed IT support. Our IT operations are located both in Chicago's Loop. We are currently seeking two interns to assist with our outsourced support program for our client located in the Chicagoland area.
Desired Experience
1 - 2 years --For a Work for free job?
Desired Education
High School or higher --OK
Desired Technical Skills
Windows 7, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Remote Access, Remote Desktop, Active Directory Administration, Basic Group Policy. --ok
Desired Soft Skills
Additional third party application skills and network infrastructure a plus. Ability to heavily multitask, excellent written and verbal skills, ability to understand business concepts and operations, independent worker, punctual, professional, asks detailed questions.
Must enhance skills on their own time when necessary at home or in office. --so not only is this work for free it's work off the clock at home as well?
Job Description and Career Opportunity
Throughout the course of each day, Leapfrog Technology Group delivers the absolute highest quality and most reliable technical support and network design\implementation services to small and medium organizations between 5 to 150 computers with one or more servers. Leapfrog is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the Midwest Region, focusing on network infrastructure, advanced network infrastructure and managed services. Established in 2002, the company employs a small group of highly capable senior engineers focused on providing IT strategy and ongoing operational support.
We are currently seeking candidates through our Campus Relations Program for our Information Technology Development Program. This program provides challenging assignments and exceptional growth opportunities. In your role as a Help Desk Analyst, you will expand your skill set by providing prompt and effective support for our clients technical needs. Additionally, Leapfrog has a web design division, provides hardware\software sales, provides project management services, and in this role, additional non technical skills will be developed. This internship requires heavy multitasking, use of technology software to ease the burden on the support specialist, and is extremely challenging. Even for seasoned IT professionals, a role as an IT consultant is a very challenging one. We believe that this will be a position in which the staff is held to the highest standards and will be held accountable to use Leapfrog's proven methodologies.
Must have the following qualities:
Business savvy: You are smart and you understand the business implications of your ideas. You are successful in translating classroom training into workplace solutions.
Results focused: You always give it your best but you're not satisfied until you've acco
The interns where I work have more perks, do less work, can leave any time they want, have unfettered access to just about anyone in the company AND get paid... often more than I do. They don't get benefits like heath insurance though... so there's that.
I don't get why internships were ever unpaid in the first place. In the course of training someone to do the job they are interning for, they end up providing some form of valuable work, even if it is at a lower level of effectiveness/efficiency than a highly-skilled employee. As an engineer, I have the good fortune of being in a field where internships are almost universally paid, and paid well for that matter. (Many engineering internships run from double to triple minimum wage.) Even my most basic intern experience (which is barely considered "engineering" by my standards) paid over double minimum wage (back in 2006). I can't fathom a sort of situation where an intern provides absolutely no useful work. Can anyone provide an example?
(((dB)))
I was never interested in the college route, and got lucky and got an unpaid internship when I was younger that blossomed in to a 13 year career. This ruling makes me sad because I know that my life would be way, way worse if I hadn't gotten that unpaid internship. I didn't have a degree or anything to offer the company that gave me the internship, just what I knew from hobby programming as a kid, which was why the unpaid part made so much sense.
This kind of ruling basically shuts off a great future for anyone who was like me, and that is bad news. If you don't want an unpaid internship, don't take one. But why rob someone who will benefit from it of the possibility to improve their lives? I'd probably working some shit job right now making minimum wage if I didn't have that opportunity.
Slashdot, I don't want to disable ads on my account, I believe you deserve to get whatever revenue it is from me. But if the stupid slide-over-the-page ads continue, that's going to annoy me so I will disable advertisements.
Twinstiq, game news
so, why should work be any different?
All he did was uphold the existing DOL laws. This isn't a change. At most, it is making people aware of abuses that occur in the name of student internships.
Where I work, there are perma-temps going on years with the company, with less pay, no vacation, no reviews or raises. Meanwhile, while the perma-temps are repeatedly the highest performers, more recently-hired 'actual' employees have fairly abysmal performance. While I hate the idea that laws need to made to control every possible senerio in everyday life and business, it's difficult to find a non-governmental-controlled fair solution to both the employer and employees.
You used to be free to decide for yourself whether to take an unpaid internship. Now you can't. The internship police won't allow it. Because they know more about your life than you, so they'll be making your choices for you.
Of course people should get paid if they were promised an internship but end up doing menial labor. But they have a simple solution: they can just walk away from their unpaid internship without losing anything. If you voluntarily stay in an unpaid internship, presumably you are getting something out of it.
The insidious effect of this rule will be to place organizations providing good unpaid internships at a much higher legal risk, because the organizations that provide them now have to worry about getting dragged into court by a disgruntled intern for back pay. That not only means they are going to be less likely to have interns in the first place, it also means that interns who can't clearly contribute at a high level from day one have to be kicked out right away.
"Fine. Here's $5000. Now remove from your resume that you interned on Black Swan ."
I'd be perfectly happy with the intern system if it wasn't being abused.
If people are going to be deliberate, exploitive assholes just because they can be, then I'll bill them for my time and energy, (and I'll put whatever the hell I want on my resume, thank you very much).
If there is genuine good will and an intention to share skills and knowledge, then I'm perfectly happy to work my ass off as a student without pay. If you don't think I'm worthy of passing your skills onto, then don't take me on as an intern. I'm not a slave. I'm in love with your profession. Or at least I was until I realized it was filled with psychopaths.
The fact that the system is abused and that people are willing to pretend it's not happening, means that the world is just that much shittier a place to live and work. Nice job.
Hell on earth is created by its occupants and how they choose the treat each other.
This ruling well have exactly zero effect on internships. There will be the same number of students gaining valuable experience and knowledge from companies through interning as before this ruling.
What it will do is seriously curtail the number of companies who fail to pay employees they choose to call interns, but are not. Unless you are interning at a Starbucks, getting coffee for people provides no benefit to the intern, and is, and has been, illegal.
This is not a judge revising the law. This is a judge finally applying the guidelines that define an internship to companies that have abused them for years.
"employed for zero pay" = VOLUNTEER
"forced to work for zero pay" = SLAVE
So is it now illegal to volunteer at a soup kitchen? The lunch lady union is preparing their lawsuit now...
For my degree, I needed intern experience in order to graduate.
There were two stipulations --
1: it be related to my major
2: it is paid
As a student, I felt like I was making lots of money (because my previous work was the sort that didn't even require a high school diploma), but to the company, student labor is still ridiculously cheap. If a company can't afford to pay their interns, then they have no business hiring them.
Go to the Prison-Industrial Complex, pay them a low fee, and get your labor for next to nothing (or free).
This has been about the only growth industry in the US for decades.
This is very appealing to Red states as it gets them a good chunk of money both over and under the table whilst also satisfying their twisted Purtianical sadism fetishes. The fact that most of the sla^H^H^H workers are minorities is just gravy.
Very related: for-profit prison companies are now lobbying if not outright writing ever more laws with prison sentences as it directly increases their profits. Greed and sick, religion-driven punishment fantasies are the twin reasons the US has more citizens imprisoned percentage-wise than anywhere else.
Soon there will be no tools left. What are we supposed to exploit the desperate with then? Help?
I once offered Blizzard $1000 to be an intern at a time when I was desperate to have experience on my resume. I would have been glad if they accepted too. It is hard to get your foot in the door in the video game programming/design industry.
God spoke to me
If you want to work for free then work for a charity or relatives and not some dipshit that hasn't got the message about slavery yet.
Consider some industries that can be very lucative and exclusive - Advertising boutiques, high end fashion houses etc. You can't get in without experience.
Who can afford to work as an unpaid intern for 2 years? Those with Daddy's wealth.
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.
I ran a company for quite a few years. The summer students I had were paid something, but I have to say that the assumption that employers are getting something for nothing is simply ridiculous. I had to do background checks before allowing them access to my business assets. I had to supply them with desk-space, a computer, a phone. I had to assign someone to train and then to supervise them. Most of their "work" was them learning to do the job. I had a couple who worked out really well, but most were revenue-neutral at best. The last few years I ended up not doing it even when kids begged to work for me for nothing. I would liken it to the opportunities available in international aid. Kids go off and volunteer at orphanages in India or whatever. These days, NGOs usually charge their volunteers a fee in exchange for the opportunity. They have figured out that, in the end, it _costs_ them money to host volunteers.
If you have to pay interns like regular employees, what's the point of hiring interns?
I don't know, maybe to educate them? What a concept!
Interns aren't supposed to be doing the work of regular employees. If they are doing the work of regular employees then they ARE regular employees and should be paid as such. An internship isn't supposed to be a loophole to acquire free labor.
They should be honored for the privilege of getting us our coffee.
But what if their work is not realistically worth even the minimum wage to the employer?
If it isn't worth even minimum wage then it probably isn't very important is it? Recognize the internship for what it is supposed to be which is an educational opportunity. An internship isn't supposed to be a way for companies to skirt minimum wage laws and get free labor.
I'm about to finish up my second year as a permatemp. My previous employer kept me for three years as a permatemp. At my current employer, I'm "laid off" for two months once a year, then I have to reapply and fill out paperwork for my own job, because otherwise the state will make them treat me like a real employee.
I'm currently an EE on a co-op for a large chip manufacturer. They pay me well for what I do and in return I do quality work for them. An unpaid internship makes no sense because there are two possibilities:
You're not getting paid to do worthwhile work (in other words, you're getting shafted)
You're not getting paid because your work is worthless (in other words, you're not getting any real experience)
I'm glad that someone recognizes that.
Not at the college level, but I've heard from similar things at the High School level where they're expected to work for experience rather than pay.
IIRC, the local ski-hill often utilized unpaid high-school students in the capacity, but at least they often get free lift passes out of it. Other businesses offered little to nothing. It may be different now, but back in the day you were expected to be unpaid.
I think this is currently a similar program.
Also see here
I thought it said interns should be laid.
-Bill Clinton
If it makes you feel better, you're an exception to the rule and unpaid internships do far more harm than good overall. Without this institution maybe it would have been easier for you to get a job just by showing experience and skill, unpaid internships contribute to the "job requirement inflation" that has made a Bachelor's degree the new high school diploma and wants everyone to have 5 years' experience.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Don't you normally work out your job responsibilities and payment BEFORE you start, not in some court case afterwards?
If they agreed to work for nothing, how do they have ground to sue, specifically when it is widely known that their job would involve exactly what it involved, grunt work, coffee gettins, and trash removal.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The system shouldn't be set up to essentially require people to volunteer in order to get experience...but it's basically impossible to prevent people from volunteering _should they so choose_.
An "internship" to me is a paid position for someone who is still in training and is therefore not ready to be hired as a permanent employee.
From TFS:
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."
All this judge did was rule in accordance to existing law - that interns are there to be taught the tricks of the trade, not be your goddamn coffee mule, and if you're going to utilize them as such, they must be paid for their efforts (and rightfully so).
For fuck's sake, guys, learn to read at least the damn summary before you go off on a nonsensical tangent; perhaps you'll learn to think better of it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"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."
Really? I've worked with a lot of interns and I don't remember having any of them doing this. You may consider working on a small website nobody has time for 'taking out the trash', but I don't think that is what the OP intended.
love is just extroverted narcissism
One-off stuff is fine, that's called volunteering.
I got into grad school because I worked for free. To get into grad school in science, you need to have professors that are interested in supporting you (at least partially supporting you, as once you are in you can teach to get department funds). As someone who had been out of academia for a decade, I was having trouble finding any professors who would take the risk of supporting me and I couldn't get accepted to school. Then a friend of mine who was a recent PhD grad told me that I should just offer to work for free. After a few months of working for free, the professor I volunteered for, as well as few others, were willing to say they would support me. Lo and behold, I was accepted when I applied again. I think in many cases, interns should be paid, but I don't think a blanket law requiring them to be paid makes sense. I would never have been able to get into the school I wanted without volunteering my time first. The professor I worked for simply didn't have any money to pay me, though I'm sure now that he would have it he could have. It's just a conjecture, but I bet there are other situations where volunteering first gets your foot in the door where there simply would be no other option to open that door.
The soylent pickup is on Wednesdays...
Lay off... the aristocracy???
Pardon me, I need to step outside for a moment because my raucous laughter will be highly disturbing and I don't want to alert my cubicle neighbors of my mounting hysterical rage.
Who would even do an unpaid internship?
I'm doing an internship right now, and if they didn't pay me I would have just continued with my studies.
Sure, you get to make connections with people that might help you later one, but 6 months of unpaid work is a lot.
Re-read the summary and the ruling. This isn't going to end unpaid internships.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Maybe they should do a degree that isn't useless.
What kind of internship program is going to actually have you sitting around "learning" while doing nothing that benefits the company? This concept completely baffles me. I mean the easiest way to teach someone about a business... is to get them to do the work required by the business.
Are you telling me that American employers haven't figured out how to get more work done with an intern than without an intern?
Baffling...
I recall you as one of the people who insists that copying is stealing. You vehemently denounce piracy, saying that artists deserve to be paid, and people who just make a copy without paying are cheating the artists. Pirates are not paying for the labor, the hard work artists put into the creation of their works, and are therefore allegedly making it impossible to earn a living from art.
But interns? If artists deserve compensation for labor, and not just once, but each time their work is used, surely interns deserve some pay for their labor, just once?
How do you justify what seems to me to be a huge double standard?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Because for-profit ventures didn't exist before or independently of central governments looooong before Randians existed. Because Standard Oil wasn't an abuse monopoly during the Randian Golden Age of post Civil War to WWI. Because Monsanto and Lockheed Martin would fold up shop tomorrow if everyone went Galt and world governments disappeared.
Because you guys are freaking Loony Tunes.
'the database'? WTF? Of course the intern doesn't work on a live database.
The intern may download a free database engine and install it on their personal laptop. He/she may then frolick/wallow in the database with admin rights and can ask questions of experts while fetching their coffee. Perhaps the expert will allow them to install a real world database on their laptop as further education.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
People should be able to make their own choices. It's getting to the point where people can get sued after the fact for making a indy movie with volunteers or even accepting help to move to another apartment. Liberty is just fading away.
That may be true. But in a free society, they would have been paid exactly what they contracted for before they started the internship. The rights of the two parties to the contract would have had some significance, and a court would not come in later and overturn an agreement between two free people who voluntarily entered an agreement for legal activities.
The problem with "free society" is the same problem as deregulation. People want a society free of government control without appreciation for the massive differences in bargaining power between people and corporations. In a truly free society there would be no minimum wages and everyone would be working for peanuts. I say this as someone who often has unemployed mature aged people come past my small shop front looking for work and offering to take on the same pay as some 15 year old, which is approximately half their minimum wage. It's a race to the bottom.
Fortunately we don't live in a truly free society and a dramatically one sided contract is in legal terms "an unconscionable contract" and thus not enforceable, and if one side of the contract had already been fulfilled the legal system offers recourse to ensure both sides are treated fairly.
I could sell you my house for $1. And I could also take you to court and likely get my house back (with legal expenses though so don't treat this as a literal example).
The article seems to imply that this might be the beginning of the end for the rampant abuse of unpaid internships.
Nice summary. Obviously the OP has never heard of a good internship experience.
Who are these interns fetching coffee, making copies, taking out the trash, etc? I don't know anybody who did such things in their internships. Most of the time they were used as cheap alternatives to contractors. The companies around my university could get an engineering or compsci student for $15/hr - $20/hr and have them do system administration, testing/qa, debugging, documentation, etc.
Sounds like all the stories out of EA. Everyone wants to be a game dev. So with the popularity of the job, comes the exploitation of the worker.
Because it is the lazy fat management types to do the laying off of course...
When the org structure of the place you work at starts to look like an upside down pyramid, things have gone awry.
Imagine a place like Innotech from Office Space where the reason you have 8 bosses, is because management actually outnumbers workers. As a worker, looking at management layoffs of workers in this regard, sometimes wonder, "OK who is going to do all the actual work now? Management?"