Slashdot Mirror
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.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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."
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.
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 ;-)
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.
I hope you get modded up, as your comment gets to the core of the issue very nicely. I just wanted to expand on this:
Nowadays every imbecile thinks that an "intern" is a source of free labor.
Yeah, I run a very small software dev business, and on a couple of occasions I have hired interns for the summer. Of course, as I hope everybody here knows, in our industry interns get paid, and pretty well...
A couple of times, in conversations with friends outside the industry, when this subject came up, there was a total disconnect. They wondered how the heck somebody like me could find interns, and it turned out that their bafflement was because they assumed that by "intern" I meant "unpaid". I was so shocked by this ridiculous assumption that the first time I was literally speechless for a few seconds while I processed the concept: "this person thinks that there are young people who will develop software for a for-profit entity without being paid, wtf...". Then I slowly explained: "no, in this industry employers consider it customary to pay our employees..."
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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.
"There are plenty of paid internships out there already"
That's a pretty broad statement that ignores a number of facts, such as:
1) Not every field has paid internships
2) Not every field has internships readily available
3) Not every location has companies nearby willing to take on interns (think small cities and rural areas)
4) Not every paid internship is flexible enough to be viable
5) Not every internship meets the educational requirements some schools have for it to count
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 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).
Fanatically anti-fanatical
But it is the judge's job to determine if working someone without pay is legal or not.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.