Paying for Internships

Well, it has obviously been a while since I posted here. After daily blogging for almost three months, I decided to take a bit of a breather. I'm hoping to settle down into a weekly posting schedule.

(Side thought... if I saved up all my posts, and scheduled them to automatically post once a week, I would have had almost two years of posts!)

Ok, now that I've justified my slacking off, I thought I would talk about internships. I've posted before about my frustration with how arts organizations use interns. For-profit businesses have jumped on the bandwagon as well, trying to get away with using low or non paid interns instead of actually hiring bona-fide employees.

Well, there's a new wrinkle in the formula. Businesses actually CHARGING folks for the "privilege" of interning.

I first came across this in an arts discussion forum I participate in. Someone was hawking their gallery, and proudly announcing that opportunities were limited for people to pay for internships! Apparently, this is not limited to the arts. Here's an article from the Washington Post from 2010,

More would-be interns paying thousands to land a coveted spot

The article reads:

The Washington Center is the city's largest program, and for the past three years it has placed about 1,500 interns annually, up from about 1,300 in 2007. It charges nearly $9,000 for a summer, including housing.

and:

The National Internship Program, formerly the Washington Internship Program. It charges an enrollment fee of $3,400 without housing and has seen its numbers increase from 166 students last year to an expected 250 to 300 this year. The for-profit company has doubled its staff in that time and is beginning to expand into other major cities.
"There has never been a harder time to get hired," said chief executive Lev Bayer, whose mother started the company nearly 30 years ago. "There is such a need for internships. We have more students than we can ever deal with."

From the U.S. Dept of Labor 

The following six criteria must be applied when making this determination: 

The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment; 

The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern; 

The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff; 

The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded; 

The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; 

The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

On the flip side, people art starting to wake up. This from the New York Times:

A former unpaid intern for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, accusing its parent company, the Hearst Corporation, of violating federal and state wage and hour laws by not paying her even though she often worked there full time.

and:

The lawsuit against Hearst states, “Employers’ failure to compensate interns for their work, and the prevalence of the practice nationwide, curtails opportunities for employment, fosters class divisions between those who can afford to work for no wage and those who cannot, and indirectly contributes to rising unemployment.

“Unpaid interns are becoming the modern-day equivalent of entry-level employees, except that employers are not paying them for the many hours they work,” said Adam Klein, one of the lawyers for Ms. Wang. “The practice of classifying employees as ‘interns’ to avoid paying wages runs afoul of federal and state wage and hour laws.”

and:

Last September, Mr. Klein’s Manhattan-based law firm, Outten & Golden, filed a lawsuit against Fox Searchlight Pictures, accusing it of violating wage laws by using unpaid interns to work on “Black Swan” and other films. Fox Searchlight has denied any wrongdoing.

It is about time. This foolishness of people working at unpaid interns so companies can avoid hiring actual employees has to end!

Ah... and  the latest update. From July 23, 2012 topclassactions.com:

A federal judge has conditionally certified a class action lawsuit covering unpaid Hearst Corp. interns who worked at 19 of the company’s magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, since February 2009.