Planet of the Interns

How Unpaid Interns Are Fighting Back.

For Generation Y, having an unpaid internship has become an ubiquitous coming-of-age marker as the tattoo. From the minute students walk through the doors of their college’s hallowed halls, they are encouraged to grab every opportunity that comes their way — whether or not they are being compensated for it.

In New York City, the practice of taking on an unpaid internship is especially widespread, despite many students having to take on one or two paying jobs in order to support themselves through school. Many students even have to pay their school in order to receive credit for their work. Yet students often feel obligated to take internships on, a result of pressure from their future careers and the desire to get a foot in the door. But in the past few years interns have made their voices heard, filing lawsuits that state that the jobs they were performing were as employees — and employees get a paycheck.

“Ninety-nine percent of all unpaid internships in the for-profit market are illegal,” said attorney Maurice Pianko at Intern Justice, which represents unpaid interns. “Even for start-ups, there’s no excuse not to pay minimum wage. You’re a business.”

Because internships have not been heavily-regulated by the Fair Labor Standards Act, some companies take advantage of the gray area of unpaid internships to phase out their entry-level jobs. “Unpaid internships, from a policy perspective, are a bad thing,” said Pianko. “They’re usually displacing a paid worker, they rob of tax revenue and they create a barrier to job-market entry for those from most socioeconomic groups.”

Unpaid internships save corporations approximately $2 billion each year, according to Business Insider. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor responded to the growing trend of unpaid internships by creating a set of guidelines. These guidelines state that an unpaid internship cannot be for the benefit of the company and the time spent there should be a period of training and “real world” experience, comparable to a vocational school. The guidelines give exemption to non-profits where the intern may be offering to “volunteer” their time. Yet many unpaid interns are working full-time and over-time, providing data entry, office duties, and other menial tasks. In other cases, paid and unpaid, interns are mistreated and overworked.

The death of a Bank of America intern this past summer after multiple sleepless nights pulled focus to the rise of internships and the loan-laden state of recent college graduates. The controversy comes in the wake of a successful intern lawsuit. In September 2011, two former Fox Searchlight interns, Alex Footman and Eric Glatt, launched a civil action case on their own behalf as well as 100 other former Fox interns. In the landmark June 2013 case, the judge ruled in Footman and Glatt’s favor, agreeing that the time they had spent at Fox was as full-time employees, not interns.

“The reason employers are hiring unpaid interns is to get the labor because they need it — the need for labor isn’t going to go away, simply because employers are required to pay for it,” Glatt told the Free Press. “The explosions of internships are relatively new.” In fact, according to Ross Perlin’s book “Intern Nation”, the number of college-aged interns has doubled since the 1980’s.

Since the Fox Searchlight case, dozens of interns have filed lawsuits against former employers. In New York alone there are multiple open internship lawsuits. Elite Model Management, Hearst Magazines, Gawker, Conde Nast, and Bank of America are only a few of the companies who have been sued for not paying interns.  After a lawsuit in December of 2012, Charlie Rose announced that his production company would be paying back wages to up to 189 interns in a settlement. According to the lawsuit, “central to the show’s lean production are the substantial number of unpaid interns who work on The Charlie Rose Show each day, but are paid no wages…despite the significant work they perform, Charlie Rose interns are not compensated for any of their work, in violations of the New York Labor Law.”

Many colleges sponsor internships fairs, tout the importance of experience, and end up charging students who wish to receive academic credit for their work at the internship. Students at college campuses, the hub of the unpaid intern, are taking notice and encouraging administrations to take a stand. Last May, NYU undergraduates Christina Isnardi and Rachel Whitbeck drafted a petition asking the administration not to post job listings for unpaid internships. The petition collected a few thousand signatures. At the New School, Jens Astrup, co-chair of the USS and a student at Parsons, introduced an initiative that calls for the university to take a stance on unpaid internships.

 “They [the Office of Career Development] use an external service of job listings, so the question is, is there a filtering system they can use? It’s not about filtering out unpaid internships, but ones from for-profit companies that have a certain amount of employees, which takes research,” said Astrup.

At a university where many majors not only encourage but require internships to graduate, the filtering service would be widely used. “The New School Career Services is aware of unpaid internships becoming an issue and welcomes input from students, especially those who have had unpaid internships in the past,” said Sam Biederman, Associate Director of University Communications.

For some students, just as troubling is the fact that they have to pay the school in order to receive credit for their experience. “I’m not being paid for my internship, but I am paying the school for it,” said Elizabeth Bello, a Parsons graduate and intern at Calvin Klein. “I think it’s absolutely necessary to receive compensation for interning. The thought of doing the same job as someone else, but for free, is nauseating.” Despite this, Bello worked two semesters at Calvin Klein.

But not all unpaid interns feel as though they’re being exploited. Brandon Halcomb, a Parsons graduate, worked an unpaid internship at Cosmopolitan Magazine that led into a short period working at Niche Media. “I understood that I wasn’t the most important person there and it was my job to do those things at the end of the day,” said Halcomb. “You have to realize that you’re there as a learning experience.  You’re not there to start a career, you’re there to see how careers are made and what you would do if that was the career path you chose.”

Many students simply cannot afford to work internships. This leaves a gap that only the wealthy are able to build a bridge over by receiving support from their parents. This leg-up into the professional world only further widens the gap.

Some believe that the successful Fox Searchlight lawsuit may be marking the beginning of the end of the era of the unpaid internships. “With this, we expect continued forward movement in terms of suits filed, and likely dozens more cases to be filed over 2013,” said Pianko.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ annual survey, the number of internships, both paid and unpaid, is expected to increase by 2.7 percent in 2013. An upheaval of the unpaid internship system would affect millions of college-aged workers who hope to head off after graduation with a little more than experience lining their pockets.

Reporting by: Alexandra Ackerman and Charlotte Woods