Unpaid internships are back! New federal court ruling

^ Oh no! Poor kid.

tbf: the Circuit only bounced the case back to the district court, where even the author opines;

Thus, while the entertainment industry is ‘safe’ for now, it may not be for long.

Moreover, the Circuit’s circuitous ruling (pun intended), looks a lot like the DoL’s 6-step evaluation, just that they are re-ordered.

Did anyone see this story?

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/18/goldman_sachs_reduces_intern_day_to_17_hours_after_death_of_bank_of_america_corp_intern/

Kids on CC now are questioning unpaid internships. I think they must be reading this thread.

I am sure there are some companies where your statement is true. I worked for decades in TV and have gone through many an intern. Our company used to hire interns if they were getting credit. We switched to only interns who were getting paid by outside organizations like the National Association of Broadcasters. In every case the interns did not take a job from an entry level worker. They watched and learned and followed around reporters, or helped producers write scripts. You would think that would ease the workload a bit of those who were mentoring, but often it meant more work. Those kids have to be trained. I got to the point where I did not like interns.

One of my first interns was like @katliamom, and learned everything he could about everything in the station. When an emergency arose during an overnight shift he volunteered. Things progressed from there and he is still at that station almost 20 years later. He would not have gotten that internship if we were required to pay him, which means he would not have gotten his foot in the door and gotten his dream job.

I am sure there are abuses but I am strongly in favor of internships, unpaid or not.

Edited to add:

I think that is the difference. For internships where you are actually doing work I think I tend to agree with you that they should be paid; certainly after a substantial length of time they should. For internships where the student is mainly observing and not doing valued work then I have no problem with them being unpaid.

@Erin’s Dad In post #54 you said you had a problem with students not getting paid, especially when they were paying for the college credits. Is that actually the case. When I had my internship back in the 1700s I didn’t have to pay for mine. I wonder what the general rule is nowdays.

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Does anyone know what the accreditation rules are for colleges OUTSOURCING instruction duties to non-accredited organizations?

Not that these accreditation bodies really take their job seriously. UNC only got slapped on the wrist with one-year probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, for teaching phoney classes to athletes for 18 years. It seems to me that SACS also deserves punishment for enabling the fraud.

Can students apply institutional FA to unpaid internships which grant college credit? Or can only students w deep-pocketed parents afford to pay for these college credits?

I don’t know. I also don’t necessarily agree that only kids with deep-pocketed parents can afford to work for free. We had tons of entry level kids who made such meager salaries in TV that they had to find “real” jobs to support themselves. There is no reason an intern couldn’t do that too.
Unlike some interns mentioned in this thread where apparently they are forced to work long hours, ours worked just part-time.

ETA-

Many countries and many professions require “apprenticeships” which are the same thing: unpaid employment where you learn the profession.

I think the difference is if the company is getting a benefit or actually encumbered by the extra work. My company (and me) gets nothing of value from our interns. I spend valuable time and energy teaching them what I know and my workload does not get diminished at all. In fact, it goes up. We aren’t going to pay someone to make me have to work harder.

The company I worked for (and all the media companies I know about or have worked for) didn’t even pay entry-level positions $10 per hour, and capped the hours at 20-something. If they pay permanent employees $7.50 per hour and limit them to 20-some hours, there is no way they would pay an intern anything close to that.

BTW- since we have been talking a lot about TV I will add that many TV employees can not quit anytime they want, but can be let go any day. If they leave they owe a large severance fee.

The difference is that in an apprenticeship, there’s relevant training going on, student performance standards, and a job with at employer in the end.

In the lawsuit of the ‘Black Swan’ movie set interns’, there was no relevant training. The interns were just doing low-level work, like fetching pillows and taking lunch orders, i.e. work that an entry level worker hired off the street could readily do.

FYI, some background on the legal standard for unpaid internships
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2015/07/07/why-the-second-circuit-made-a-flawed-decision-in-upholding-unpaid-internships/

The serve coffee and tea is very much the movie industry. My daughter has a friend got hired at a movie studio and that’s exactly what he did, even with paid salary. He called by daughter asking her how to make tea for the British people. That’s what she’s told me.

DS1 is having an outstanding paid internship this summer. He loves it and he’s gained so many skills before starting as a freshman at university this fall. He has to present to the company executive team this next week for example. He takes pride in the paychecks. But I still would see great value if there were no money. The 40 solid hours a week I think would be asking a bit much for an unpaid gig. I’d say more like 24 hours a week max to let the kid enjoy their summer while also learning how things work inside the glowing cubicles of e-commerce.

With all due respect, that is just impossible to comprehend. Media corporations are not eleemosynary institutions. Interns would not exist if the did not benefit the company somehow, someway; unless you want to assert that they are just sitting there, like a ‘stump on a log’, as my dad used to say.

What would you consider valued vs. unvalued work? For example, is fetching coffee or making copies of scrips value-added?

I worked for a major corporation that had an unpaid intern program for high schoolers. It cost the company money and it was a hassle (we had to invent jobs for the kids, write up reports about their progress, etc.) The VALUE was strictly in branding and PR for the company, but it was certainly no “help” for the staff that had to participate in the program.

Exactly my point; while PR value maybe hard to measure, the company believed that the value gained exceeded the hassle of a bunch of high schoolers roaming the halls.

OTOH, fetching coffe for Fox Searchlight seems like a catering job to me. In other words, if interns didn’t do it for free, Fox would have to pay a caterer/food service to man the food/coffee tables bcos, with 15+ hour work days, caffeine is a necessity.

The problem, I think, is that the temptation is strong for employers to use the unpaid interns for low-level work, instead of spending a lot of time and money actually training them. It’s a lot easier.

Actually, it is not even a temptation. An employer has zero reason to bring on an intern just to sit around and watch others work. Zero.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. There are people who have a pro bono impulse, and also those who just enjoy teaching young people. So I think there are “real” unpaid internships that are designed to teach the interns. The trick is finding out, in advance, whether the one you are looking at is really like that, or if it’s masquerading.

Actually, we do. You are looking at this through way too much of a manual labor lens.

Over the decades, I would say about 80% of our interns are, from a manual labor perspective, totally unnecessary; that is why many are unpaid. However, corporations are no different than other fields, i.e., we compete for workers and, more specifically, we compete for the interest of the youth. We need to develop / have a farm team in place to have a cadre of replacement workers. That is done through exposure to the corporation and seeing who likes said environment etc.

@Hunt is pretty close. Except, I do not think there is really much pro bono about internship, especially internships done on impulse. On impulse, it is about teaching a promising young person who caught your interest about one’s industry in hopes he gets interested in it. I have not met anyone who is spends time teaching without a hope that what is learned is used to that employer’s / field’s benefit, even if a few years later. And it is also about weeding out young people who think they like your industry or corporation, but then realize by simple exposure that they do not enjoy it or are not stimulated by it.

Another point is most corporate learning is not manual, but cerebral, by watching and sitting in on meetings. An intern who literally does nothing, but shadows a top executive learns a whole lot more than someone getting coffee and getting paid for it - in addition to eating extremely well and flying around in a private jet - much more fun than getting coffee. Sure that intern may, incidentally, get a few things for the executive, not the primary or even secondary purpose though. Serious internships are about learning procedures, culture, values, purpose, and management style. Corporation that I know look real hard at excellent unpaid interns and over 90% of those are offered permanent positions.

The apprentices in our architectural office in Germany went to work half time and school half time. They also were only 16 or 17. I have no problem with them not being paid.