“When my bank account went down, I wished it was paid—everybody wishes.”
Internships are something that most students think about at one point or another. The real-world experiences…the opportunities…the connections. For most, it is an opportunity to explore their intended field of interest. It gives students the chance to gain professional experience and insight into the real world. It can be an exciting time.
There are benefits and certain downsides to these internships—the ones that some students know all too well and have caused stirs of controversy…the unpaid internship.
Michelle Goff knows what it is like to take on an unpaid internship such as this. Goff, a senior English secondary education major, interned at Running Press in the summer of 2013 working on projects such as marketing, research and blog tours for unpublished books. She went into the internship three days a week and, because of the time commitment, gave up her paying job as a secretary at a real-estate company.
According to Nancy Hutchison, director of the center for career and professional development, roughly 25 percent of the employers that participate in Cabrini’s internship program are marked as paid. Subsequently, another 25 percent are paid with a stipend, while 50 percent are marked as unpaid. 100 percent of the internships posted on the Job Source database are taken for academic credit.
“They [the students] have to understand that it’s their choice; they don’t have to take an internship that is not paying,” Hutchison said. “They could hold out to find something or, frankly if they don’t need the credit at all, just find a part-time or summer hire where they’ll get paid. Hopefully it’s something in their field so they get experience, they won’t get the credit though. The bottom line is if they want it to be on their transcript so it reflects that they did an internship, then it has to be linked to the credit.”
Goff had the option to take the internship that summer with an academic credit of three credits. She decided against taking it for credits, however, since students have to pay for the extra credits over the summer. Still, Goff was able to learn a lot from her time as an intern there. “It was more the money aspect—not the company. I really always liked the internship—nothing bothered me, loved the people I worked with and learned so much from them.”
According to Phil Gardner’s “Reaction on Campus to the Unpaid Internship Controversy,” “98 percent [of those surveyed] agreed that students with internship (professional) experience are more employable than students without similar experiences.” Basically, it’s better to have an unpaid internship than to have no experience at all, with 85 percent of the people surveyed agreeing.
Having practical experience helped graduates to have higher income; students who completed an internship while in college earned nearly 15% more on average — $30,000 versus $26,000 — than those who did not undertake an internship, according to Journalist’s Resource.
But that still leaves some people wondering over the unpaid internship itself. If an employer isn’t paying their interns, they have to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and apply the six-point test, which includes:
- 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; and
- The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.
“Unpaid internships have tended to be most popular in industries like media, communications, entertainment, and publishing,” Craig Durrant writes in “To Benefit or Not to Benefit: Mutually Induced Consideration as a Test for the Legality of Unpaid Internships.” “Moreover, unpaid internships are particularly prevalent among small businesses, ‘which often look to save money while benefiting from the productivity of the students they hire.’” Some of the negative effects of unpaid internships can include: financial detriment to the intern, unfair advantage to wealthier students, increase in unemployment rate and a lack of protection against discrimination and harassment, according to the text by Durrant.
Intern lawsuits have been tracked, compiled on ProPublica, dating back to September 2011. One of the most major lawsuits that have been taken out was in late September 2011, regarding the unpaid interns who worked on the movie “Black Swan.” It ruled in favor of the interns who had alleged that Fox Searchlight had violated minimum wage and overtime laws. The post was last updated in October 2013 and has 30 lawsuits posted.
Some media companies have indeed started to pay their interns. In the summer of 2013, Viacom Inc. began paying their interns. Viacom is the parent company of networks such as MTV and Nickelodeon. NBC Universal began to implement a paid internship policy around the same time.
“At the end of the day, interns at many for-profit companies were performing work that would be done by entry-level employees, Peter D’Amato, columnist on unpaid internships for Vitae, said. “I think that as lawsuits continue, companies who need this work done will simply have to pay. You hear a lot that some industries simply can’t afford to pay interns, so the question just becomes, what are students losing by not working for free in a business that struggles to pay entry-level employees?”
D’Amato also wrote an article on Vitae about a New York University student who is petitioning against the posting of illegal unpaid internships (illegal in this case refers to for-profit companies that don’t adhere to the six-point test). “I wanted to write about the story because the internships issue is often poorly understood,” D’Amato said. “Isnardi’s petition was interesting because she is basically asking NYU to abide by the Department of Labor’s (DOL) legal guidelines and hold employers accountable, instead of making students responsible for discerning whether an unpaid internship is legal or not.
Christina Isnardi, student at New York University, created a petition for NYU’s Wasserman Center to stop posting the illegal unpaid internships. “I think that many schools are allowing their students to work for free and they must stop promoting this practice,” Isnardi said via Twitter. “They are promoting a largely illegal and unethical practice that is exploiting their students in plain sight.” As far as her next steps go within her fight, she hopes to “continue putting pressure on schools to cut off the free labor supply, target for-profit employers and involve legislators to enforce the FLSA.”
The summer that Goff did her internship, she lost about $2,000 because she was not able to keep her paying job. The internship was located in Center City and it did not include a stipend for her commute. It cost her roughly $100 to and from the city. “I couldn’t even afford to get my sister a birthday present.”
Hutchison believes that unpaid internships will remain as an option for students to consider because there are a lot of good organizations to work for that just can’t afford to pay a salary. She believes that, moving forward, more organizations will begin paying their interns. “It’s changing—it’ll take time.”
