Unpaid..?

Search for “unpaid internship” on job listing aggregation site Indeed.com and you will find a staggering 2,300 listings. Among them: “analyst intern” at an outfit in Cambridge, MA called Cloud Spectator, which advises cloud companies on marketing and helps companies choose cloud providers.

Michael Harper, a Boston University labor law professor who has written casebooks on employment law, and he says it’s clearly illegal, given courts’ interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). 

In the ruling last week, the court wiped out that standard and applied a totally new test, a requirement that the “Primary beneficiary” of the internship must be the intern rather than the employer.  The ruling seems to open the floodgates to internships that deliver school credit, a factor that was irrelevant before the ruling.

Ross Perlin, author of a book on internships, argued eloquently in the New York Times that “these very same institutions have been complicit in the internship boom by ignoring abuses, requiring internships for graduation and charging students for academic credit when they go off campus to do unpaid work.”

The ruling sends the Black Swan case back to the district court for a decision, where it’s likely that plaintiffs Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, who aren’t seeking class status, will prevail, since it’s clear that the primary beneficiary of their work was the production, not them as interns. It’s tough to argue that emptying the garbage and fetching a pillow is educational.

The ruling paves the way for employers to make deals with educational institutions for school credit, perpetuating a system that exploits student labor, takes jobs from would-be entry-level workers, favors the privileged who can afford to make no money and flouts the basic tenet of the FLSA, that people who work deserve to get paid at least a minimum wage.

Just a thought.