A Shout Out to the Intern Family

Huffington Post published a compelling article detailing the extraordinary uptick in unpaid internships infecting close to 50% of college students (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jett-wells/young-educated-and-unpaid_b_654771.html). I am part of that statistic. In the summer of 2007 I interned at US Congressman Edolphus Towns' (10th congressional district) downtown Brooklyn office. Sure I answered phones and entered endless data, but I also responded to constituent mail, wrote dinner proclamations, researched house bills, and set my own hours. The point is that I gained tremendous insight into the intricate workings of national politics. Just by way of example: I was once composing “the congressman’s” generic response to a mail campaign advocating for a bill protecting Polar Bears. The phone rang and as the intern I interrupted my work and answered. I was then subjected to a 20 minute harangue about police brutality. I felt that at the congressman’s office I had a meaningful internship experience.

Unfortunately, because of the current economic reality, my experience is the exception not the rule.

Employers, from MTV to UFC advertise internship openings and students compete for the openings. Compete for what? You know coffee runs, data entry, answering phones. But wait, that sounds like a secretary or an assistant, not an intern. Interns are supposed to gain work experience in a given field, but if they are going on coffee runs are they gaining career specific experience? Unlikely, though employers are enamored with the waves of unemployed highly-educated graduates. Why wouldn’t they be? It’s free labor.

What I never knew and wanted to share was that under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) many of these standard internship activities are illegal, because they would otherwise be fulfilled by a regular employee (see the fact sheet here: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm). The true measure of an internship is the extent that it mirrors an out of class educational experience. This does not imply that an intern cannot do routine work but rather that the reason why they are doing that work is for the sole purpose of gaining experience -not to fulfill a required duty in the operation of a business organization. If the interns work is deemed, after the fact, as good enough to benefit the company, it may be used.

The standard reason offered for non-enforcement is that businesses will be deterred from providing internship opportunities for students if their company cannot gain something in return. This, “they” argue, will impair an essential source of students' experience. I disagree with “them”, for the following reasons:

1. The whole higher education system is business oriented. In other words the reason why most students invest all those resources into their education is to prepare themselves for the job market. The college student is the future employee and employer.
2. The establishment of a comprehensive and well managed internship program offers a company access to a steady stream of quality labor.
3. Talented interns are trained at a lower cost than hiring an employee and then training them.

For the above reasons, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, I find it hard to justify “their” assertion that companies have no incentive, other than to exploit students for immediate free labor, to maintain internship programs. On the contrary, there are both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards for companies that maintain internship programs. It is up to the intern to educate/remind their “educators in the field” about FLSA and ensure compliance.