Tag Archives: legal internships

Don't get eaten by jaguar sharks, intern.

These days, 84 percent of college students complete an internship before graduation and 64 percent of those are paid.

So are the other 36 percent college-educated slaves shackled by the burden of building a resume while being whipped until each and every TPS Report is filed alphabetically?

The legality of unpaid internships has been clouded by companies that don’t develop a truly valuable internship experience. Small companies may have a lot to offer a student looking for experience through an internship. They might not necessarily be able to afford paying an intern though. But when an internship is unpaid, it needs to meet a higher standard for what the intern gets out of it in terms of experience. In other words, if you can’t pay your intern, you better make sure they’re really getting something of value for their time.

Unpaid internships themselves aren’t illegal — it’s just that there are too many employers that can get away with substituting a valuable experiential learning experience with a filing cabinet and some phone jockeying.

It’s not unpaid internships that are the problem. It’s employers that think an intern is for slinging coffee.

Many employers offer internships that are either unpaid or for college credit in lieu of pay. The intern meme is that of a college student desperate for experience, hurriedly filing away endless mountains of paperwork, doing menial tasks and being given unwanted work.

If a business’ internship programs fits that meme, chances are it’s illegal. The Department of Labor created a 6-point test to evaluate whether a “trainee” is an intern or technically an “employee.” Each of these six points must be true for a legal internship:

1. If the training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in a vocational school;
2. If the training is for the benefit of the trainee;
3. If the trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under close observation;
4. If the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees and, on occasion, the employer’s operations are actually impeded;
5. If the trainees are not necessarily entitled to employment at the completion of the training period;
6. If the employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.
The part that makes this dicey is displacing regular employees and the bit about the employer not directly benefiting from the activities of the intern. That may make you scratch your head — aren’t interns supposed to help? Yes and no.

Interns should be benefitting at least as much if not more than the employer from a given internship. At play here is the idea that an employer should be taking a hit to their productivity by taking time out to help serve a mentorship role, teaching the intern and helping them develop.

But let’s turn the tables and think about internships for a second: Sure, some smaller companies might be able to offer a great experience to a student looking to add experience to their resume. But at the same time, if the extra help isn’t worth $8 an hour to a company, there’s probably either something wrong with the help…or the company.