Regulators Investigating Unpaid Internships 182
theodp writes "With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor. Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California, and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. 'If you're a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren't going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,' said the acting director of the US Deptartment of Labor's wage and hour division."
Re:Los Angeles and its entertainment industry (Score:5, Funny)
they'll probably make a movie about it.
Re:Internships should always be paid (Score:1, Funny)
From these three sentences, I can see why you were unpaid.
Re:Class discrimination too (Score:1, Funny)
Maybe it would've helped if you were Jewish.
My last company hired lots of unpaid interns (Score:1, Funny)
My last company got a new manager a while back. He had this "brilliant" idea to hire interns as low wage work. Our security infrastructure was woefully unprepared to handle all of these new people with lower security privileges than a full worker, so the full timers spent most of their time checking in/out the interns code, and walking then through everything by hand. By the time the interns were semi-autonomous, it was time for them to leave. Financial statements showed that we actually lost money on the venture.
So then the manager had the brilliant idea to hire a new wave of interns for free. He figured since we had lost money by paying the interns last time, if we didn't pay them we'd come out ahead. So he went ahead and hired 5 more interns than there were developers (I think it was 12 devs, and 17 interns). This was an unmitigated disaster, because with so many more interns the logistics of managing them all was ridiculously inefficient. And since they were unpaid, all the good interns who knew they were worth money wouldn't take an offer, so we got the bottom of the barrel desperate interns who were even worse than the first batch.
Then on top of that, he flat out said that he wouldn't give the interns any of the "bitchwork" that interns are supposed to do. He was afraid that if we gave them menial tasks, they would get bored and leave since they had no real attachment to the company; so he gave all the bitchwork to the full timers, and the really interesting architectural work to the free interns.
The architects left first. All 4 of them. Then the senior developers left, and finally most of the junior developers (including myself) left. When I left I was one of the only 3 fulltime devs left at the company, and our intern numbers had ballooned to 20. They still maintain a high number of unpaid interns to this day, and I'm frankly amazed how they manage to stay in business. I heard they lost most of their contracts due to the sudden inexplicable shoddiness that appeared in our product. I guess they stay afloat due to the fact that they don't pay salaries anymore.