Cheap Bastards, Inc.
I could have an intern, but I never have. Don't believe in it.
Either you're a high school kid observing my work, in which case I won't pay you, but I'll buy you lunch while you're here, or you work for me, in which case I'll pay you and buy you lunch and mentor you/help you with your writing. It's a very different sort of thinking from that of many companies.
Steven Greenhouse writes for The New York Times that the government is cracking down on some of the employers using interns for free labor. He interviewed Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the Labor Department's wage and hour division:
Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer "derives no immediate advantage" from the intern's activities -- in other words, it's largely a benevolent contribution to the intern..."We've had cases where unpaid interns really were displacing workers and where they weren't being supervised in an educational capacity," said Bob Estabrook, spokesman for Oregon's labor department. His department recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.
Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.
One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.
At Little Airplane, a Manhattan children's film company, an N.Y.U. student who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship said she was instead assigned to the facilities department and ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.
Tone Thyne, a senior producer at Little Airplane, said its internships were usually highly educational and often led to good jobs.
Note to people and companies with "interns" -- because you can pay somebody nothing doesn't mean you should.
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