by Sean Begin
An internship has always been a part of the college education landscape, but recent court rulings may be changing how companies approach the free labor.
In June of 2013, a federal judge ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated not only federal labor law but the minimum wage laws of New York state when failing to pay two production interns on the set of the movie “Black Swan.”
And, just over the weekend, NBCUniversal reached a $6.4-million settlement with thousands of former interns, including those who worked on “Saturday Night Live,” for pay they should have received while working for the company.
While this lawsuit may not mean a large amount of money for each plaintiff, it could mean a precedent has been set for other lawsuits currently in the court system, many of which are in the entertainment industry.
But what does this mean for anyone who has been through an internship? Can every unpaid intern ever start suing former companies for back pay?
In the 1940s, a Supreme Court case led to the Labor Department creating a six-part test that employers had to pass in order to not pay someone the minimum wage. While these laws have been in place for decades, it doesn’t change the fact that companies ignore them, find ways around them or aren’t policed well enough by the Labor Department.
The internship has become America’s newest and biggest form of unpaid labor. While numbers are scarce, Robert Shindell, vice president for the consulting company Intern Bridge, estimates that more than a million Americans a year take part in an internship, with only about a fifth getting paid.
A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) received responses from more than 38,000 college students. Almost half (48 percent) had participated in unpaid internships with more than a third of those (38 percent) working for private, for-profit companies.
Proponents of unpaid internships argue that they offer real work experience and a route to a job after graduation. But NACE found that just 37 percent of students participating in unpaid internships got job offers, just one percent greater than students who didn’t intern.
The lawsuit settled by NBCUniversal may, or may not, set precedent for future intern lawsuits. But it should. An internship, especially one for college credit, is costly to the intern both in time and in finances.
The internship has simply become another tool for large, for-profit companies to save yet another buck, putting their products out on the backs of college students simply hoping for a future.