The Price of Unpaid Internships

Abstract

Obtaining unpaid summer internships is increasingly popular among undergraduates, who feel pressure to accumulate as much work experience as possible during college to improve their chances of securing a good job after graduation. Some students are willing to accept unpaid internships because they anticipate these experiences will enable them to gain insight into the inner-workings of a particular field, learn professionally valuable skills, and expand networking opportunities. Others are compelled to saturate their resumes with unpaid internships due to feelings of anxiety and desperation related to job insecurity in the current economy. These are just some of the factors that have contributed to the considerable growth of unpaid internships in recent years. According to estimates by the Intern Bridge research firm, undergraduates currently undertake over 1 million internships annually, half of which are unpaid (Greenhouse 2013). Reports published by Intern Bridge suggest that 70-75 percent of students at four-year colleges now undertake one or more internships, which is at least double the amount in the early 1980s (Perlin 2011: 26). This upsurge has raised concerns within the media, federal government, and Supreme Court regarding the potential for the illegitimate exploitation of unpaid interns, as well as the biased nature of unpaid internships against low-income students who cannot afford to work without pay. Furthermore, the rising popularity of arrangements in which students receive college credit for internships has generated public scrutiny and discord within certain academic institutions about the educational significance of internships, or lack thereof. The Legal Standing of Interns: Underpinning and Implications ! #!The legal status of unpaid internships is grounded in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), the federal law that defines and protects the rights of American workers (Perlin 2011: 62). Braun (2010) explains that the FLSA is a national statute administered by the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the Department of Labor (DOL) requiring employers to pay employees the federally mandated minimum wage.The original version of the FLSA broadly defined employ as "to suffer or permit to work," and did not address the status of interns (US DOL). The Supreme Court helped to establish a basis for determining whether an intern qualifies as an employee with the Walling versus Portland Terminal Co. case in 1947. In this case, the Court ruled that the trainees were not legitimate employees entitled to minimum wage, because they obtained an advantage from the training program, and their work did not benefit the railway company or displace regular employees (Braun 2010). This decision influenced the development of the WHD's six-factor test to ascertain whether people are eligible employees for the purposes of FLSA (Braun 2010). A trainee is not considered an employee or entitled to monetary compensation if all of the following six criteria are fulfilled-training is comparable to educational instructi...