Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say | Hacker News Reader

Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say

nytimes.com

65 pointstokenadult40 comments

Federal law for unpaid interns in for-profit organizations requires that six criteria be met: (1) the work or training should function as an extension of the intern's educational training; (2) it should be provided primarily for the benefit of the intern; (3) it does not replace the work performed by regular employees; (4) it does not provide the employer with any immediate benefit; (5) it does not entitle the intern to employment at the end of the internship; and (6) there is no expectation by employer or intern that compensation will be paid for the work or training. To have a bona fide intern, all six of the criteria need to be met.

State law may also impose additional requirements, as for example in California where the training must be part of an official educational curriculum at an accredited school - California imposes other restrictions as well.

All in all, the rules may be well-meaning but they effectively kill opportunities for students to get training in many situations where the employer would otherwise normally be glad to make the opportunities available. In practical terms, it means that an employer wanting to open opportunities to students needs to pay minimum wage at least. Of course, the idea of the regulations is to prevent employers from circumventing minimum wage rules by dressing up what is really a job as an "internship" and in this sense they serve a protective function.

Mark Cuban once did a piece entitled "Want an Unpaid Internship So You Can Get Valuable Experience - Screw You" (http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship...) in which he recounted his frustrations in dealing with the federal regulations, and this in turn elicited an interesting and lively thread here at HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806563).

In tech at least, I've always found the "valuable experience" argument to be a bit of a scam. There are plenty of companies that will be happy to pay you a good stipend (not even anywhere near minimum wage) for an internship. If you want something less job-like, you can work informally with lots of smaller companies, visiting their office and doing odd jobs, essentially as an unpaid freelancer (e.g. find something crappy about their site and offer to fix it). But if they want someone coming in to the office 40 hrs/wk, with a boss and deliverables, they should be prepared to pay them in something more than vague promises of "valuable experience".

I, too, believe that most technology internships are a total scam. The usual phrase from a small company is that they want a 'rock star' ( insert your synonym here ) intern. I'm fairly certain that any 'rock star' intern can replace many hours of labor spent by an FTE.

To put it in some perspective, and this is all personal point of view, I believe that a company in three to four months of a full time internship should be able to teach a computer science student ruby, rails to a working knowledge extent, the why's and how's of why rails is the way it is (the ups and downs of MVC, convention over configuration, etc), limited database knowledge, and some basic UI/UX considerations.

Deeper knowledge into any of those (especially databases with CAP and the whole sql/nosql argument) would be valuable if there were any time remaining. And, obviously, the previous paragraph can be replaced by the equivalents in your specific niche.

EDIT: spelling

Always insightful to have you weigh in on the Grellas - cheers.

As for this...

> this in turn elicited an interesting and lively thread here at HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806563).

There's a lot of ignorance in that thread. People seem completely unable to imagine the other side of the table in situations they haven't been in. I did an unpaid internship for the state government at one point for a couple months and learned quite a bit how government works, made some friends, and got to meet some interesting people.

Later, I had an unpaid intern come in and work for 3 hours twice a week with me. It evolved into me sitting, working hands on and training him for 2 and a half hours of that time, teaching him all sorts of things, and he'd make some reports during the week about that and some writeups, which I used as the basis of some marketing literature.

But if I'm going to be totally honest - it was a fun experience, a good time, he's a great guy, but it was a bad business decision. I'd have produced a lot more in the 6-10 hours per week on my own or working with one of my paid staff or contractors than I did with him. He got a heck of a lot of it. Me? I mean, it was good fun, I learned some things, I don't regret it at all, but in the end the time cost on my side was more than it was worth.

An unpaid internship can absolutely be worth a heck of a lot - I mean, many of us wind up paying thousands for some college courses of dubious value. Getting to spend hands-on time with someone talented, seeing how they do things - that can be a tremendous amount of value if you're in the right organization working with the right person or people.

Personally, I probably won't take an unpaid intern again, but there's a lot of people I'd work for free for in some capacity to learn from.

I agree. Probably kills a lot of learning and a lot of jobs.

But that's just unintended consequences. Why should government be concerned with those, unless there is some expansion of government that can be engineered to address it?

There is a strong argument against unpaid internships, they're hugely damaging to social mobility. If you need an unpaid internship to enter a career you're essentially excluding anyone from a poorer background (who have to work for money) from those occupations.

Problem is there's no middle ground between $0.00 per hour and $7.15 per hour. If you outlaw $0.00 then those opportunities would simply cease to exist for everyone, including poor people working at McDonald's who could swing an internship on the side.

Yes. But it means those from more well off backgrounds and those from poorer backgrounds will be on a more level playing field when it comes to applying for permanent jobs.

No, people with money can afford to purchase technical and vocational training which poor people cannot.

Money is valuable. If money did not confer advantages to its owner, it would not be valuable. Therefore a "level playing field" between people with more money and people with less money cannot exist.

Besides, you are saying that you would forcefully prevent peaceful people from making mutually beneficial voluntary contractual arrangements among themselves, simply because not everyone is capable of participating. The implications are monstrous. Keep in mind that you are also forcefully excluding the McDonald's worker doing a part-time internship on the side.

That argument can also be used against all work related legislation (minimum wage, holidays, safety requirements).

Correct. Though I would expect that working under exceedingly dangerous conditions would command a very high price.

Not if you're desperate, there are far more people that need jobs than there are jobs, and accidents aren't ridiculously common. See the Industrial Revolution, coal mining, and sweatshops in developing countries.

> Not if you're desperate, there are far more people that need jobs than there are jobs, and accidents aren't ridiculously common. See the Industrial Revolution, coal mining, and sweatshops in developing countries.

You're assuming that they'd be on easy street if those jobs weren't available. You're wrong. While those jobs are crap, those folks are worse off without them.

You can't make their lives better by taking away options. You can only make their lives better by providing better options.

You're assuming there's no existing hierarchical power relationship. The obvious example is child-labor: the parents decide whether the kid goes to work, not the kid.

In general, there's all sorts of non-governmental power structures that pressure people into making decisions that aren't in their own best interests. Governmental intervention is always a hacky solution in programming terms, and often counter-productive, but there's legitimate areas where it's actually worked. How would you deal with child labor?

When I was 14 years old I worked in a grocery store with a deli and butcher shop. How would you deal with that?

> You're assuming there's no existing hierarchical power relationship. The obvious example is child-labor: the parents decide whether the kid goes to work, not the kid.

If the kids want to be fed, the family must have sufficient resources.

Do you really think that the family will be better off if the kids don't work? How do you know better than the parents?

Seriously - I want an answer, complete with relevant details. How are those families going to have sufficient resources, food, shelter, etc, without the kids working?

Note that your answer can't depend on anything other than keeping the kids from working, as providing additional resources from the outside can happen whether or not the kids work.

> How would you deal with child labor?

You're assuming that child labor is the biggest problem. It almost never is. In fact, it's typically a result of other worse problems.

And, pushing child labor underground makes it even worse.

I suggest you become part of the solution and start hiring people.

My take on this is that anyone who would be worth taking on as an unpaid intern, is worth paying minimum wage. I can imagine that not all employers feel this way, but for a typical high-tech company (especially a start-up), the opportunity cost to train and integrate a new team member for, say 6 months, would dwarf a minimum salary.

anyone who would be worth taking on as an unpaid intern, is worth paying minimum wage

It's not the money you save by not paying the intern that is valuable to the explosion of companies that want unpaid interns.

The real value comes in restricting the opportunity to people of the right social class and with the right family connections to be able to subsidize your company by paying. Working unpaid costs money for commuting, for dressing up, by closing the chance to work a job for money, and other ways. Only the privileged can afford to do it.

So if you want to include only the already privileged in your company, unpaid internships are the way to go. And that's also the reason they should be tightly regulated or outlawed.

"Unpaid intern" doesn't mean "unpaid full-time intern." You could intern, unpaid, while working other jobs.

There's a really good ('selfish') reason to properly put interns on payroll. A tech company that has an unpaid intern working on something 'useful' - like writing code - is in a terrible position. If the intern is ignorant, sure no problem. But what if that code makes it into a shipping product, or some other asset that's sold? And suddenly that person feels like they were screwed over because they were not paid? Or what if they get hurt at work, or are harassed and want to bring suit? Its already a risk with proper employees on payroll but at least you have insurances for that. Or perals - they file for unemployment and put your company down as their last employer with $0 pay. (Have any of you had to -really- deal with your local DoL? You'll -wish- it was the IRS!) This is a very bad position to be in. Isn't $10/hr worth it to avoid these problems?

I was in the job market for the past few months and stumbled across postings where even certain well-known tech companies (startups can be considered as exceptions) were looking for unpaid interns. You could see smell their BS from a mile.

This is an interesting turn of events.

Just 2 weeks ago when this story popped up on HN recommending unpaid interns (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1202168) I thought it may have been legal, but now we know where the lawmakers stand.

When I was a student the first year of a UK law graduate's work in a practice (articles) was unpaid. This was necessary to keep the wrong sort of people out of the legal profession after they started letting anybody go to university in the 60s and 70s.

Yeah, this allegedly happens in some areas in the U.S. too, especially business and law--- unpaid internships as a way to filter out the poor, who can't afford to work unpaid internships.

It's not just business and law in the US. When I was a CS student in college (not very long ago), during the summer students had to make a choice to go do low-paying internships for brand-name companies like MS, Google, and Amazon or take real summer jobs that would pay better but not look as good on a resume. Poorer students with more debt would take the short-term better paying jobs while students whose parents were footing the bills would take the internships that would give them better future prospects.

What are you talking about? I interned at Microsoft for a summer 3 years ago and was compensated almost 20k... Low paying my ass.

Yeah, in my experience it's always been the opposite: internships from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Intel are about the highest-paying summer jobs (~$30-50/hr) any college student is likely to find, versus "normal" summer jobs that pay more like ~$15/hr at best. When I decided to do a $5k-stipend research internship instead of working somewhere like that, it was turning down a good deal of money.

My upcoming Microsoft internship is more than $5k a month. My summer NSF REU last year was $3k total.

My experience has been completely different. I'm a CS student from a low income household, yet it was the brand-name (and well-known startup) internship opportunities that were not only incredibly educational and provided with me with invaluable experience, but also paid pretty darn well. I made more than half of our annual household income in a single summer.

I know this is just a single anecdote, but I don't think my story is that unusual for people in the tech/engineering/finance industry.

No problem, register the internships as training courses and charge the little idiots/candidates for working there

In our town someone made a business of that, starting a technical and vocational training school many years ago. They're doing quite well trading knowledge and experience for money.

Ugh. What possible good could it do to outlaw unpaid internships? Do people actually think the result will be companies deciding to pay interns rather than just not offering internships?

Just put yourself in the position of a manager making the hiring decision - suddenly you get word that you may be sued for offering unpaid positions, is your reaction going to be "wow, we'd better pay them" or "ok, no more interns."

Who does this kind of crap benefit, other than self-serving politicians masquerading as defenders of the public good?

Something about laws explicitly framed to protect people from themselves (i.e. students from accepting unpaid positions) drive me insane.

rather than just not offering internships?

And then, after a little while, it becomes impractical to insist on prior experience for entry-level positions.

The problem is that large, macroscopically psychopathic corporations (including universities) have complete control over access to most of the jobs out there, and so they can dangle "experience" (access) as a carrot that can be offered as a sole reward to the desperate masses.

Doesn't "Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal" mean it's legal not to pay interns, but illegal for them to grow up?

If anything, I'd say it technically means "it was legal when they were rarer, but now that they're becoming more common, it's illegal" as it's the growth of unpaid internships, not of unpaid interns, that may be illegal.

They were trying to fit the fact that unpaid internships may be illegal and the fact that they've been growing all into one title, and it didn't work so well.

But splitting hairs a) is kind of annoying, and b) doesn't add anything to the conversation about the content of the piece.

Always Read Charitably. (Especially, when author is facing formal constraints, as in a headline, tweet, article/op-ed with limited word budget, etc.)

Comments on (the literal meaning of) titles of articles are hardly ever a valuable contribution to the discussion about the subject of the article. We are all aware that journalists often make up less-than-ideal titles. Let's not reiterate that point ad nauseam.

No, it doesn't mean that.

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