The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not

I thought this article would be beneficial to the many who are pursuing an internship. Interns should know their rights and that most of the time, if working for for-profit company, they should be paid.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown by major and industry. For instance, how many computer science majors do unpaid internships? How many film studies graduates?

One of the best things about a CS major is that it enables you to enter the workforce in a high-value way. Some people would argue that it limits you later, that you become a technical resource without a business background, but I disagree completely. You get incredible exposure to business through software projects. And if you don't (ie., they hide their programmers off in a cubicle farm somewhere), it's probably not the kind of company you'd want to be working for anyway (nor is it a company likely to be producing good software).

I don't want to be too hard on college students/grads who are struggling, and I find the trend toward paying for work experience to be kind of disturbing. But can we expect students to make an effort to acquire skills that employers will pay for?

I spent a couple years of my errant youth in the entertainment industry, where unpaid internships are the standard way to enter the business. But those jobs aren't worth anything like a minimum wage to the employers, so if they weren't unpaid, the jobs simply wouldn't exist. For people looking to get a job in the industry after graduation, their best shot is to get an internship in college, do a great job and meet lots of people, and parlay that into an offer. Those "vulnerable" young people should be the first to object to a crackdown on unpaid internships.

This article makes me think of a previous article discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406328

There were quite a few comments supporting working for free/on spec. I have to wonder if we'll hear any talk about "your existing business model is disappearing" or "you're being disrupted" or "This is a huge opportunity for anyone trying to break into the business - college kids, amateur designers, the unestablished."

I see these articles constantly, and wonder which interns don't know that they should be paid. Unpaid internships are next to nonexistent in my major at my school.

Why are we seeing this article a year after it was published?