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To pay an intern is like a school paying student to teach them.
If you are ONLY teaching the intern you don't have to pay them, that has been discussed in this thread. If the intern is doing actual productive work you must pay and rightfully so.
If you are ONLY teaching the intern you don't have to pay them, that has been discussed in this thread. If the intern is doing actual productive work you must pay and rightfully so.
yep.
it still bugs me that unpaid internships automatically exclude people who have to get paid for their work in order to survive, but i can see the value in our present laws about internships, if they were enforced. that is - interns get paid if they're doing work for the company, and unpaid interns are really just there to learn, either with no benefit or even a slight detriment to the company. replacing entry-level jobs with unpaid interns is just wrong.
When I was in college, I had to do an internship for my major and, with the guidance of my school, interviewed for a competitive internship in my small city's government. It was only then that I found out that my part-time internship was replacing a full-time worker who was laid off/moved to a different department (it was never totally clear) and not replaced. It was just me and the full time director of the program, but she would often be out sick or away at conferences so I was running a whole city's recycling department by myself. For nothing. I was so poor that I had to walk the 2 miles each way because I couldn't afford a bus ticket. It was not what I signed up for in the least.
So yes, I got great experience.. but there wasn't much "teaching" going on. I was basically tossed onto the phones, asked to manage the website (which I had no experience doing - and my boss could barely manage to send an email on her own so I had to teach myself), and given huge contracts to look over with virtually no oversight. My school didn't send people back for a few years.. but it looks like they're back at it again.
When students desperately need experience for the workforce in addition to meeting graduation requirements, unpaid internships often aren't a choice. Here in the Boston area, outside of a few industries, most employers know that they don't have to pay interns because there are far more students than open positions. It is difficult to go to school, work an unpaid internship, and somehow fit in a job that pays you enough to eat, much less pay for rent, books, etc. I was only able to do one summer internship because I was able to use a scholarship to take classes. There were no paid internships within 20 miles of my parents' home, and I needed some way to pay for the car I would need to purchase to get to the internship as well as other incidentals.
There actually is a discussion in the Fair Labor Standards Act about internships other than medical. Basically if the person is a student and the internship is managed by their school as a part of their education, does little work of economic value, the student isn't an employee. Other than that the intern must be paid.
For jobs where networking is critical, such as the television and the entertainment industry, employers have been taking advantage of interns for years. The unpaid worker-intern practice had really gotten out of hand during the economic downturn. Expect the USDL, ESA, Wage & Hour folks to spend time on this issue. One of the challenges is that they don't show up on the payroll.
Another concern is workers compensation. Unpaid interns are not regarded by the employer as an employee and if hurt may not be covered by insurance.
Unpaid internships only insure that those with the family means to take on unpaid work succeed when they leave college. To put myself through college required working two minimum wage paid jobs - one full time and one part time. That plus going to school full time, meant that I didn't have free time. This resulted in my graduating college, during the recession, with great work history, great grades, but nothing that related the two - which translated to no job. I ended up having to go back for grad school (because they don't give internships to people who aren't in school) just so i could take out student loans and work for free to have experience to land me in a job in my field after another 2 years. This is a ridiculous system.
This is a large part of why American student loan debt is about to be the next big bubble to burst, and why so many people in Generation Y are struggling despite being intelligent and willing to work. We need to bring back apprenticeships, and the idea that you CAN learn on the job.
We need to bring back apprenticeships, and the idea that you CAN learn on the job.
It works in the building trades. I'm my trade apprentices go through a 4 year program. They start at 60% of journeyman scale and learn on the job and one afternoon a week there is training at the school at the union hall. At school apprentices are taught mechanical drawing and print reading, math, rigging, fitting, welding, burning and other skills. They are also taught OSHA safety classes; fall protection, hazard recognition and such.
Every 6 months the apprentices are reviewed and if they pass muster are given a 5% raise. If they don't pass muster they are held back and get no raise. There are provisions for removing incompetents from the program and quite a few apprentices get bounced.
My company pays interns what amounts to minimum wage. We bring them in twice per year. Some interns stay longer than others. At the end they're required to do some sort of presentation to the C-Level - something fun.
I've never needed to be an intern myself, but I see it this way.
If what you're brought in to do is educational in nature - for example, a mentoring program or something that does not increase the company's profits like managing a general blog, or if you're apprenticing for something that is directly related to your study, no pay is expected because the point is really to gain direct experience.
If you're brought in to assist with some sort of work effort that is administrative - envelope stuffing or research, for example - where the value to your study is minimal, then pay is warranted, because you're really contributing to the company profit margins.
The ideal scenario involves an intern being brought in to do both sorts, which is what we do. They might do research tasks, but at the same time, they learn interviewing techniques, discovery techniques, documentation techniques, and organizational strategies that will be vital to their studies, AND they get paid. It's a dream setup.
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