If you’re a student who has an internship, you’re nothing out of the ordinary. If you’re a student who has a paid internship, you’re likely to be greeted with high fives whenever you tell your friends.
It’s become an expectation of college: At some point, you will work for free. You might gain less tangible benefits — a line on your resumé and a reference you can use to get a job (or another unpaid internship) — but you won’t receive any cold hard cash for your efforts.
The number of students who seek out internships — and the number of internships each student accumulates before graduation — has skyrocketed over the past decade. It’s reached the point that if a student doesn’t have work experience in his or her chosen field, finding a job in it after graduation will be nearly impossible. Several colleges at this university either require or encourage students to procure an internship (not necessarily an unpaid one) before they graduate. The U.S. economy has evolved in such a way that 18- to 22-year-olds are expected to provide free labor before they start getting paid.
This reality needs to change. The dividing line between paid and unpaid interns needs to be made less arbitrary in a way that won’t scare off employers who have open positions that could benefit students but will also prevent unscrupulous employers from taking advantage of free student labor.
Last Thursday, the U.S. Labor Department issued guidelines clarifying when internships can be unpaid. Officials in California and Oregon have taken similar steps. Why? Because many unpaid internships — up to one in five, according to some estimates — are based on illegal compensation structures. For an internship to be legal, the student can’t simply be replacing paid workers, and the organization can’t derive an “immediate advantage” from the intern’s work.
Those rules seem to disqualify most work the average intern does or ever could do. It also seems to eliminate the rationale for employers to hire interns in the first place. Generally, profit-seeking companies aren’t going to train someone for charity. They’re either gaining something from taking on an inexperienced employee or testing a potential employee by seeing how well he or she works in their organization.
This issue has been gaining attention in recent weeks — in no small part due to a New York Times article earlier this month — and many have suggested stepping up enforcement of the federal laws governing internships. But better enforcement could have the unfortunate consequence of employers opting not to offer internships because they’re afraid of violating labor laws. And even if no money is exchanged, most students gain something from their internships.
The solution here isn’t better enforcement of the rules. It’s the creation of better rules. There are certainly interns who deserve to be paid, and there are some who don’t. The current federal guidelines, based on a 1947 U.S. Supreme Court decision, do a poor job of dividing the two camps. The most obvious dividing line would be the number of hours an intern works. If, over the course of the internship, he or she averages more than 20 hours a week, the intern should be paid. If the average is at or fewer than 20 hours, the intern can remain unpaid.
This boundary line makes sense because it indicates whether the intern is acting as a full-time employee. Regardless of what assignments you have, someone who works more than 20 hours a week is acting as a full-time employee, whereas someone working less than that isn’t essential to the company’s operations.
No dividing line between paid and unpaid internships is going to be completely fair. Some wealthier students with financial support from their parents can afford to work 60 hours a week without pay. Less well-off students might have to work a full-time job to pay their rent and may not be able to have an internship at any point during their college careers.
But until the rules are revamped, students will continue to be short-changed. Until a concrete line is definitively drawn and made clear to potential employers and interns, many students will continue to be forced to enter an unfair system with few alternatives to exploitative arrangements.
