All Posts Tagged With: "internships"
Are unpaid internships legal? The confusion continues
Even employment counselors don’t understand the rules
Photo courtesy of USDAgov on Flickr
University career counselors in the United States don’t understand what constitutes a legal internship, according to a new survey of 427 of them.
Nearly a fifth of those surveyed believe that interns must always be paid or else their work is illegal. That’s not true. Another fifth believed that internships are always legal, regardless of whether there’s academic credit awarded. That’s also not true.
The standard in both the U.S. and Canada is as follows. If someone receives academic credit from a college or university for their work placement, it’s assumed that the experience is primarily educational and therefore they don’t need to be paid. But if a so-called intern is not in school, the organization isn’t a non-profit, and/or they’re replacing a regular employee, the job is considered a job like any other — the minimum wage laws apply. Read more about the rules and the backlash against unpaid internships, right here.
Regardless of the rules, college counselors overwhelmingly agree that internships are valuable and don’t think students should be too concerned with pay. More than 80 per cent think a student should take an unpaid internship if they can’t find a paid one and only 11 per cent think that all interns should be paid for their work.
The backlash against unpaid internships
Unpaid interns are illegal and yet ubiquitous
When Michael graduated with a fine arts degree from the University of Toronto last spring to a tough job market, he was thrilled to be offered the position of marketing assistant for a festival. The posting said “compensation to be determined,” which he thought meant minimum wage or more. At the interview, he learned it was an unpaid internship with a $50-per-week stipend. He took it anyway, hoping it would give him “a foot in the door.” He’d live with his parents and get a part-time retail gig to pay the bills. But there was no time for a retail gig. Every evening was eaten up on the phone for work or driving around (in his own car, paying his own gas) putting up posters for the festival.
Laura was similarly disillusioned with her experience. She got no orientation and no training on her first day of work at a big-city daily newspaper. Instead, she was handed a press pass and told to laminate it on her way to the first of that day’s press conferences. She too paid for her own gas, her own parking, her own cellphone bill. The University of Alberta graduate was treated as a member of the full-time reporting staff—except she got paid nothing. At the end of the internship, instead of offering her a paid position, they brought in another intern. They do that every month. “Why hire me when they could just get another unpaid intern?” she says.
It turns out her internship was illegal, considering she was working at a for-profit business, wasn’t in school, and was doing work normally done by a paid employee. But Laura hesitated to complain, for fear of being blacklisted. (Like Michael, she still doesn’t want her real name used for this article.)
It’s the kind of story Alex Try, co-founder of U.K. website Interns Anonymous, hears nearly every day. Interns have written to him complaining of being forced to scrub toilets, having to make tea all day, or spending nights on the street because they missed the last train home from their unpaid gig. Try, who started the website after a night at the pub with friends who’d all graduated from university and fallen directly into unpaid positions, has captured a political movement with the site, which has had 150,000 hits since it launched in 2009. He’s learned of playful initiatives to draw attention to the cause, like the Paid-not-Played Choir, made up entirely of unpaid interns in London. “It’s a sad re-al-i-ty / that I have to work for free / making lots of cups of tea / in a cold gall-e-ry,” they sing in a video on Interns Anonymous.
But he has also learned of a growing trend to correct the imbalance, in part via court cases, like the one launched by an intern who worked as a reporter at the Independent newspaper in London and is now suing the paper for several months of back pay. It’s part of a nascent but growing backlash against the phenomenon of the unpaid internship. In 1992, only 17 per cent of American college students had done an internship (paid or unpaid) by graduation. By 2008, half of American graduates had held at least one internship (most unpaid), according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. And that was before the job market was flooded with eager, unemployed twentysomethings. “During the recession, companies said, ‘Hang on, there’s this massive surplus of talented labour willing to work for free,’ ” explains Try. He learned that car companies, grocers—even the elite London department store Harrods—offer unpaid internships.
The flouting of minimum wage laws caught the attention of the Obama administration in April 2010. It issued a directive reminding employers of which internships are legal and which are not. California has started issuing warnings to companies who take on unpaid interns. New York has similarly started investigating several unpaid internships offered by employers in that state. And recently, two Oregon men who installed solar panels for their “internship” last year were each awarded $3,350 in pay after they took the company to court. The jury decided they were there to learn, but instead had simply been put to work.
Half-burnt
Three years in, I’m starting to think the library isn’t how I want to learn about the world
I was walking to my friend Hannah’s house last night, eating my dinner – a pear in one hand and a samosa in the other. My bag – full of notebooks and texts and power cords – was thudding heavily against my back, but I barely noticed.
My attitude towards hygiene has gotten pretty defeatist (“I’m just going to smell again tomorrow anyways”), my exercise now consists of running for the bus, and I no longer have even the contents for a modest grilled cheese in my fridge.
Sounds like another November, when students everywhere start churning out assignments at a frantic rate, all while gearing up for exams. They have a name for this combination in the spring – “March Madness” – but I’m not sure what they call it in the winter, when we collectively descend into a long, chilly Ottawa winter and a bout of Seasonal Anxiety Disorder.
Nasty November would probably be a good one. Nauseating November. Or how about we just call it what it is – Extremely Crappy and Seemingly Endless November.
Other years, I’ve marked up my agenda and gotten down to work. This year, however, it seems like my head is perpetually somewhere else.
I thought this might have to do with a lack of time management, disorganization, or even just laziness. And I don’t dispute those are probably part of the problem. But I also thought this lack of concentration was unique to me.
But after some really solid whining, I started to hear from a lot of friends – bright, well adjusted kids with well oiled work ethics – that third year was getting to them, too.
A large number of them have dropped a class, conceding that four is just more manageable. One friend told me he’s taking next semester off. Another says he wishes he was. Others are going on co-op, opting for a lighter course load, going on exchange (including me), or just plain dragging their feet.
We developed a couple theories about why this might be. The obvious one is – third year is just harder. Like every year of university, the standards go up – the papers are longer, the readings heavier, the topics more challenging. Naturally, there are some growing pains.
But there might be something else. Call it the half done burnout, if you want. But you can trace it to people like me who, for the first time, are realizing all they’ve seen is school – and are thinking that might not be a good thing.
I went from high school straight into university, and when I moved across the country, like many first years, I was just seventeen.
I had done nothing. My work experience consisted of making lattes, my writing experience was basically a couple book reports. I had good teachers and I worked hard – I had to, to get into university – but I had never stayed in on a weekend night to do school work.
My life experience was even thinner. I had travelled with my family, but I had never been further then summer camp on my own. I had never cooked for myself, nor had a serious boyfriend. And as my first lonely semester proved, I didn’t really know how to make friends.
Going to university was what I wanted, and I don’t think I would have been happy otherwise. I think the idea of working or travelling – veering away from a path which might be stressful, but was at least well marked – scared me more than school ever did.
I have a lot of friends who didn’t go to school immediately. And I have to admit, I thought if they didn’t go right away, they might never go.
Two years later, most of those people have proved me wrong. Many of them are now in school, and unlike a lot of restless 17-year-olds, they actually want to be there. All of them have travelled around the world, they’ve worked and moved out and grown up.
I love school, and I think it’s where I belong at this point in my life. But sometimes I feel like what I’ve seen the most is the commute from my apartment to the library and back. And there’s only so much you can learn from that.
And when I apply for internship after internship, anxiously poring over my transcript or resume and agonizing over my post-grad potential for grad school or even just a journalism job, lately I`ve been one to stop and take a deep breath. I look up from my computer and out of my dining room window, where the late afternoon sunshine is drifting along the weathered bricks of the lovely old houses that line my street. And I think:
What’s the big hurry?
Journalism internship: take two!
If you’re looking for work experience, consider going somewhere new
As a part of the Journalism program at College X, students go on four-week internships during their first year (for the second half of March and the first two weeks in April). Second-year students have always done a six-week internship in January and into February.
This year, they’ve changed the rules a little bit. Six weeks has been shortened to four weeks. And frankly, I’m delighted.
I guess Instructor A and B were getting some freaked-out students. (“I have no family out of the area. I need to stay here in City X.”) Well, there’s 11 of us and only one newspaper in the whole town and three radio stations.
As for me, I dished out $1,000 so I could stay at a nice bed & breakfast down the street from the news office, in Town X where I’d previously attended high school and had a couple friends. Generally, I got great stories: people stories, which is the best kind (to me) that a small town newspaper can offer. Although my experience at that news office was a good one, I always felt very out-of-place. There was only one other full-time reporter there who was a woman and she worked evenings so I didn’t see her much.
Otherwise, I was in an office of men. The editor? Male. Both the copy editors? Male. The other two full-time reporters? Male. The sports reporter? Male. Male, male, male. Which makes it look so strange to me that I only have three males in my journalism class.
I had assumed I’d be going back to the same news office this year. I knew the place. I knew some of the people, although several of my friends had since gone to university. But I decided to take a chance and look into accommodations in another town. I do know a few people there and yes, my aunt works in that town… but mostly, I know very little about this town (which I will refer to as UniTown X). But Instructor A once told me, “There’s no better way to learn about a town than being a reporter in it.” So, I’ll keep that in mind while working there.
UniTown X is a university town — and not much else. The newspaper is a weekly instead of a daily, which will likely be a bit different. There is an editor and one other reporter- and she’s a she! And guess what: I’ve found a tiny place to rent for the month of January- only $325 per month! It’s not the Ritz, by any means, but as long as I have Internet access, I don’t even need much else. (Although food is a necessity.)
This post, albeit lengthy, does have a point, I promise. If you’re in college and looking for a place to do your internship, consider going to a town you don’t know much about. If everyone just stuck to their hometown, nobody would go anywhere! Nobody would live anywhere else! Life is too short for that.
- photo by rabbleradio
