(Unpaid internships may be illegal)
ERIC Glatt and Alexander Footman worked as unpaid production interns on the film Black Swan. In September 2011, they sued their employer, Fox Searchlight, to recover wages.
An internship may be an essential part of an established course of an accredited school or of an institution approved by a public agency to provide training for licensure or to qualify for a skilled vocation or profession. It is historically exempt from wage and hour laws.
However, workplace experts claim that many employers are violating the law by using unpaid interns – a virtual army of unpaid young men and women – primarily to do the jobs of other workers but not providing the interns a true educational experience. Generally, if any of the following apply, the intern must be paid:
1) The intern program is for the immediate benefit of one specific employer.
2) A regular employee has been displaced by the trainee.
3) The training is not supervised by the school or disinterested agency.
The Black Swan interns claimed that they did basic chores, usually undertaken by paid employees, such as taking lunch orders, answering phones, arranging other employees’ travel plans, tracking purchase orders, taking out the trash and assembling office furniture.
Ruling in favor of the interns, the federal court in New York said unpaid internships should be allowed only in very limited circumstances and that the rules laid out by the Department of Labor for unpaid internships should be followed. Those rules state that unpaid internships should not be to the immediate advantage of the employer. The work must be similar to vocational training given in an educational environment, the experience must be for the benefit of the intern and the intern’s work must not displace that of regular employees.
In applying the rules to the Black Swan interns, the court found that Fox’s internship program benefited the company more than it benefited the interns. Fox received the benefits of the interns’ work for free.
Additionally, the Fox internship did not involve any formal training program. Even though the interns received some benefits from their internship, such as resume listings, job references, and an understanding of how a production office works, these benefits were neither academic nor vocational in nature. Rather, these benefits were derived as a matter of working in the office like any other employee. Even if the interns were receiving college credit for the internship, the court said this was of little importance in determining whether interns should be paid.
Finally, the Black Swan interns displaced regular employees who otherwise would have been hired and paid to do the tasks assigned to the interns. A supervisor stated that “[i]f Mr. Glatt had not performed this work, another member of my staff would have been required to work longer hours to perform it, or we would have needed a paid production assistant or another intern to do it.”
As part of the ruling, the court also granted class certification to a group of unpaid interns who worked in other divisions of the Fox Entertainment Group.
Unpaid internships are often found among many white-collar professions, including film, journalism, fashion and book publishing. As more interns complain, some companies have changed their compensation policy. Fox Entertainment started paying its interns in July 2010. Condé Nast has adopted a policy of giving its interns a $550 stipend per semester.
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C. Joe Sayas, Jr., Esq. is an experienced trial attorney who has successfully obtained significant results, including several million dollar recoveries for consumers against insurance companies and big business. He is a member of the Million Dollar-Advocates Forum—a prestigious group of trial lawyers whose membership is limited to those who have demonstrated exceptional skill, experience and excellence in advocacy. He has been featured in the cover of Los Angeles Daily Journal’s Verdicts and Settlements for his professional accomplishments and recipient of numerous awards from community and media organizations. His litigation practice concentrates in the following areas: serious personal injuries, wrongful death, insurance claims, unfair business practices, wage and hour (overtime) litigation. You can visit his website at www.joesayas law.com or contact his office by telephone at (818) 291-0088.
