This is a old, but cool article from The USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-04-19-vanderkam-edit_x.htm
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With interns, you get what you pay for
By Laura Vanderkam
My e-mail in-box is overflowing. I haven't seen
the top of my desk since March. So, between interviews and deadlines, I
had a daydream: I should hire a summer intern.
I pictured the job description: Ten 35-hour
weeks. She'd answer my phone and do my research — such as "Find
statistics on internships." Of course, I couldn't pay the intern. But I
could offer experience — see how writers live! — and brushes with
celebrity (I once interviewed Will Ferrell).
Then I woke up and thought, "This can't be
legal" — until I perused the internship ads on Vault.com. Plenty of
employers pay interns, but plenty don't. Congressional and White House
interns have long worked, unpaid, but with the economy as it is,
companies ranging from Empower Records to toy company Sport-Fun Inc. to
Derek Jackson, a Brooklyn artist who pledges to pay his intern's subway
fare, are advertising for unpaid short-term workers, too.
Lawyers disagree on internship law. In general,
though, companies can argue they aren't violating the federal Fair
Labor Standards Act, which sets the minimum wage, if they call unpaid
temp workers interns.
Then I started wondering whether someone naïve
enough to assist me, unpaid, would be more likely to hang up on Will
Ferrell than cure my headaches.
As we enter intern-hiring season, employers
should remember that internships — paid or unpaid — sap enough of an
employer's resources to make sense only if you hire many of your
interns after they graduate. Better pay lures better interns. Better
interns mean more employees you'd want to hire. While unpaid
internships save a company money for a summer, in the long run, they're
just bad business.
Internships have nearly replaced traditional
summer jobs among today's career-crazed students. Princeton's Office of
Career Services, for instance, estimates that 60% of Princeton students
do internships — paid or unpaid — at some point. Surveys by the
National Association of Colleges and Employers find that companies
believe internships are their best recruiting technique. During the
2002-03 school year, more than 38% of respondents' interns became
full-time hires.
For-profit businesses can't pay less than
minimum wage, but labor laws allow exceptions — if the job is for the
educational benefit of the student, and — the kicker, according to
Birmingham, Ala.-based labor lawyer John Richard Carrigan — if the
employer derives no immediate benefit from the intern's work.
Legally, "you can't bring an (unpaid) intern in
and have him do photocopying and an endless number of menial tasks that
an enthusiastic gopher would perform," Carrigan says. But that's what
many interns do. A huge number of internships, he says, are illegal.
So is speeding, though, and Carrigan's son has
interned, unpaid, for a magazine and a publishing house. No one sues
because, "Who would it be helping, other than the lawyers who get the
fees?" Carrigan asks. Kids want experience. Employers feel warm and
fuzzy as they greet fresh-faced interns each June.
Consequently, internships are largely
unregulated. Supply and demand rule. Fields deemed "boring" — think
retail — have to pay interns. "Hip" fields such as radio attract dozens
of hopefuls for every unpaid job. During the late 1990s, notes Steven
Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com, employers showered interns with money
out of desperation. "What we're seeing right now, with probably most
internships either being unpaid or so lowly paid that they might as
well be unpaid, is actually normal."
For any penny pincher, the prospect of free
labor is almost irresistible. But you get what you pay for, and unpaid
internships are rarely in employers' best interests.
For starters, unpaid jobs eliminate many
students from the hiring pool. Some unpaid interns wait tables on
weekends to earn the rent, or swill coffee at 8 a.m. jobs after
bartending the night before. But most can't afford it. Financial aid
packages expect students to work. The average student-loan taker has
$18,900 in debt. Most unpaid interns have parents who can underwrite
the summer. A survey at a summer intern lunch I attended in Washington
in 1998 found that more than 60% of these mostly unpaid interns had
parents earning more than $100,000 a year. Only about 20% of all
families of college students earn that much. It's unlikely the best
interns inhabit only this bracket.
Then, on the employer side, there's another
overlooked truth. Free interns, notes Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com,
aren't really free. As I calculate it, even a living wage — say, $4,000
for 10 weeks — is a small part of an intern's true cost. They take up
space. They need computer support. Senior, highly paid staff must spend
hours choosing interns and training them for just 10 weeks of work.
Some do this "to give back," but more, a Rowan University survey found,
view internships as investments — a way of screening potential hires.
Few employers recoup that training investment unless their interns come
back after graduation.
Pay does matter, though, to students. The best
candidates will usually follow the higher wages. If the interns who
would make my life easier are working construction jobs because their
parents can't bankroll their unpaid summers doing my research, then I
have a problem.
Some smart companies recognize this. The Washington Post draws top journalism students with intern salaries of more than $800 a week. The Post
recoups that money by hiring many interns as cub reporters after they
graduate from school. Many other media outlets do not routinely pay
their interns.
USA TODAY, for example, does not pay interns
other than a small transportation stipend. Interns receive education
credits and training in a program specifically for them.
Less-enlightened employers don't get it. A young
Polish immigrant named Peter Strzelecki tells me he took an unpaid
internship with his senator, minimum-wage champion and liberal Teddy
Kennedy, in 2000, to give something back to Massachusetts. Aside from
strong views on limiting overseas military intervention, Strzelecki was
into civics, not partisanship.
To make ends meet, he looked for a part-time job
with a politician — left or right — who paid. He wound up with
conservative Pat Buchanan, much to the Kennedy staff's horror.
Better to pay at least minimum wage in the first place.
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