By Joe Grimm

The unpaid internship issue won’t die. And that is a good thing.

Unpaid internships can be exploitive and can discriminate against the growing number of people who can’t afford to work for nothing.

The latest salvo is a class-action lawsuit, brought by the New York law firm Outten & Golden and initiated by Xuedan Wang, an intern who worked for Harper’s Bazaar last fall.

Wang, 28, graduated with a degree in strategic communications from Ohio State University in 2010.

The law firm was already pursuing a suit over unpaid internships against Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Outten & Golden associate Elizabeth Wagoner, who joined the firm in 2011, said Feb. 14 that two other people have joined the suit against Hearst Corp., Harper’s parent company. The limitations on how recently someone must have been employed by the company to join the suit vary from three to six years under federal and state laws.

“In the media, it sort of looks new and surprising, but it is the sort of case we do every day here,” Wagoner said “The violation of wage and minimum wage laws is our bread and butter.”

The U.S. Labor Department says unpaid internships can be legal when they are part of an educational program.

Wagoner said, “There’s really no intern or college credit exception to wage and hour laws. “These are all made-up ideas that employers try to use. Either you’re a student, or you’re an employee.”

Some positions are advertised as being developmental, but Wagoner said that often “there’s no training program. They are not providing anything to the employees. They’re not learning more than any employee would.”

According to the Fox Searchlight internship posting, “Fox’s internship program is committed to offering students practical experience that complements, reinforces and places in realistic perspective, the objectives of classroom instruction. As a Fox intern you can expect to gain real world experience as you are immersed into the inner workings of one of the biggest media and entertainment companies in the world.”
www.foxcareers.com/#/internships

Wang knew that Harper’s Bazaar wasn’t going to pay her. “Basically, the internship ended,” Wagoner said, “and she thought that it was unfair and did some research,” and took her case to the firm.

Wagoner, who was once an unpaid intern in the nonprofit world, said Wang is now working in social media and wants to focus on her job rather than be known for the lawsuit.

Internships, with or without pay, can be steppingstones into jobs. That’s why so many people will work for free.

This doesn’t happen just in media companies. Lawyers, judges and members of Congress use unpaid interns. In fact, Wagoner said, when members of Congress adopted a wage and hours law to cover their employment practices, they wrote in an exception so they could continue using unpaid interns.

We need to stop doing this.

There is the issue of individual fairness that Outten & Golden is pursuing.

There is also a larger issue about making professional success contingent uponon[sub] having enough resources or connections to work for free.

Joe Grimm, a consultant and adjunct faculty member of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, recruited for the Detroit Free Press, Knight Ridder and Gannett from 1990 until 2008. He now teaches at the Michigan State University School of Journalism. He has run the JobsPage journalism careers site at www.jobspage.com since 1996. Questions about careers? E-mail Joe for an answer.