To pay, or not to pay?
That is the question the U.S. Department of Labor is now considering as it steps up its enforcement of legal issues surrounding unpaid internships.
As summer approaches and college students apply or prepare to take internships in a workforce that’s been depressed by a sluggish economy, the Labor Department is concerned many of those interns will go unpaid — and will do so illegally.
Twenty percent of internships were unpaid in 2009, according to an October 2009 LSU Career Services survey with 1,545 University student respondents.
“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” Nancy J. Leppink, director of the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, told the New York Times in early April.
The Labor Department has a six-part legal test to determine whether an intern is eligible to receive “trainee” status, a necessary classification if the intern is unpaid.
Otherwise, interns “who qualify as employees rather than trainees typically must be paid at least the minimum wage and overtime compensation,” according to the Labor Department’s guidelines.
The internship program must meet all of the Labor Department’s six guidelines to qualify as a trainee: The internship must be similar to training which would be given in an educational environment, the experience must be for the benefit of the intern, the intern can not displace regular employees, the employer that provides the training cannot derive immediate advantage from the activities of the intern, the intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship and the employer and the intern must understand that the intern is not entitled to wages.
“It takes quite a bit of time [for an employer] to set up an internship,” said Joan Gallagher, associate director for LSU Career Services.
Gallagher expressed mixed feelings about the Labor Department’s new stress on these guidelines.
“If [the guidelines] are strictly enforced, employers might shy away from offering internships,” Gallagher said.
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