Les Droits De L'enfant

BY STEVEN GREENHOUSE

With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships in the United States has climbed in recent years, leading regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.

Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers.

Last year, M.Patricia Smith, then New York Stte’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several companies’ internships. Now, as the U.S Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the department’s wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide. Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential employer. The Labor Department says it is cracking down on companies that fail to pay interns properly and expanding efforts to educate companies, universities and students o the law regarding internships. ”If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internships with a forprofit 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”, said Nancy J. Leppink, acting director of the Labor Department’s wage and hour division.

Ms Leppink said many employers failed to pay, even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities- in other words, it is largely a benevolent contribution to the intern. No one keeps official count of how many paid and unpaid internships there are, but Lance Choy, director of the Career Development Center at Stanford University, sees definitive evidence that the number of unpaid internships is rising quickly-fueled by employers’ desire to hold down costs and students’ eagerness to gain experience for their résumés. Employers posted 643 unpaid internships on Stanford’s job board this

academic year, more than triple the 174 posted two years ago.

Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure , many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.

Concerned about the effect on their future job prospects, some unpaid interns declined to give their names or to name their employers when they described their experience in interviews. One student at an Ivy League university said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.

A student at New York University who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship at Little Airplane, a company in New York that makes children’s

...