ALAN SCHER ZAGIER
Associated Press
A nascent campaign against employers’ use of unpaid interns is taking aim at what critics call some of the longstanding practice’s biggest enablers: colleges that steer students into such programs in exchange for academic credit.
Organizers hope to have mobilizers raise the issue on campuses as students return to school this fall, with a particular emphasis on schools in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. They also want to join up with organized labor as part of a broader coalition focused on workplace issues.
The backlash against working for free — and sometimes paying tuition for the privilege— comes after a federal judge in New York recently ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated federal minimum wage and overtime laws by not paying interns who worked on the 2010 movie “Black Swan.” Angry interns have also sued record companies, magazine publishers, modeling agencies and TV talk show hosts.
Leaders of the Fair Pay Campaign, a group organized in 2012 to fight the internships, say they are taking their social media-driven effort right to the top: they plan to press the White House to end its use of unpaid interns.
Getting college credit “is a tangible benefit” of internships, said campaign organizer Mikey Franklin, a 23-year-old British ex-pat who now lives in Washington. “But I can’t pay my rent with college credit.”
Franklin said he founded the Fair Pay Campaign when he was unable to land a paid political job after working as a campaign organizer on Maryland’s 2012 same-sex marriage ballot measure.
“Everybody told me you can’t get a job on (Capitol) Hill unless you’re an unpaid intern,” he said. “The more I looked, I saw it was an incredibly widespread practice.”
His allies include University of Nevada-Las Vegas student Jessica Padron, who is trying to defray the $6,500 costs of a four-month Washington internship for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid with a crowd-sourced online fundraising campaign. At New York University, a petition drive asks the school to remove unpaid internship listings offered by for-profit businesses. More volunteers are pitching in, he said, although he declined to provide specifics about the campaign’s finances.
A recent survey reported that 63 percent of graduating college seniors this year had an internship, the highest level since polling began six years ago. Nearly half the internships were unpaid. The expansion of internships comes as President Barack Obama and Congress have been emphasizing the problem of growing student debt.
Uploaded by Miranda Britt
