February 2, 2012
Former intern sues Harper’s Bazaar seeking unpaid wages
by Melville House
Xuedan Wang, represented by the firm Outten & Golden, has filed a suit against The Hearst Corporation claiming the company owes wages to their unpaid interns. Wang claims that she worked 40-55 unpaid hours weekly while interning at Harper’s Bazaar. The lawsuit “could shake the publishing industry” writes Jeff Roberts at PaidContent.org.
The case poses philosophic and economic challenges not just for the publishing industry but for an overall economy in which more and more businesses are using interns….In the case of Hearst, its practices may be no better or worse than the dozens of other companies that use interns. The publisher may simply have had the bad luck to have become a test case for the legal parameters of America’s internship economy.
Roberts uses himself as an example of the widespread use of unpaid labor, and gives a taste of the frustration that surely led to Wang’s complaint:
I interned as a fact-checker [at The New York Times] in 2010, providing French translation and GDP calculations for its columnists. I didn’t receive a salary, a lunch or, some days, even a greeting.
The use and/or abuse of interns has become an increasingly hot topic (see Verso’s Intern Nation). What do you think? Is the system broken? If so, how should it be fixed?
I’m particularly curious to hear interns (past or present) respond to this. I might as well start. As an undergraduate, I interned at the LA WEEKLY, which eventually led to a paid job fact-checking, assisting the music editor, and writing for the paper. This seemed like an ideal internship experience: a valuable, short-term career education that leads to paid work. However, I can easily imagine the labor abuses inherent to the internship system as well…
Stories, anyone?
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11 Comments
The intern system is a manifestly exploitative system that has the bonus of also being a highly regressive system. Basically, it gives the relatively privileged a hobbling and uncertain step up while at the same time, because of its ubiquity, acting to exclude the less privileged.
It’s a disgusting practice and the federal government should get serious about it the way they claimed they would a few years back and put an end to it–at least with for-profit organizations.
As an undergrad I’ve had three unpaid internships in publishing and going into it I knew none of the companies would be hiring me. At my most recent, my supervisors took long lunches, went Christmas shopping, and discussed People magazine throughout the work day. Which made sense, because they had nothing else to do while their interns were doing literally all of their work. Oddly, my resume STILL isn’t good enough to land me a paying job. So I wait tables instead…
I had learned quite a bit at each internship, but I literally can’t afford to work for free now that I’m out of school and paying back my enormous student loans. I absolutely agree with dporpentine that this system benefits the privileged — those kids whose parents pay their rent, pay for their school, pay for their train tickets to get from the suburbs to the internship in Brooklyn.
Yes! Its ubiquity in certain industries (publishing) has transformed the job landscape, absolutely costing opportunites. Why retain an entry-level salaried employe when you can instead put those efforts toward vetting a revolving door of workers you won’t have to compensate?
Also, when people jokingly complain about the quality of work they receive from their interns, it’s terrifying insight into how that work is being degraded. They are basically admitting that the workers they aren’t compensating except with bitcoins of experience haven’t been adequately trained. Meaning they’re getting less than nothing. Monstrous.
I’m a recent grad who has been interning while in school and for the last six months while looking for a paid position. However, I come up against the help wanted but only someone with two or more years experience for an associate position. Just this morning I scoffed at an ad seeking an intern with one to two years experience for an unpaid six month position. After six month a paid position may be offered. How is anyone supposed to begin a career after college with a system like this? Three internships while completing my undergrad should be an acceptable amount of experience for an associate position. Am I wrong?
Like many people who went to college in NYC (not a “in Cambridge” -type euphemism for Columbia; I went to Eugene Lang) I had lots of internships and worked paid jobs simultaneously during my college years. I interned at Bust magazine, Fence magazine, Marvel Comics and Grove Atlantic. I felt disenchanted and exploited during these internships and was super obnoxious and unpleasant about it. (Especially at Bust! Sorry Bust!) Partial excuse: I was tired? I worked at a bar til 4am then came to work in an office all day a lot of days.
I graduated without student debt — an increasingly anomalous experience and one I’m very grateful to my parents for. But as I searched for my first job (and temped and waitressed), I noticed something odd — some of my former classmates were still working at unpaid internships! For, sometimes, years, while being supported by their parents. The magazines and art galleries that “employed” them presumably had less need to hire salaried entry-level employees. Like, well … me.
I finally did find a job at a publishing house, thanks 100% to connections I made during my Grove internship. There, too, though, there were some entry-level workers who were actually living on their 30K-ish salaries and some for whom that salary was a fun joke supplement to the rent and bills and travel expenses paid for by their wealthy parents.
I know “vast class differences exist in New York City” is not news. And I feel grateful, now, for the internships that I felt exploited by at the time. Coffee-fetching is not ennobling, but absorbing whatever you can from the environment you’re in IS worthwhile experience. I wish it wasn’t an experience relegated exclusively to the relatively privileged. And I think post-graduate unpaid internships should be illegal.
That’s *appalling*.
Off the intern topic, but I just wanted to point out that BitCoins are worth nearly $6 as I write at the Mt. Gox exchange. So not valueless at all.
“And I think post-graduate unpaid internships should be illegal.”
Pretty sure they are illegal under current labor law, and that their continued existence is a question of enforcement. Of course, this class-action suit will help determine that going forward, of course of course.
I interned for a couple of different places before landing a job (which, truth be told, I got through dumb luck and a wardrobe choice), all the while doing the grad school and moonlighting shuffle. It sucked, and it didn’t take me long to become embittered. The corn-syrup frosting on that bit of poverty cake was when someone I worked with stood up at a meeting of independent publishers and started raving about how wonderful interns were: “They work for free, and they are dying to do it. We should have an entire _staff_ of interns; why should I pay someone to do the work they do for free?” That’s as close to villainy as most pleasant people get.
I wonder if people would accept publishing-style unpaid internships in other industries, like, say, construction or manufacturing? Books are still a business, and so long as the goal is a profit (most of the most dignified presses are not 501c3s), publishers need to pay their employees.
Having completed four unpaid internships (all after receiving my BA, mind you), I’m even more conflicted on this issue than I was when I started.
Is the system unfair? Of course it is. But I think the problem is so much more complex than it is often made out to be.
A stranger once scolded me, saying, “You’re taking away the job from yourself!” And one one hand, she was right. It’s tempting to argue that companies should not be able to use unpaid interns to take on the work typically reserved for entry level hires. My question is: Should it then be ok for interns to do nothing more than stuff envelopes and fetch coffee? In my opinion, there’s nothing worse than coming out of an unpaid internship after six months and realizing that you have essentially learned nothing.
Sometimes I wonder if by taking on so many internships, I haven’t actually DEvalued myself. I can almost hear the HR reps. “Still interning at 25? There must be something wrong with her.” Interning can be demoralizing, disenchanting, and frankly, infuriating.
And yet, I also know that without those extra bullet points on my resume, I’d have nothing. No experience, no contacts, and no hope. You think the internship system benefits the well-to-do? Well, what if it weren’t in place? I’m not so naive that I don’t realize that all the jobs would just go to the person whose father had the most connections or the person who attended the most prestigious school. At least now I have a chance to dip a toe into that world and pick up a few valuable skills – even if it means I have to take on a full-time job “on the side” to enable me to pursue a string of unpaid internships in a field I actually love.
Will all my unpaid hours end up paying off? Well I guess that depends. You aren’t hiring by chance, are you?
It’s really this simple: under all but a narrow band of circumstances, almost none of which obtain in the comically exploitative world of publishing, it’s illegal for for-profit companies to have people work for free. The practice should end. Even if the employer is a small company that needs the help to get by. If your business model requires slavery, you should get out of business.