How to Know If An Unpaid Internship is Illegal

 ABC News on Campus reporter Miriam Smith blogs: College undergrads are eager to find summer jobs that will pad their resumes. But with the current economic downturn, paid job openings are becoming harder and harder to find. That’s why 50 percent of graduating students have agreed to spend their precious summer months working for free according to a 2008 survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. And of these hundreds of thousands of internships, about half of them are estimated to be unpaid. Although unpaid internships may pay off for future prospects, experts say most of them are actually illegal.If you answer yes to any of the following questions, your unpaid internship may be illegal.   Are you providing work that’s of any benefit to the company whatsoever? Are you assisting the employer in any way in running their business — doing tasks such as delivering mail, sorting files, filing papers, writing reports, or scheduling interviews?  Are you performing a task that is routine — i.e. if you (the intern) weren’t there, would a regular paid employee still do that job?  Do you work independently more often than you are supervised?   Is your internship more like a job than a class (despite being on company property)?  Have you been promised a job at the end of the internship?  Affirmative answers to any of the questions above may make your internship illegal because they contravene the six federal criteria that must be met for an internship to be unpaid and still legal. California employment lawyer Michael Tracy who practices in Los Angeles, Calif. breaks it down: “It’s not so much the work they do but the benefit the employer derives from it,” he said. “It’s easy to determine a valid internship because the intern is going to more get in the way of running the business as opposed to helping it.”Some other things to remember:  Some companies try to get around labor and overtime laws by requiring that the internship be part of a college program. Don’t be fooled — this does not make your internship legal!  If you work for a nonprofit employer, there’s a much greater chance that your internship is legal.  Whoa, I think this internship is illegal. What do I do now?Most interns don’t report unpaid labor violations because they are concerned about how it would affect their future job search or because they don’t know that what’s being asked of them is illegal.  But if they do choose to report the violation, they can do so and possibly without jeopardizing their future. Interns have up to two years after the job’s termination to open a case. According to Tracy, “Internship cases very frequently settle quickly and quietly for a good amount of money… especially for large companies who want to avoid any type of publicity.” Compensation claims can add up, since interns who report their employers are eligible to win twice the amount of minimum wage for each hour worked, even two years later.To avoid such prosecution, trial lawyer Broadus Spivey of Spivey & Grigg LLP in Austin, Texas advises employers to stick to basic work hours.”An employer that works an employee over eight hours a day and, number one, isn’t paying that employee or, number two, may be paying that employee for regular time — and doesn’t pay overtime — is taking a serious risk,” he said. “You can’t work slave labor in America anymore.” When in doubt, be sure to ask plenty of questions before accepting an unpaid internship to make sure the knowledge you gain will be worth the expense of spending the summer broke. And, of course, each internship is unique, so it’s important to speak to an attorney to determine whether or not yours is legit.