Moneybox: Get Your Own Damn Coffee!

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Moneybox Get Your Own Damn Coffee! Most unpaid internships are illegal. Why don't more interns protest? By Katy Waldman Posted Monday, Feb 13, 2012, at 11:10 PM ET On Feb. 1, a funny thing happened in a U.S. district court in Manhattan: An intern complained in public. Xuedan Wang, a 28-year-old former intern at Harper's Bazaar, filed a lawsuit against the Hearst Corp., Harper's parent company, for failing to pay minimum and overtime wages during her unpaid internship. Wang, who goes by Diana, spent August through December 2011 at the magazine, coordinating fashion sample deliveries, filing expense reports, helping with photo shoots, and supervising other interns. Her typical 40-hour workweek sometimes ran to 55 hours. According to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, employers offering unpaid internships must meet six requirements that ensure the educational value of the experience for the interns, as well as guard against the displacement of regular workers. Unpaid internships are legal only if "the employer derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operation may actually be impeded," the guidelines say. The internship must also be "for the benefit of the intern" and should not involve tasks that would otherwise be assigned to paid employees. Wang's lawyer Elizabeth Wagoner, of the firm Outten and Golden, contends that Hearst violated these labor standards in its treatment of Wang and the hundreds of other unpaid interns who stud the corporation's offices at Harper's, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country, Seventeen, Esquire, and other titles. "The law says that workers can't bargain away their rights to the minimum wage, even if they wanted to," she told ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Romney Thinks Saying, "I'm a Conservative" Makes Him a Conservative Pentagon Calls for More Big-War Weapons. What Happened to a Leaner, Meaner Military? How Digital Roses Could Solve Internet Dating's Biggest Problem	Advertisement
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