Tag Archives: Intern

11.15.18
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NYC May Expand Anti-Discrimination Law to Cover Contractors, Interns

NYC anti discrimination gapI will admit, without shame, that in the 1980s, I loved the Gap Band. Songs like “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” and “Burn Rubber on Me” were just plain fun to listen to. Tip: Try it!

The band’s name didn’t refer to any actual gap — the name comes from the first letters of streets in Tulsa, Oklahoma — but I do know there are many gaps in anti-discrimination law, leaving some types of workers without adequate protection.  

The federal laws that prohibit discrimination in employment, like many (but not all) state laws, protect only employees. That leaves a gap. Independent contractors and interns who have been discriminated against may have no recourse.

The New York City Council is trying to close that gap.

In the same bill we excoriated on Monday for unfairly attacking the franchise model, the New York City Council also proposes to expand the protections of the City’s anti-discrimination law (section 8-107 of the Administrative Code) to protect independent contractors and interns, not just employees. 

Closing that gap makes sense. Hopefully this bill will be amended to keep the parts that expand anti-discrimination protection to non-employee workers (a good idea), while removing the parts that would expand liability to companies not responsible for the discrimination (a bad one).

© 2018 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.

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01.08.18
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Free Bird! Dep’t of Labor Rewrites Test for Unpaid Internships

chicks-2965846_1920Lots of things are free in the world of music. There’s Free Bird (Lynyrd Skynyrd), Free Money (Patti Smith), and according to Dire Straits, you can get your money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.

For the most part, though, you’ve got to pay for your interns. Or do you?

On Friday, the DOL announced it was reversing its 2010 guidance on Internship Programs under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Since 2010, the DOL had been taking the position that unpaid interns are employees and must be paid unless each of six factors were present. Here’s the old DOL fact sheet and six-factor test.

The DOL has now changed course, after four U.S. Court of Appeals decisions rejected the DOL’s test as too strict. The DOL now opted for a balancing test. The balancing test asks whether the intern or the business is the “primary beneficiary” of the internship.

The DOL’s new guidance adopts the same balancing test recently favored by the courts.

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10.30.17
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Court Rules That Shadowing Dad at Work Might Require Payment

Shadow - Trainee or Employee death-2577486_1280In the 1930s, the popular radio program The Shadow featured an invisible avenger who possessed “the mysterious power to cloud men’s minds, so they could not see him.” (He supposedly picked up this power in East Asia, which must have seemed mysterious in an era before Kung Pao Chicken was widely available.)

Eighty years later, “shadowing” has a different meaning. An unpaid trainee follows around a more experienced employee as a way to learn the business. Few trainees have mastered the power of invisibility [Note: only the best ones have, and they’re hard to find … ba-dum-bum], and often the nature of being a trainee involves getting in the way of the real work.

Scott Axel was a trainee who shadowed his father at an automobile wholesaler in Florida. He had no expectation of pay, and the business said it would not hire him. As a favor to his dad, the business let him learn the business by shadowing his dad.

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