Tag Archives: Paid Intern

06.11.18
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You can’t pay for English whales (the queen owns those), but you should pay summer interns – as employees, not contractors

Whale summer internships paid unpaid employee independent contractorSome things you can’t pay for. All of the whales and sturgeon that live in English waters, for example, belong to the queen. Under an English statute from 1324, “The king shall have wreck of the sea throughout the realm, whales and sturgeons taken in the sea or elsewhere within the realm, except in certain places privileged by the king.”

So if you wanted to buy an English whale this summer, you may be out of luck. U.S. business should be spending their money elsewhere — like on summer interns! Yes, let’s talk about summer interns. Paid or unpaid? Employee or independent contractor? Have I captured your attention? I knew it. Read on.

Paid or unpaid? The rules have been changing to make it easier to have unpaid interns, provided the internships have educational value and are not for the benefit of the business. This post provides some guidelines. The bottom line, though, is that it’s safest to pay your summer interns. Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →