The corporate "intern" scam.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - When two former interns at the New Yorker and W Magazine sued parent company Conde Nast Publications on Thursday, legal experts said it could be the first in a wave of lawsuits challenging companies who pay little or nothing for student labor.
The lawsuit comes just two days after a judge found that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated labor laws when it used unpaid interns for production tasks on "Black Swan," the 2010 film starring Natalie Portman.
Employment lawyers said that decision and similar lawsuits that are likely to follow would force employers to reconsider using unpaid or underpaid interns, first in "glamour" industries such as movies and publishing, where the practice has become standard, and then in industries that have implemented similar policies to reduce labor costs in a flagging economy.
"This trend is probably going to expand beyond media companies and beyond New York," said Laura O'Donnell, a lawyer at Haynes & Boone in San Antonio who represents management in labor disputes. "I think employers in all industries across the country need to take note."
More at:http://news.yahoo.com/employment-experts-predict-wave-lawsuits-unpaid-interns-192615927.html
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At first, it troubled me that he signed on to work for free, then discovered the law, then sued.
But what he explained was that the film industry has created a racket where skilled, experienced people (i.e., not "trainees"
are brought in to work as virtual slaves, simply because the entire industry does it that way, because they can.
Puts me in mind of what Disney does to the foreign kids they bring into Epcot, or the Summer Program kids they charge for apartments they own, where sometimes the net pay is zero.
Putting a stop to that is a good idea.
