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By Susam Adams

This spring luxury shoes and accessories company Salvatore Ferragamo posted an unpaid internship listing on LinkedIn. “Retail Intern for its New York Flagship Store,” it reads.  “This position will provide a valuable learning experience for those interested in the day-to-day operations of a luxury goods environment.” Really? “90-95% of the time will be spent on the sales floor working with product, sales associates and answering client questions when possible,” it goes on to say. The interns don’t ring up sales, but instead walk around and presumably try to convince shoppers to buy shoes, scarves and jewelry. They also fix the displays and manage the stock. One of the requirements: “A letter from your school confirming that you can receive school credit.”

This listing exemplifies the messy state we’re in when it comes to unpaid internships. Now that it’s intern season and hundreds of companies, non-profits and government agencies are relying on free labor, we should be asking whether these arrangements are legal. Search “unpaid internship” on job aggregator Indeed and you get 1,880 listings, including big players like Cablevision, radio broadcaster Clear Channel, fashion house Marc Jacobs and the Mayo Clinic. Though a federal judge has said that school credit doesn’t make unpaid internships legal if they don’t meet other criteria, all of those companies make college credit a requirement for getting the job.

What’s more, the law isn’t clear as it applies to non-profits and even to government agencies like the White House, says David Yamada, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, who wrote the first law review article on unpaid internships back in 2002.

Proponents of unpaid internships say the jobs help aspiring professionals get on-site experience and résumé entries that can spur their careers. Detractors insist that unpaid positions exploit workers, take jobs from would be entry-level employees, favor the privileged who can afford to make no money, and perhaps most importantly, break longstanding labor laws. Now that some 35 suits have been filed against employers by unpaid interns (11 have settled, including one for $450 million against the Elite modeling agency), employment defense lawyers are increasingly advising clients to start paying interns at least the minimum wage or cancel their programs. Condé Nast ditched its internship program in October after unpaid interns at The New Yorker and W sued....Continue Reading

> via Forbes