With an unforgiving job market looming in their near future, University students from every major, desperate to boost their resumes and gain work experience, are increasingly taking on low-paying or entirely unpaid internships.
“Internships are a really important and valuable part of the learning process,” said Pam Macki, a job developer in the University Career Center. “But the primary goal of an internship is that students should be learning.”@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=staff&d=person&b=name&s=Pam+Macki@@
According to the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, however, internship programs often fall short in fulfilling this goal of training and teaching students, and they are violating labor laws as a result.
“Often students don’t know their labor rights as interns,” said Robert Estabrook, communications director for the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. “It is a pretty high bar that employers need to meet if they’re going to have an intern.”@@http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Blogs/The-Vault/2010/12/21/Vault-Minimum-Wage-Jumps-in-Seven-States-But-Does-it-Help-Anyone.aspx@@
Internships do not mean free labor, Estabrook said, and the labor bureau has guidelines to ensure employers are not using them as such.
“They shouldn’t be benefiting financially from having an intern in their office,” Estabrook said. “The office may be just as productive with an intern as without.”
Instead, work during an internship should be a learning experience that increases in complexity and teaches specifics about an industry.
“The bottom line is that if it does not meet this criteria, the employer should be paying,” Estabrook said. “If an employer is using an intern in place of someone they would normally pay, then the intern should file a complaint.”
Students are often hesitant to file complaints against employers, however, for fear that it will give them a bad name in their chosen industry and they will lose a good recommendation to a potential future employer, Estabrook said.
University alumna Kailee Crawford, who graduated in March with a degree in sports marketing, said she directly attributes her unpaid summer internships to landing a job in a New York City marketing firm that she is set to start next month.@@http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2656535777@@
“My boss there is still a really great contact,” Crawford said of her first internship, an unpaid marketing internship in Portland. “I ended up working in sports after that job.”
She had similar internships for the next three summers and said the experience was valuable, but dedicating her summer to unpaid work, 20 to 30 hours a week, was hard. “I ended up working a lot of odd jobs to pay to live,” Crawford said.
Students who can’t land a paid internship but don’t have the option of dedicating an entire summer to getting one without any compensation can instead opt to apply to get credit through the Career Center’s Development Internship Program.
“It’s a real bargain in terms of credit,” Macki said, adding that it only ends up costing around $125 a credit.
University freshman Andrew Rogers said he has used his internship with the ASUO since fall term to get extra credit on top of his classes.@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=student&d=person&b=name&s=Andrew+Rogers@@
“I wanted to get more involved in the student government,” Rogers said. “This was a way to get credit for the work I was already doing.”
There has been more focus on unpaid internships in the past year, Estabrook said, but there are still issues with student interns doing work for free that they should be paid for.
“We’re still going to have cases where employers don’t know the law or don’t care,” Estabrook said. The bureau doesn’t usually know about a situation until it is brought to their attention, however. “We rely on students if they are having an issue with an employer to contact us.”