The U.S. Labor Department rolled out new guidelines last week that make it easier for companies that want to hire interns but don’t want to pay them.
The new rules establish a “primary beneficiary test” that ratifies programs that help the intern more than the company. Seven factors determine whether the gig meets the standard. One says internships should provide training that “would be similar to that which would be given in an educational environment.” Another says the intern’s job should complement, not displace, the work of paid employees.
Unlike the previous standard, an unpaid internship doesn’t necessarily have to meet any proscribed threshold related to those seven factors. Each internship program will be justified on its own merits, a more forgiving benchmark for employers.
“This standard that the department is setting forth is easier for companies to satisfy in terms of internships qualifying as unpaid,” said Paul DeCamp, an attorney who works with employers at Epstein Becker & Green.
The old test was six factors, one of which prohibited employers from deriving “immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.” Companies found that standard overly rigid, arguing that it made it difficult for most internships to meet that requirement.
“If the intern did any productive work for the company it would — at least based on the strict reading of the test — be required that activity be paid, which is not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous,” DeCamp said.
Prompting changes
The change is a response in part to a string of intern lawsuits starting in 2011, when two former interns at Fox Searchlight Pictures filed a lawsuit alleging their employer violated the Fair Standards and Labor Act by not paying them for work they did on the movie “Black Swan.” In 2013 a court ruled in their favor, finding that their roles fell short of the Department of Labor’s six criteria for unpaid internships.
That decision was reversed in 2015 by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, which found the government’s standards too rigid. The court established its own criteria, and that became the basis for the new Labor Department rules.
Eric Glatt, one of the plaintiffs in the Fox Searchlight case, said he had mixed feelings about the new guidelines. While they give new latitude to companies that don’t want to pay interns, they may also improve the training and education that interns get.
But some labor advocates worry that under the new guidelines a company can justify any program, no matter how basic, as benefiting the intern.
