At a minimum, 20th Century Fox, which is seeking to reverse the decision, will have to pay out the minimum wages earned in that period by the duo. The judge also added "class certification" to a group of Fox interns, and Turner, their attorney, told the Wire that the totality of the judgment "will have a much broader impact in terms of making corporations reexamine their internship programs."

The new precedent clarifies how employers can meet six criteria that the FLSA says make it okay to use young people as workers without pay. "If you're going to not pay your interns, it's a pretty high bar," Turner said. The law states that unpaid internships must benefit the worker, not the employer, and should be a part of a formal training program, without replacing a paid employee's job. The Black Swan "internship" — much like a lot of unpaid intern situations — violated all of those tenets, ruled Judge Pauley. Here's how, in the words of his ruling (in gray block quotes):

Fox's program benefited the company more than the kids:

On the other hand, Searchlight received the benefits of their unpaid work, which otherwise would have required paid employees. Even under Defendants' preferred test, the Defendants were the "primary beneficiaries" of the relationship, not Glatt and Footman.

There was no formal training program involved:

Undoubtedly, Glatt and Footman received some benefits from their internships, such as resume listings, job references, and an understanding ofhow a production office works.68 But those benefits were incidental to working in the office like any other employee and were not the result ofinternships intentionally structured to benefit them. Resume listings and job references result from any work relationship, paid or unpaid, and are not the academic or vocational training benefits envisioned by this factor.

The Black Swan interns displaced regular workers who otherwise would have gotten salaries:

Glatt and Footman performed routine tasks that would otherwise have been performed by regular employees. In his first internship, Glatt obtained documents for personnel files, picked up paychecks for coworkers, tracked and reconciled purchase orders and invoices, and traveled to the set to get managers' signatures. His supervisor stated that "[i]fMr. Glatt had not performed this work, another member ofmy staffwould have been required to work longer hours to perform it, or we would have needed a paid production assistant or another intern to do it.

For anyone who has ever had an unpaid internship, the Black Swan situation sounds familiar, which makes this ruling even more encouraging. Indeed, many internships appear to be within the grounds of the very internship that a U.S. federal judge just found illegal, both setting a precedent for future disgruntled worker bees and also scaring potential intern abusers into paying their summer or short-term staffers some actual money.