An unpaid internship can run to $1,463 a month in living costs, locking qualified young people out. Has an internship thrown you into financial hardship? Tell us

Unpaid internships are expensive.

That’s true all over the world. A striking new study highlighted by our colleagues in the UK finds that one-third of UK college graduates pay $1,463 a month in living costs, and up to $8,779 for a six-month unpaid internship.

Here in the US, the problem goes right to the top. The White House, which is fighting for a higher federal minimum wage for government workers, employs roughly 300 unpaid interns each year. The country’s most powerful office sees nothing wrong with employment for no compensation.

The scale of the problem is unmeasurable. The 2012 book Intern Nation estimates that there are currently 500,000 unpaid internships in the US. It’s an educated guess – the US Department of Labor does not count, regulate or track internships.



There are rules about unpaid internships, and they are often widely ignored. The six-point criteria for legal unpaid internships from the Department of Labor set the rules: employers cannot force interns to perform duties of a permanent employee or use unpaid interns for work that will benefit the employer. In 2010, the Department of Labor reminded employers that these internships should ideally be “structured around a classroom or academic experience”, encouraging the common practice of allowing internships for school credit.



By working for an organization for credit, which the student herself pays for, an intern is effectively paying her own employer for her work.



Even with the Department of Labor’s sparse legal framework, the list of lawsuits is endless. Two former interns sued Fox Searchlight for violating federal minimum-wage laws by not paying them. And 2011 was the year of the intern lawsuit, the beginning of a string of cases against big names such as Donna Karan, Hearst Corporation, Atlantic Records and PBS’s Charlie Rose. Only two weeks ago, NBCUniversal settled a class action lawsuit filed by a group of former interns for $6.4m.

But the courts won’t change the attitude toward interns. Condé Nast defiantly shut down their internship program after being taken to court rather than pay its interns.

There has to be a better way. We’re looking to explore the intern experience. Share your story in the comments: Have you been exploited for pay, or worked in an abusive internship environment? Share your experiences in the comments below.