Unpaid internships constitute a large portion of the employer job postings on the university’s Career Knight website.

The unpaid internship must be be destroyed. Some legislation could be written, or some more lawsuits could be filed — in the end, it needs to become illegal. As a business school student, you might think I’m typically sympathetic to most companies, and you’d be right in that regard — most of the time. But on this issue, I cannot waver; this is theft for hard work, peonage, plain and simple.

While looking for my current internship, I sent my resume to a few places that I thought might be interesting to work for; this included a local business incubator that shall remain nameless. I quickly got a call from a woman there who said that she was very interested in having me work for them, and wanted me to accept the position on the spot. Although she said my travel expenses would be covered, because I’d be driving around for them, I could not negotiate anything else out of her. I politely turned her down, and moved on to other more serious offers.

The history of the internship in the United States can be traced back to World War I, when the term first referred to physicians in training when medical school just wasn’t enough preparation. Because of this, interns were associated with medicine for a long time. According to the 2011 book “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy” by journalist Ross Perlin, the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act allowed lawmakers and committees to have “large staffs of experts”. This, along with the advent of air conditioning, paved the way for interns to be a part of the action. “Internship” eventually became widely used to refer to a generation of student workers starting around the 1960s.

Regular employees in this country have a number of federal workplace protections. The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed into law in 1938 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced some new work concepts, including the federal minimum wage, a forty-hour work week, an obligation to pay someone who is benefiting the business, and overtime pay. So, how did modern-day internships slip past the protections of the FLSA?

Not too long ago during the recession, the Department of Labor wrote distinctions that they found between an intern (“trainee”) and an employee. One of these is that an intern isn’t supposed to be giving the employer any “immediate advantage”, and they could actually be impeding the business. “Immediate” is not exactly defined here, but it’s logical to assume that an intern must give some kind of benefit to the business in order for them to be retained. Further, a new employee to a company could theoretically impede operations due to some kind of inexperience; why the intern has to be treated in a different class is unknown.

Every year, about one million undergrads take unpaid internship positions. However, its only the 61% of them who took the paid internships that are getting job offers. As of November 9th, 2013, a search on Rutgers University’s job board, CareerKnight, turned up 580 internships. Out of 485 listings that included any information at all about pay, 34% of employers flat out said that the posted internship was unpaid, while another 6% did not intend to pay minimum wage. Even though 20% of these companies claimed to at least pay the minimum wage, it’s unknown how many will actually pay overtime wage, if applicable. Additionally, only nine states also require work breaks; if any companies listed are offering an internship in California, for instance, they may also be skirting this.

Pay’s not the end of it, though. In 2009, Lihuan Wang, a grad student at Syracuse University, worked as an unpaid intern for a TV broadcaster. She claimed in a lawsuit that her boss led her to a hotel room, threw his arms around her, and squeezed her buttocks. When she resisted, she said that he later lost interest in giving her a permanent position. The case went to a U.S. District Court, where it was determined that because she was not getting paid, she was not considered to be an employee. She could not have her day in court because her status made her ineligible for sexual harassment protection under Title VII of Civil Rights Act ‘64.

With pay, though, the tide seems to be turning. New York law firm Outten & Golden has a website dedicated to class action lawsuits for unpaid interns who worked for employers like TV interviewer Charlie Rose, publisher Conde Nast, Fox Searchlight (regarding “Black Swan”), the Hearst Corporation (regarding “Harper’s Bazaar”), and NBCUniversal. A former intern for Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment sued for back wages plus interest, claiming she was only given $40 a week to do things like wrap presents and run errands. (Diddy’s only worth about $580 million, by the way). The White House has also been under fire recently for revealing that they save $2.5 million annually from not paying their interns.

High-profile internships, like those at the White House or in Manhattan, where the employee must shell out thousands of dollars in living expenses, means that greater opportunities are skewed towards richer families. It’s an unfortunate cycle that exists because companies (and the government) can get away with it. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. My advice to prospective internship hunters would be to never take an unpaid one, even if you think it’s one step closer to your dream job. Every student worker in this country deserves to have the same benefits and protections under the law that millions of other American workers enjoy.