Corporate America, do yourself a favor and pay your interns
A piece of advice to companies hiring interns this summer: Pay them for their work.
Some organizations don’t, claiming that the chance to learn on the job is compensation enough. But not only has this left corporations vulnerable to lawsuits — NBCUniversal, Hearst, Condé Nast, Fox Searchlight Pictures, Warner Music, Coach and Viacom are just a few companies sued by former interns — it’s a foolish human resources strategy.
First, paying interns is clearly the safest legal option. Regardless of the outcome of such legal battles (Hearst was vindicated in December 2017 after a five-year battle, for instance, while Viacom settled for $7.2 million), paying their interns minimum wage would almost certainly have been cheaper for these companies than the legal battles and bad publicity that not paying them generated.
Unpaid internships also artificially limit a company’s hiring pool. If internships are unpaid, after all, students who have to make money to support themselves can’t do them. This system therefore gives people from more privileged backgrounds an unfair leg up. Offering internships for college credit only is even worse, since it forces students to pay what typically amounts to thousands of dollars to their universities in order to work for free.
Those financial realities stand to put internships outside the realm of possibility for those who aren’t affluent. That’s a huge percentage of college students. A recent study of students at more than 60 American universities found that 36 percent don’t have enough food, and a similar proportion lack adequate shelter.
And pay they must. CNBC calculated last year, for example, that it would cost around $9,506 to live for the summer in a city like Los Angeles, and an unpaid intern would forgo about $3,480 in wages (before taxes) — meaning that an internship can cost $12,986. Many students aren’t going to be able to shoulder such costs. This means companies are losing out on their skills.
Organizations that don’t pay their interns recruit not from a pool of the best possible talent but from the most privileged people seeking to break into their industries. That’s a bad outcome for both sides.
KARA ALAIMO, HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. Editor’s note: Kara Alaimo is an assistant professor of public relations at Hofstra University and author of “Pitch, Tweet or Engage on the Street: How to Practice Global Public Relations and Strategic Communication.” She wrote this for Bloomberg View.