Christopher Aemmer Professor Kim Moore GNST-G481 June 29, 2015 Free Labor? Becoming an intern can open up a world of possibility to an individual who is looking to get started on gaining experience for their expected career field. It is for this reason that many companies have come to expect, or even favor applicants who have had some experience in the field already, usually, from an internship. An internship can tell an employer a lot about an applicant. It can tell them what kind of experience that person has had already in the field, whether he/she will be more competent at their job than the others, and probably a little about their work ethic. Since the internship is such a popular gauge for new hires, the question of whether or not the reliance on the hiring process needs to be asked. The answer to the question breaks down along two lines. Is the internship paid, or unpaid. Having and internship on ones resume’ really functions very much like having previous job experience listed. So for the employer, this would actually show them where the applicant has had the most experience and what their performance was like. But if we can consider an internship to be almost the same as job experience, then shouldn’t internships be paid like a job would be? The answer is both yes and no. In actuality, the paid internships allow companies to assign interns “real work” according to the standards set by the Department of Labor whereas in unpaid internships, the guidelines stress the importance that “[t]he employer doesn’t benefit from work the intern is doing”, a rule which helps inhibit abuses, but also limits what an intern is allow to do. In essence, the unpaid internship is a very similar thing to volunteer labor, but the intern must sign a contract and follow the same rules as employees do but with a lower status and little to nothing for perks or real job experience. Naturally, there is still the potential for a company to either abuse the intern, seeing him/her as essentially free labor with few strings attached (even fewer if the intern doesn’t report abuses to the Department of Labor). Fortunately for interns, there are federal regulations which govern how unpaid internships are set up. These rules are particularly sensitive to internships which are being conducted at a for profit institution. It’s not uncommon that a person (student or graduate) will travel (even out of state) to the location where they received their internship, if it’s important enough to them and their budding career. It seems natural then that if an individual were to change their living arraignments to complete an internship with the company they chose, that they should receive some level of compensation. If anything, it would likely help guarantee and increase the successful completion of more internships than before. Any compensation that helps stabilize an intern in a new area if that intern has moved or prevented them from needed a second or third job to support themselves would actually benefit the employer as well as the intern. The less time an energy the intern has to spend working beyond the regular work week, the more time and energy the intern will have to devote to the quality and quantity of their internship. It makes sense then that the majority of internships in the U.S. are paid internships. So, if companies are going to screen their applicants by whether or not they’ve completed an internship, it would be wise to consider if that person had a paid or unpaid internship, on one will guarantee that person had real job experience. Bibliography Hickman, Blair, and Christie Thompson. "When Is It OK to Not Pay an Intern?" Top Stories RSS. ProPublica, 14 June 2013. Web. 30 June 2015. .