Two years after announcing its crackdown on unpaid internships, Pro Publica reports this week that the U.S. Labor Department is doing a poor job and has investigated a few businesses for wage violations.
The biggest offender was an Outside magazine, an outdoors publication based in in Santa Fe, N.M.
Interns at the magazine had been fact-checking, reporting, researching, proofreading and preparing content for the website, all for about $250 a month.
“The Wage and Hour investigator told Outside’s lawyer that this arrangement violated minimum wage law, and the publication owed its interns back pay. Outside’s counsel said she’d talk it over with her client. They spoke again two weeks later. Outside refused to pay,” Pro Publica reported.
In 2008, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 50 percent of graduating students had held internships, up from the 17 percent shown in a 1992 study by Northwestern University. This means hundreds of thousands of students hold internships each year; some experts estimate that one-fourth to one-half are unpaid, according to the New York Times.