Managing Partner Ronald Shechtman, who is also the Chair of Pryor Cashman’s Labor Group, was interviewed by the Society For Human Resource Management (SHRM) for its April 9, 2010 article “Some Internships Might Be Challenged as Off-the-Clock Work.” 

The article begins by noting that for years, internships have provided a foot in the door for high school and college students. Shechtman told SHRM that now that internships increasingly are being filled by adults who want to gain new experiences instead of lengthier blanks on their resumes, employers should think twice before continuing to offer unpaid internships. Otherwise, that grateful look employers might once have expected from an intern might give way to the grimace of a plaintiff suing for off-the-clock work.

According to Shechtman, not all internships have to be paid at least at minimum wage. “There are institutions and companies who hire interns and make the internship completely educational.” The interns are just observers who receive training and participate in courses that are introductions to various fields to try to stimulate interest and familiarity with the basic aspects of different jobs. Those internships typically do not involve the kind of off-the-clock work prohibited by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and state wage and hour laws. And some internships—such as for law students after their second year of law school or for business school students interning at investment banks – are relatively lucrative for interns.

In his article, Allen Smith, SHRM’s manager of workplace law content, writes that if an employer tells an intern to answer a phone or brings in grunt work for the intern to go through, the employer is at risk of an off-the-clock claim. An employer might decide that the risk of this type of claim is too small to worry about. Shechtman worries about it though and says smart employers will pay interns at least minimum wage to avoid the time and expense of defending themselves from potential off-the-clock claims by interns.

Far too many employers assume that just because they name workers as one thing – such as interns or independent contractors – that enforcement agencies will accept these classifications at face value. As employers plan to fill summer internships, Shechtman cautioned them to remember that simply stating that internships are unpaid does not mean enforcement agencies will too.

To read the SHRM article, please click here.