I'm worried my employer is getting his work done for free.

Career Opportunities & Internships
1

HI! I’m a second year college student.
I’m in the middle of an internship with a start-up company. It’s a content writing internship, but I find myself working 4-5 hours a day sitting at my computer and entering data. I’m not getting paid, and I get assignments DAILY. As I mentioned already, this is a start-up and they’re not generating any revenue yet. It’ll take them at least 6 months.
What should I do with this? I’m worried they’re getting free labour and calling it an internship. The kind of work I’m doing will not change - it’s donkey work, very honestly. This will go on for about two more months. And then the employer will send me off with a letter of recommendation.

Will this internship help my resume, or should I look for something else? I have another unpaid opportunity where I’ll be writing/generating content and not copy-pasting it.

I need your advice people!

2

You’re being exploited. You don’t need a LoR from an employer.

3

Look for a paid job.

If you are not being compensated anything (not even a stock/equity stake in the company) for doing real work, the internship may be illegal. In any case, either it is a signal to you that the employer is not on the up and up, and/or the actual paid job opportunities in that line of work are few compared to the number of people seeking those jobs.

4

There are many unpaid internships as it was and continues to be common practice. A lot of states have made it illegal or have required unpaid internships to at least apply towards academic credit. Your internship will help your resume a little bit, but you should definitely look for other opportunities as any employer that doesn’t provide its employees (interns included) with an exchange of value isn’t likely to give you that strong of a recommendation anyway.

5

Thanks for your reply. Yep, I’m pretty sure a letter of rec from a starter in the entrepreneurship business won’t have any value.

6

There is most definitely a dearth of paid internships. But unpaid ones with established companies have atleast some value.

7

An unpaid internship definitely involves doing work for free, so I’m not sure what the surprise is here. Perhaps you can ask for more challenging work.

8

An unpaid internship should not involve doing ANY work that provides value to the company; the unpaid internship should be exclusively for your benefit as the intern. The moment you do work that adds value to the company, you must be paid. The easiest test of whether you should be paid is to ask yourself the following two questions: 1. Have I regularly performed tasks that needs to be done (i.e. if I weren’t around, would someone else have to do them)? 2. Is the organization I am interning for a for-profit? If the answer to both of those questions is YES, then the company is in violation of federal labor laws. For a more detailed test, look here: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.pdf

If the company is in violation of laws (which sounds likely), then you should do a handful of things. First, take time to list out everything you have ever done for them. Second, document every hour you have worked (exclude time you were not working, such as non-working lunches and breaks longer than 10 minutes). Third, ask nicely for compensation for the work you are doing.

From there, things could go different ways.

A) Your boss could grant your request for compensation appropriately. That means that he will either offer to give you back pay as well as pay going forward and that this pay will be greater than or equal to the minimum wage of your state. If you expect to work, say, 20 hours per week for 12 weeks, that means you need to be paid a minimum of $1,740, though that can take the form of hourly pay + back pay or a guaranteed stipend (anything not guaranteed won’t work).
B) Your boss could grant your request insufficiently. For example, if he says he will give you a stipend of $1,000, then you can only accept if you will have worked fewer than 138 hours over the course of the summer (that comes out to federal minimum wage of $7.25); that hours figure will be lower in states with a higher minimum wage (for example, if your state has a minimum wage of $10.00 per hour, then you cannot work more than 100 hours for a stipend of $1,000). If he says that he will pay you from this point forward, then you should not accept, as you are still owed back pay for the work you had done previously.
C) Your boss could deny your request for compensation. If that is the case, then make sure to get it in writing.
D) Your boss could fire you. If that is the case, then make sure to get a written reason for dismissal.

An important thing to note is that as an employee you are not ALLOWED to negotiate against yourself for something less than minimum wage. It is illegal for an employer to pay you less than minimum wage, and you are not permitted to waive your rights - this is done to protect people, like yourself, from being taken advantage of. So when I say that you “cannot accept” an offer, I truly mean you legally can’t accept and your boss can’t legally offer it! Furthermore, even if you spent the majority of your time on training type things, the company is still not excused from paying you fairly (this is because, as a full time employee, your employer is required to pay you for training as well).

If B, C or D are the outcome of your conversation, be sure you get things documented, and look into legal options. Several unpaid “interns” have won judgments against companies illegally exploiting them in the name of “gaining experience” in the past two years. The nice thing here is that if your employer tries to tell you that you are in the wrong, you will have the full weight of the law on your side. Fair compensation is your right, not a privilege.

9

This is the most recent fact sheet on the website for the U.S. Department of Labor. http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm?loc=interstitialskip

I would assume that the owners of the start up are unfamiliar with the laws about unpaid internships. Presumably organizations offering internships through a university program would be informed about the laws, but I assume that the OP arranged his own internship. I don’t recommend the adversarial approach recommended above, but I suggest having a meeting with your supervisor where the OP discusses what he has learned about internships and asks (if he is interested) in what kind of real internship experience could be created there. It isn’t good to be exploited but at the same time doing real work might be more useful career-wise than doing no work of value to the firm and writing a internship paper that gets academic credit. These credit/no credit internship papers that are submitted to faculty at the end of a proper internship are often lame.

10

Yeah, you could spend lots of time documenting all the ways this start up has violated the many and varied regulations against free labor. A great use of your time and a great way to generate some business for an underemployed labor lawyer looking for a case.

Or you could quit and go get a paying job or a better internship and look at this as a lesson learned.

11

The attitude of “just get another job” is the very reason that employers think they can get away with violating the law (or, as Cheddar wisely points out, that employers don’t even know the law exists). The whole point of this law is that employees can’t reasonably get another job, and without the weight of the law on their side the employees have nearly no bargaining power - in a saturated labor market, it is much easier for an employer to go out and hire someone else than it is for an employee to go out and find another job.

Asking for payment should definitely be done and it should be done in a constructive fashion, I agree; approaching things adversarially makes things much more difficult. However, being prepared is never a bad thing. If you go in armed with information, you can take a productive, constructive approach, act professionally, and then respond accordingly after your conversation ends. Whenever matters of payment are involved, preparation is key - if you get a response you do not want to hear, your first reaction will set the tone of the rest of the conversation.

Documenting the things you have done for a summer internship should not be too arduous - an hour or so is not exactly “lots of time,” and that is all it should really take.

To rebuff glutton’s point a little more, the idea that one can simply take another job makes sense if you are talking about a full time job at a company that is failing or mistreating its workers. Employer cut benefits? Reason to start looking. Employer is making you work too many hours without in-kind compensation? Maybe worth looking. But in order to start looking, you need to have time… a job search can take months. In the case of someone with a summer internship, time doesn’t exist - it is already August, and summer internships will be ending within the next two to four weeks. That isn’t enough time to find a place to apply to, let alone go through an interview process, start the internship and get something meaningful out of it. The time to find another job was during the interview process, but since that obviously came and went, getting paid for work already done is the step to take.

Even if you lose and don’t get paid, you still will learn plenty about employment rules and regulations as well as standing up for your rights when you are in a position of weakness, which will help you in your future endeavors.