Unpaid and Overworked: A Study of Unpaid Internships, Labor Law, and the Long Struggle for Fair Treatment in the American Workplace

Abstract

Unpaid internships have become normalized in contemporary American society. As a form of unpaid labor, unpaid internships are nothing new and have long been accepted as legal and standard practice. Unpaid internships highlight the usefulness of educational experiences over monetary compensation and are seen as socially and professionally advantageous. Such logic is used by employers in both the public and private sector as a crutch invoked to promote unpaid internships' modern utility. While much research has been dedicated to the disparities unpaid internships perpetuate, scant attention has been paid to how the fight for paid internships can be contextualized within other American labor movements that have historically used the courts as a tool for social change. Working women, victims of age-based discrimination, and independent contractors are groups who have used the courts to secure equal pay and fair treatment. This paper concludes that unpaid internships are excused with infantilizing language in a similar vein to how other labor movements were treated by the courts; however, it was also found that unpaid internships exist entirely as a new category due to their consistent and contemporary justification for an economy that seeks out cheap labor.