Unpaid internships came under fire after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out fellow colleagues for not paying their interns. Every year, over a million college students and recent grads join the “intern workforce” in hopes of getting the experience necessary to pursue their careers. But, many internships are unpaid, unregulated, and without employee protections. What’s more, not everyone can afford extracurricular job training with no pay, and that puts these students at a disadvantage when they are later seeking jobs. TOPFRIG discusses how this form of unpaid labor came to be, and how to make access to this experience more fair and inclusive.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING
ProPublica on Obama era regulation https://www.propublica.org/article/ho...

Department of Labor’s six factor test
https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/complian...

Pay Our Interns’ congressional report http://payourinterns.com/wp-content/u...

Matthew Hora’s college internship study http://ccwt.wceruw.org/documents/CCWT...

Andrew Mark Bennett on unpaid internships
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...

CREDITS
Produced and Edited by: Isabela Quintero, Dushyant Naresh, Page Ellerson
Supervising Producer: Allison Brown

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