The fight against unpaid internships continues on with a fresh campaign against the schools that encourage them by offering academic credits, the Associated Press reported.
The Fair Pay Campaign, organized in 2012, has mobilized using the Internet and social media. One of their main objectives so far has been to get the White House to stop using unpaid interns.
Fair Pay and other supporters of interns being paid more than just class credits are coming off of a lawsuit in which a federal judge in New York ruled in the favor of two interns working on the set of "Black Swan." The judge ruled Fox Searchlight had violated minimum wage and overtime laws by not paying two 40-something-year-old interns.
Since the court victory, magazine publishers, modeling agencies, TV studios and more companies have received similar lawsuits.
Mikey Franklin, a British 23-year-old Fair Pay organizer who now lives in Washington, said college credits are a "tangible benefit... But I can't pay my rent with college credit."
He said he heard endlessly from his peers that he would not be able to find a job unless it was an unpaid internship. He eventually found a paid position as a campaign organizer for Maryland's 2012 same-sex marriage ballot measure.
"Everybody told me you can't get a job on (Capitol) Hill unless you're an unpaid intern," he said. "The more I looked, I saw it was an incredibly widespread practice."
Skeptics of campaigns like Franklin's still point to the valuable experience an internship at a prestigious company will get a student. Robert Shindell, vice president and chief learning officer of the research and consulting firm Intern Bridge, previously told Inside Higher Ed that the Black Swan case was not a ruling on interns, but on employees.
"The definition of intern always includes the word student or academic or some form of these two things," Shindell said. "[Black Swan] is an employee law case - plain and simple - it has nothing to do with internships. But because they added in those words, all of a sudden everybody's up in arms about it."
As the job market remains harsh, not just for recent graduates, but for all, internships have been on the rise. 63 percent of graduating seniors this past spring had an internship, the highest figure since such surveying began six years ago.
It is also coming at a time where President Barack Obama is addressing the problem of students graduating with a mound of loan debt. While internships encourage student debt, they still provide students with their best shot at finding work after school.
"I agree that there are organizations that see interns as cheap, unpaid labor," Dianne Lynch, president of Stephens College, told the AP. "But I could line up 25 students who could tell you the best learning experience they had was an academic internship."
