Publishing house Condé Nast announced on Wednesday that it will close its internship program, after two former W Magazine and New Yorker interns hit the company with law suits that cast bright lights on the nature of the unpaid worker's world.
The two interns claimed they received less than $1 an hour for working up to 14-hour days, according to the Guardian.
Condé Nast has yet to confirm the announcement, but Women's Wear Daily, but one of its publications, reported that the company would be ending its internship program in 2014, following the end of the current run of interns.
According to United States law, employers are only allowed to bring in unpaid interns if they benefit in some way - some internships provide educational credit, stipends or perks such as free meals. But companies aren't allowed to take on unpaid interns if they perform tasks that take the place of paid employers. Now, a series of legal cases has incited arguments over the ethics of unpaid work.
A judge ruled in June that Fox Searchlight Pictures employed two interns illegally, giving them payment below minimum wage to work on the film "Black Swan". One former Harper's Bazaar intern's case is in court at the moment as well.
The duo currently suing Condé Nast said that the publisher was gaining an illegal advantage from their cheap labor, the Guardian reported. Former W Magazine intern Lauren Ballinger, who worked there in 2009, said that her time spent at the publication was akin to the experience Anne Hathaway portrayed as the overworked secretary in "The Devil Wears Prada." Matthew Leib, who worked for two summers at the New Yorker's cartoon archives, claimed he was paid between $300 and $500 for nearly six months as an intern for the literary non-fiction magazine.
Ballinger and Leib's lawyer Rachel Bien advised Condé Nast that it would be "prudent" to get rid of the internship program, provided that the company wasn't willing to fork over more cash for their interns.
"We've focused on cases where we've seen interns doing real work and not having training or education experience, and on companies that we feel are most outside of the law," she stated.
"Some people feel that they have to exploit themselves to get their foot in the door," Bien said, acknowledging that internships do sometimes come with positive results and experiences. "Only certain groups are able to work for no pay, more affluent people - so the best-case scenario would be that companies hire interns, but pay the minimum wage."
