Accomplished New York City Employment Law Attorneys Fight for Basic Employment Rights for Unpaid Interns

Stopping intern exploitation

Internships are meant to be a means of fostering real-world growth for students looking for a little experience and mentorship. Now, internships for many companies have become a means of putting students into the workforce without having to pay them anything. As the pressure to gain experience before graduation has mounted, highly-motivated students have accepted working for free. At Hepworth, Gershbaum & Roth, PLLC, our New York employee rights attorneys have been increasingly disturbed by the trends in using unpaid interns to run their businesses. This exploitation needs to stop.

Determining whether you should be paid for your internship

The Department of Labor has an established test that it uses to determine whether or not an internship should be paid. Our NYC employee rights attorneys are successful in unpaid internship lawsuits because we have nearly a century of combined legal experience recovering damages from employers who have abused their employees. The test for these cases is highly factually based. Each of the six factors of the Department of Labor’s six part test must be proven convincingly in order to recover damages. The three most highly contested factors in these cases are:

• Whether the experience was most beneficial to the intern or the employer

• Whether regular full-time employees were displaced by the internship

• Whether there was an immediate advantage derived from the work that the intern performed

Deciding to join a class action lawsuit with other unpaid interns

A class action lawsuit enables a group of plaintiffs to collectively recover relief from the same defendant. In order to get a class action lawsuit validated by a judge, the plaintiffs must all have suffered essentially the same injury from the same entity. Our New York employee class action attorneys encourage unpaid interns to consider this course of action for their lawsuits. It enables you to recover from your claims much more quickly and the strength in your numbers demonstrates the immorality of your employer’s actions.

Schedule a free initial consultation today if you are or were an unpaid intern

Although the definition of an internship has changed in practice, the definition of a legal unpaid internship has not. Schedule a free initial consultation with one of our NYC employee rights attorneys at Hepworth, Gershbaum & Roth, PLLC today to discuss your legal rights as an unpaid intern. An appointment can be scheduled by calling us at 212-545-1199 or contact us online.