You’ve probably read about the two interns on the movie Black Swan who are now suing for $$$ they say is due to them for the work they performed (and if not, here's the NY Times article about it). As I wrote a while back, most industry internships are probably illegal under current laws, and while the internship system is pretty set in its ways, it has been mostly unchallenged until now.
Overall, this is a tough issue, but in case I didn’t make it clear in my previous post on the subject, I think interns are already paying to go to college and an internship if made available to a student should provide an educational experience in exchange for class credit. It should NOT be a source of unpaid labor or a way for a production, studio, or company to save money. Interns are college students, they are already paying tuition. This notion of paying to work someplace is simply ridiculous. If a production or company or studio wants (or probably NEEDS) to hire PAs to make coffee and get lunch and things of that nature, they should open their wallet and pay some folks and stop exploiting desperate students. Otherwise, you know, change the law, hire interns, go nuts.
Now, on the flip side, I get that cracking down on internships, well, it cuts both ways. What’s worse for students...paying (tuition) to basically work someplace for free in exchange for the hope of connections and future employment…or, having fewer opportunities for networking before graduation? Let’s face it, there aren’t that many legal internships for a reason…who really wants to play teacher or mentor to someone when they’re busy working a job? On the other hand, doesn’t the practice of replacing paid entry level employees with interns end up hurting students in the long run? Think about it this way, you work hard interning and once you graduate you can’t find a job because productions, like Black Swan, are only hiring interns for the work you're most qualified for. Like I said, it’s a tough issue.
I can only speak from my own experience, but as I mentioned in my previous post, I worked a couple internships and while I did get a job offer through one of those, I couldn’t take that job and in the end, after I graduated, I got my first job from a college friend whose show needed additional PAs. That friend got their job a month earlier because they answered an ad on Craigslist…yeah, Craigslist. So yes, it’s possible for a person without a ton of great connections to “break in” to the industry without an internship to pave the way. But hey, I do know unconnected friends that got excellent (even amazing) jobs via their internships, so they’d probably disagree with me big time about this matter.
So anyway, all that debate aside, what a lot of people are wondering now is, what exactly will happen with this lawsuit? Will these two guys make serious waves? Will they “never work in this town again?” Will anyone care much either way? As far as the outcome of the lawsuit, I’m gonna guess these two fellows get a little class action thing going on and that the end result is that everyone involved gets a small settlement (hush hush and out of court) and as a result maybe a few more interns who worked for other shows/studios come forward with their own illegal internship lawsuits (the economy being the way it is, needing to pay rent might trump fears of “career suicide” in the minds of former interns). Beyond that, I think the only thing that is absolutely certain about this whole issue is that students will continue to get the short end of the internship stick.
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