How to Treat Your Interns Right

By Rieva Lesonsky

The end of the school year is here, and that means it’s time for many small businesses to turn to a valuable labor source: interns. Hiring college students to work in your business, learning the ropes, is a rite of passage for students and small business owners alike, and can give you access to the energy, enthusiasm and tech skills of young people who can contribute a lot to your business.

But a growing number of companies, emboldened by the recession, are taking more than they’re giving from their interns. The New York Times recently reported on the growing practice of companies offering unpaid internships, having interns work 12 hours or more and using them solely for “grunt work” like fetching lunch and filing.

These aren’t just college students, either. The Times reports a growing number of college graduates are clamoring for internships in a tough labor market where the jobless rate for college grads age 24 and under is now 9.4 percent.

Are you exploiting your interns? Yes, entry-level work has always involved some degree of fetching and carrying, but if your internships aren’t offering anything of value, you could be running afoul of the law.

The major area to consider is whether your internships are paid or unpaid. State labor laws regulate this, so you first need to determine whether your state requires paying interns. If your state does allow unpaid internships, you also need to comply with federal Labor Department regulations.

In general, this means that:

• Unpaid interns must gain some type of vocational education from the internship.
• The internship is for the benefit of the interns.
• Interns can’t be used as substitutes for regular employees; instead, they have to be supervised by employees.
• The employer cannot derive immediate benefit from the intern’s work.

An unpaid internship may seem like a lot of trouble for you in the beginning, but if you handle it right, you can end up training someone who could become a valuable employee in the future. Stay on the right side of the law, and your company will be a desirable place for interns. Run afoul of the law, and you could ruin more than your business’s reputation.

Image by Flickr user Jessica Mullens (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Business Law, Compliance, Small Business, small business, Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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