Comedian David Letterman can breathe easier today after a former unpaid intern dropped her class-action lawsuit against his company and CBS. NYU graduate Mallory Musallam had sued Letterman for failing to pay her and other interns who had been promised no pay for their time working on Letterman’s late-night show.
The trend of interns winning such lawsuits is a troubling one. Nothing could be more destructive for a valuable institution that has traditionally helped ease young, unskilled workers into the professional world.
No offense to this newspaper’s interns — past or present — but even the very best ones often absorb more value (mostly in the form of paid employees’ time) than they produce. Their work product often doesn’t hold up to professional standards, and it takes a serious time commitment to bring them up to snuff.
But that is, of course, expected. Young people enter internships — including unpaid ones — precisely to improve their work product and make themselves a catch for future employers. Interns who master basic entry-level tasks can also be given more challenging tasks as well.
More broadly, internships familiarize tomorrow’s young workers with industry practices and teach them how to think the way professionals do when they approach problems. If both the interns and their supervisors work conscientiously, then the training and experience leads to a good reference and directly or indirectly to a job offer.
Internships, including unpaid ones, are a service that companies currently provide to the young — an informal course in professional education. Many companies would not offer them at all if meant getting sued or constantly hiring young, untested employees with a steep learning curve.
It is heartening to see Musallam not only withdraw her lawsuit, but also offer an explanation for how it came about in the first place. According to her letter of apology, a group of trial lawyers from a Virginia firm caught her “in a weak, vulnerable time, facing student debt,” and presented the lawsuit as an opportunity for her to make a quick buck. “The inveigling suit squad assured me that my intern work was little more than indentured servitude under newly established laws and that I was just one among other participants,’ her apology letter reads.”
This isn’t just about Musallam, or Letterman, or even the “inveigling suit squad” whose acquisitive behavior threatens young workers’ professional educations. It is also about the Obama Labor Department‘s efforts to crack down on unpaid internships, through which companies have long educated young people in the “real world” at a low cost. The department’s new guidelines were cited in one successful intern lawsuit decided last year in New York.
In an age when jobs for college graduates are already so sparse, and educational institutions do such a poor job preparing those graduates for professional life in the first place, it would be very short-sighted to kill off or scale back one of the few good avenues to an entry-level job.
