The Internship Rip-Off - NYTimes.com I took an unpaid internship that I figured would give me experience and help me land somewhere in six months. Instead I'm picking up coffee and dry cleaning and performing other tasks that the company would otherwise have to pay someone for. I know this is the status quo for internships, but it violates the law, and it feels deeply unethical. Taking legal recourse would hurt my career prospects. Is there anything I can demand of this company in exchange for my slave labor? There is not. You have no standing to make demands, at least not the kinds that anyone will take seriously. A thousand eager aspirants are waiting for the chance to take your position. Start issuing ultimatums, and one of those lucky suckers will get her wish. That, however, is a practical consideration. As a matter of ethics, you should be able to demand, or at least expect, that the internship offer a worthwhile return on the time and money you put into it - namely, a better sense of whether and how to pursue a career in that field, and the skills or relationships with which to do so. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay everyone - not just official employees, but anyone whom they "suffer or permit to work." Purely educational positions are exempt from this requirement, but to qualify, an internship has to exist for the exclusive benefit of the intern. It can't help the employer in any way; in fact, it's a bonus if it actually impedes the employer's operations. Plenty of internships that violate employment law might still benefit the intern, of course, by giving her an inside track in a competitive field. Even crummy internships have some value. A firsthand glimpse of the mailroom may not be the stuff of dreams, but it's more informative than no glimpse whatsoever. That's why, whether an individual internship is fun or awful, the system as a whole is unethical: it reserves those foot-in-the-door opportunities for people who can afford to go without a paycheck. That only entrenches the advantages that children of privilege already enjoy, further tilting an uneven playing field. And it undermines paid employees, who have the same interest you do in making sure every worker is fairly compensated. Which raises the question of an intern's own ethical responsibility. If it's wrong to knowingly benefit from an unjust system, are people like you - unhappy people like you! - just perpetuating the problem? Attorneys at the New York firm Outten & Golden have brought lawsuits against the Hearst Corporation and Fox Searchlight Pictures over unpaid internships at those companies. Elizabeth Wagoner worked on both cases, but as unfair as she believes the system to be, not even she thinks you have an ethical obligation to quit. It wouldn't be fair to ask a worker to keep her boss honest, she said, not when employers have so much more bargaining power than their employees. I agree; if you have your heart set on a career in an intern-dependent field, it would be unreasonable to expect you to abandon that hope just because the people currently in charge refuse to do what's right. Wagoner suggests taking the internship and filing a lawsuit, but few are capable of undertaking that effort. Better, I think, is her suggestion to take the internship and then call the Labor Department - something you or your colleagues can do confidentially. Tell them the position is not legal. But don't tell them it hasn't been educational. After all, it has already taught you something about the values of the field you hope to enter. Does that make you wish for a better field? Or just a better internship?