I recently came across a restaurant/club which was advertising for a social marketing/promotions "intern". Reading the description, I noticed that the position was unpaid. Now every small business gets the idea that it would be good if you could hire someone to do stuff and not pay them, and call it an "internship", but I know that there have been a lot of lawsuits with interns claiming that they were performing tasks otherwise done by paid employees, so they should have been paid.
What struck me about this particular place was that they don't seem to know much about marketing or social media themselves, as their facebook page isn't very well organized, they don't provide basic information on the page that their customers will want, and they don't respond to questions in a timely manner, if at all. So what will this "intern" be learning? Do restaurants and clubs really have Marketing professionals on staff that can offer the kind of training that you'd get in an educational setting?
The US Department of Labor has guidelines for unpaid internships:
- Interns must be given tasks that are beneficial for them.
- Interns must not be asked to run personal errands for the employer.
- Interns must be closely supervised by a staff member.
- Interns must receive training similar to that which would be given in an educational setting.
- The intern cannot displace staff employees.
- The employer cannot directly benefit from the intern's work.
- Both the intern and the employer must be made aware that the internship may not result in an employment offer.
- The internship should be for a fixed time period, established at the beginning of the internship.
- All parties understand the terms and job tasks on the internship.
- The terms of the internship must be in writing.
Now if you apply these rules to a restaurant or club, there isn't much that an unpaid intern could do, other than follow someone around. They can't displace an employee or do anything that benefits the employer, so you can't have them run your facebook page, work as a promotional person at events, or even work the door unless someone was standing next to them. You can't have them make coffee because that doesn't benefit the intern. There isn't really much that they can legally do.
It seems to me that you'd need to pay someone minimum wage, in which case you can actually use them to do things, and give them college credits or something that will be valuable on their resume in exchange for taking lower pay. Unpaid internships are a red flag; You may find the intern suing you for 2 or 3 months pay when it's all over with the claim that they did things that would have required a paid employee if they weren't there. And that could be very, very expensive.
