In April 2010, the Department of Labor released a six-point test to help determine whether an internship in the for-profit sector qualifies to be unpaid under federal law. One of the key criteria is that the position must be of more benefit to the intern than of benefit to the company. Companies can’t just use interns to replace regular employees. — propublica.org

fschlem started a blog The Dirty South...The blog takes it name from a studio titled the "Dirty South," offered at the Georgia Tech. The studio was the brainchild of TVSDesign Distinguished Studio Critic Jennifer Bonner and it’s goal was to look at the city of Atlanta through the filter of the rap ideology of east coast/ west coast/ dirty south, translated to the realm of architecture...Connely Farr thought "wow. really interesting idea for a studio..."

Unpaid interns are common in architecture firms, but recent lawsuits brought by interns across other industries may have the architecture industry forking out some cash.

In many industries, the term ‘intern’ is often used to describe someone who works for no pay, but the NCARB’s IDP has been trying to detach interns from the assumption by architecture firms that they are willing to work for free. The council defines architectural internships as post-graduate, pre-registration professional work. — DesignBuild Source

Estimates put the number of unpaid interns every year between 500,000 and one million. So, in a country where working for free is mostly illegal, a student population somewhere between the size of Tucson and Dallas will be working for free, in plain view. — theatlantic.com

An intern-rights movement is afoot, sparking class-action suits against Hearst and Fox Searchlight; rumors of new rules at Condé Nast; a Times “Ethicist” column (headline: “The Internship Rip-Off”); and a book (Intern Nation) decrying many of the unpaid jobs as boondoggles. Amid the uprising, our interns surveyed 100 other New York interns about the apprentice’s life. — nymag.com

Two men who worked on the hit movie “Black Swan” have mounted an unusual challenge to the film industry’s widely accepted practice of unpaid internships by filing a lawsuit on Wednesday asserting that the production company had violated minimum wage and overtime laws by hiring dozens of such interns. — nytimes.com

Internships are pretty sweet deals for employers, especially during a recession that’s forced them to lay off thousands of workers. They get to cull from a pile of résumés from increasingly qualified and well-rounded students and graduates to choose interns to come work at their company for free for two, four, or six months. Where interns may have once been confined to the coffeemaker, post-grad interns may now find themselves overworked... — good.is

Certainly, internships can provide the relevant job experience employers look for when making hires, and they give career hopefuls the chance to make industry contacts. The problem, of course, is that only the privileged tend to have the means (i.e., parental support) to pursue them without going into debt, putting those who can get by on nothing in the short run at a long-term advantage. — The New York Observer

ON college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law. — nytimes.com