If you’re a huge entertainment conglomerate, how do you respond to allegations that your internship program is illegal and unfair? By shutting it down permanently, of course. That’s what publishing giant Condé Nast did, following significant media backlash after two interns filed a lawsuit this summer claiming that they were owed minimum wage for the work performed during their internships.
The unpaid internship is a long-entrenched aspect of American corporate culture, but the U.S. Department of Labor has specific qualifications for these internships. These qualifications include the following: the intern must receive educational training in a specific area of the business, and the intern cannot perform tasks that might otherwise be performed by a paid employee.
Despite these clear guidelines defining what interns are legally allowed to expect regarding their unpaid internship, there is also a long-entrenched aspect of “looking the other way” while companies treat unpaid interns as entry-level staff members, asking them to take on the filing duties and coffee runs that might have otherwise gone to a new hire.
However, in recent years, many interns have taken back some control by suing their employers for abuse of the unpaid internship, and these two former Condé Nast interns are no exception. Like many interns before them, Lauren Ballinger and Matthew Lieb’s lawsuit claimed that Condé Nast required them to perform tasks that violated both unpaid internship and labor laws.
This particular internship lawsuit began earlier this June and is still pending, but Condé Nast had no choice but to shut down its internship program as multiple follow-up articles appeared online, calling out the company for its unfair internship practices. Turns out when you hire a bunch of interns who are interested in working in the world of magazines and journalism, you shouldn’t be surprised that they know exactly how to tell their stories to the media.
The New Times Free Press reported that Condé Nast interns “ended up picking up their supervisor’s children from school and cleaning the office bathroom.” The New York Post added insult to injury this week by telling the story of a Vogue intern who spent her days “running personal errands for editors, including picking up dry cleaning or, in one case, a boss’ juice all the way down on the Lower East Side.” Vogue is, of course, one of Condé Nast’s many media properties.
This type of online pummeling is often the kiss of death for a major corporation. As the team behind reputationmanagementconsultants.com notes: “Today, you are defined by what appears on Google, Yahoo and Bing,” adding that companies lose thousands of dollars every day due to these negative articles and other online information. Condé Nast’s already lost its internship program, may lose the pending lawsuit, and is now poised to lose its good name.
The unfortunate point in all of this is that Condé Nast could have improved things, either by apologizing or by updating its internship program. The enormous entertainment company could have offered minimum wage to its interns, or could have restructured its internship program to meet Department of Labor guidelines. Instead, Condé Nast chose to take its ball and go home, meaning that the newest generation of talent will now look elsewhere for its opportunities.
What does the future hold for Condé Nast? It’s hard to say. It is unlikely that Vogue, Glamour, The New Yorker, or any of Condé Nast’s other major properties will immediately disappear, but the long-term effects of losing the trust of the younger generation have yet to play out. Once a company makes this kind of misstep, and receives the current excoriation Condé Nast is experiencing in the media, anything could happen.
Condé Nast Shuts Down Internship Program After Lawsuit and Media Outrage is a post from: The Inquisitr News