Former unpaid intern suing Hearst Corp. What does this mean for interns?

Xuedan Wang, 28, worked as an unpaid fashion intern for Harper’s Bazaar, which announced its redesign this week, from August 2011 to December 2011.

No less than two months later, Wang has filed a lawsuit accusing Harper’s Bazaar’s parent company, the Hearst Corporation, from violating federal and state wage and hour laws, saying she generally worked 40 hours a week but sometimes as many as 55 hours.

According to The New York Times‘ “Media Decoder” post by Steven Greenhouse on Wednesday, Wang and her law firm are attempting to make the case a class action suit on behalf of hundreds of unpaid interns at Hearst Magazines.

The Hearst Corporation is a publishing company with 20 U.S. magazine titles and more than 300 international editions. (This doesn’t even count the numerous other newspapers and media companies it owns!)

Paul Luthringer, spokesman for Hearst, said Wednesday: “We have not been served with any such lawsuit and thus cannot comment at this time.”

Greenhouse writes:

Employment experts say a growing number of young people, hundreds of thousands of them, do unpaid internships each year as they seek to get a foot in the door and gain work experience. But some interns and labor advocates assert that many employers are taking advantage of these interns — and violating Labor Department rules in the process — by using the interns essentially to do the jobs of other workers and not providing a bona fide educational experience.

The magazine industry, though vast in reach, actually employs a smaller amount of people then one would originally think.

With Wednesday’s lawsuit in mind, it begs the question: Is this the end of the unpaid internship?

I say no.

Ed2010, a community of young magazine editors and magazine-editor hopefuls, says requiring interns to be paid wouldn’t be a bad thing but it’s highly unlikely.

Because the increase in unpaid interns has ballooned to an unprecedented level in the last ten years (no coincidence that it’s during The Great Advertising Recession), we have way more qualified applicants than there are entry-level jobs.

Translation: Unpaid interns are necessary to make the world go ’round.

Furthermore, in response to MediaDecoder’s original post on the lawsuit, David Carr, a New York Times columnist focusing on media issues including print, digital, film, radio and television, asked readers about their internship experiences, paid and unpaid. Their responses are overwhelmingly positive. (Some even say their unpaid internships led to full-time employment!)

Katy P of Brooklyn, N.Y. wrote on Feb. 2, 2010:

I’ve had several fantastic media internships, two of which lead to full, paying jobs, and all of which have been worthwhile. The important thing is to acknowledge that every experience is a possible learning experience. Interns need to work with their supervisor from the beginning to set clear goals about what they want to get out of the internship and they shouldn’t be afraid to speak up when things could be improved.

While, yes, there are the tragic tales of an unpaid internship (too much coffee fetching, not enough writing), “The Devil Wears Prada” is not as common as we want to believe. It is not something that should be played with in court. Maybe labor laws were violated and the companies should atone for them, but I hope Wang and her lawyers are looking at the bigger picture.

I worry that this lawsuit could cause companies who can’t afford to pay interns to cut their internship programs. And when those internships are cut, the next generation of magazine (and other industry) hopefuls are cut off. That is not something I want to see or experience.