The Team - Employee & Consultants

Unpaid interns

You can’t avoid the wage and hour laws for employees by simply characterizing your workers as “interns”.  The laws of each state vary, but in general, to properly classify a person as intern, the person must be a student or trainee, the focus of the internship must be on training the intern, and the company must not derive any immediate advantage from retaining the intern (must be similar to training given in an educational environment).  An individual’s ability to receive school credit for the internship is helpful, although not determinative in all cases.  If the person does not qualify as an unpaid intern and should instead be classified as an employee, then the person needs to be paid wages in accordance with federal and state laws, and be covered by unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance.