Unpaid internship

Internships in their original form belonged to medicine. From the mid-1800s through World War II, the word intern referred to a newly graduated doctor in supervised clinical training, a transitional role between medical school and independent practice. These positions were compensated. Around the 1930s, educators began advocating for similar transitional programs in business and public administration, and internships slowly expanded into other fields.

The 1947 Supreme Court ruling in Walling v. Portland Terminal Co. established the legal framework. The case involved unpaid railroad trainees who shadowed employees for two weeks before being hired. The Court ruled that trainees who provided no immediate advantage to the employer were not employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act and therefore did not require minimum wage. For decades, this precedent kept unpaid internships legally narrow.

The real expansion came in the 1970s and 1980s, driven by two converging forces. College graduation rates surged, flooding the labor market with candidates who needed differentiation. Simultaneously, employers were shifting toward what sociologist Andrew Ross has called the casualization of the workforce, embracing part-time, temporary, and contingent labor. The number of universities offering cooperative education programs, which split student time between campus and internship, rose from about two hundred in 1970 to one thousand in 1983.

By 2017, more than sixty-two percent of graduating seniors reported completing at least one internship, up from roughly seventeen percent in 1992. In 2011, production interns on the film Black Swan filed a lawsuit against Fox Searchlight, arguing their unpaid labor violated federal labor law. That case, and others that followed, prompted the U.S. Department of Labor to revise its guidelines in 2018, replacing the original six-factor test with a more employer-friendly standard.