“We’ve had cases where unpaid interns really were displacing workers and where they weren’t being supervised in an educational capacity,” said Bob Estabrook, spokesman for Oregon’s labor department. His department recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.
via Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say – NYTimes.com.
I can understand if a unpaid internship actually involved excellent job experience or an educational component where one can learn all the business processes of an organization. If a company is “hiring” just so they can receive free labor with little benefit to the intern, that company deserves to be shot.