O&G Unpaid Interns Lawsuit Website

February 27, 2013

By Bill Donahue, Law360

A former unpaid intern who claims Hearst Corp.'s intern policies violated federal labor law accused the magazine publisher on Tuesday of dragging its feet in turning over contact information for possible class members and actively impeding the notice process.

Xuedan Wang won conditional certification last year on her claim that Hearst ran afoul of the Fair Labor Standards Act by failing to pay magazine interns for entry-level work, entitling her to begin notifying other interns — potential opt-in plaintiffs — of her lawsuit, filed in New York federal court.

But on Tuesday, Wang's attorneys said Hearst had turned over only a fraction of the contact information it was ordered by the court to divulge, making available full information for only 328 of the estimated 3,000 potential class members.

"By failing to make a good-faith effort to search for and produce contact information for potential collective members, defendant prevented these individuals from receiving timely notice of their rights in this case, undermining the FLSA’s remedial purpose in the process," the motion said.

The company maintained that it didn't keep a list of former interns, but Wang's attorneys said the publisher seemingly had no problem finding unlisted former employees for another reason: to secure declarations against Wang's charges.

"Although defendant was able to find these individuals in order to obtain declarations from them, 19 of them were not on the class list at all," the motion said. "It will not be unduly burdensome for defendant to collect additional collective member contact information — indeed, when defendant needed to reach potential collective members to obtain declarations to support its defense, it apparently had little trouble locating them."

The plaintiffs want the court to extend the notification period and order Hearst to be more helpful during the process, including reaching out to intern supervisors at its magazines and departments and asking for all contact information that they may have.

On top of the alleged lack of effort, Wang also took exception to how Hearst's interns reportedly interacted with the former interns that it reached for declarations. The plaintiff says the defense attorneys mislead the former interns about her case, did not inform them that they could join it and even intimated that they represented the former interns' interests rather than Hearst's.

"The court should also authorize corrective notice to those collective members from whom defendant obtained declarations, claimed to represent and failed to provide adequate disclosures, informing them that they are still eligible to participate in the case," the motion said. "Courts routinely take similar measures to protect class members' rights following inappropriate communications from defendants."

An attorney for Hearst didn't immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday.

Wang first sued in February, claiming she worked full time at Hearst magazine Harper's Bazaar for five months — sometimes as much as 55 hours a week — for no pay, even though she did jobs that should have been handled by actual employees.

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Under federal law, interns can work without pay, but only if their work is for an educational purpose and does not provide the employer with a substantial benefit, according to the complaint.

Judge Harold Baer Jr. granted the interns class certification in July, ruling that they had met the fairly lenient early-stage standards for collective status under the FLSA. Several state law claims, however, have been trimmed from the case since it was lodged.

Wang is represented by Adam T. Klein, Rachel M. Bien and Elizabeth H. Wagoner of Outten & Golden LLP.

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The case is Wang v. The Hearst Corp., case number 1:12-cv-00793, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

May 5, 2012

By Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times

Confronting the worst job market in decades, many college graduates who expected to land paid jobs are turning to unpaid internships to try to get a foot in an employer’s door.

While unpaid postcollege internships have long existed in the film and nonprofit worlds, they have recently spread to fashion houses, book and magazine publishers, marketing companies, public relations firms, art galleries, talent agencies — even to some law firms.

Melissa Reyes, who graduated from Marist College with a degree in fashion merchandising last May, applied for a dozen jobs to no avail. She was thrilled, however, to land an internship with the Diane von Furstenberg fashion house in Manhattan. “They talked about what an excellent, educational internship program this would be,” she said.

But Ms. Reyes soon soured on the experience. She often worked 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., five days a week. “They had me running out to buy them lunch,” she said. “They had me cleaning out the closets, emptying out the past season’s items.” Asked about her complaints, the fashion firm said, “We are very proud of our internship program, and we take all concerns of this kind very seriously.”

Although many internships provide valuable experience, some unpaid interns complain that they do menial work and learn little, raising questions about whether these positions violate federal rules governing such programs.

Yet interns say they often have no good alternatives. As Friday’s jobs report showed, job growth is weak, and the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds was 13.2 percent in April.

The Labor Department says that if employers do not want to pay their interns, the internships must resemble vocational education, the interns must work under close supervision, their work cannot be used as a substitute for regular employees and their work cannot be of immediate benefit to the employer.

But in practice, there is little to stop employers from exploiting interns. The Labor Department rarely cracks down on offenders, saying that it has limited resources and that unpaid interns are loath to file complaints for fear of jeopardizing any future job search.

No one keeps statistics on the number of college graduates taking unpaid internships, but there is widespread agreement that the number has significantly increased, not least because the jobless rate for college graduates age 24 and under has risen to 9.4 percent, the highest level since the government began keeping records in 1985. (Employment experts estimate that undergraduates work in more than one million internships a year, with Intern Bridge, a research firm, finding almost half unpaid.)

“A few years ago you hardly heard about college graduates taking unpaid internships,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic Policy Institute who has done several studies on interns. “But now I’ve even heard of people taking unpaid internships after graduating from Ivy League schools.”

*******

Eric Glatt, who at age 40 interned for the movie “Black Swan,” is one of the few interns with the courage to sue for wages over the work he did.

With an M.B.A. and a master’s in international management, Mr. Glatt wanted to get into film after a previous job overseeing training programs at the American International Group, the big insurance and financial services company. For “Black Swan,” he prepared documents for purchase orders and petty cash, traveled to the set to obtain signatures on documents and tracked employees’ personnel data.

“I knew that this was going to be a normal job and I wasn’t going to be paid for it,” he said. “But it started kicking around in my mind how unjust this was. It’s just become part of this unregulated labor market.”

Mr. Glatt filed suit, accusing Fox Searchlight Pictures of minimum wage violations. The company says it fully complies with the law and provides interns with a valuable, real-world work experience.

“The purpose of filing this case was to help end this practice,” said Mr. Glatt, who now plans to go to law school. “That was more important than my working on the next blockbuster.”

Ross Perlin, author of the 2011 book “Intern Nation,” said postcollege internships used to be confined to a few fields like film but have become far more common. “The people in charge in many industries were once interns and they’ve come of age, and to them unpaid internships are completely normal and they think of having interns in every way, shape and form,” he said.

Some interns say their experiences were quite helpful. Emily Miethner, a fine arts major at Hofstra, took an unpaid position at Gawker after graduating in 2010, doing research and social media for the news and gossip site. After two months, she moved to an unpaid internship at Flavorpill, an online cultural guide.

*****

Xuedan Wang, known as Diana, did not have such a positive experience. Ms. Wang, who graduated from Ohio State in 2010, interned at Harper’s Bazaar, working 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. overseeing eight other unpaid interns who ran around Manhattan picking up items from various fashion houses and showrooms.

She sued the fashion magazine in February, accusing it of minimum wage violations.

“Harper’s Bazaar was my favorite magazine growing up. I was dazzled that I was going to be working there,” she said. “But it was real grunt work, lugging things around.”

Hearst Magazines, which owns Harper’s Bazaar, said its internship programs enhanced students’ educational experience and fully complied with the law.

Some people end up on an internship treadmill. Joyce Lee, who received a film degree from Wesleyan in 2010, moved to Los Angeles and did six unpaid internships, including one for Scott Rudin, a top Hollywood and Broadway producer.

Her duties included reading scripts and picking up the mail. To pay her rent, she worked at a coffee shop and handed out fliers for a taxi company.

“Scott Rudin is made of money,” she said. “I don’t think it would be so hard for him to pay five interns the minimum wage.”

A spokesman for Mr. Rudin said he could not be reached for comment.

Ms. Lee, who is now in New York making her own film and supporting herself by again working at a coffee shop, said interns deserved better.

“If I ever become a famous filmmaker,” she said, “I promise I will pay my interns.”

By Kayleen Schaefer Last fall, Diana Wang was named “head accessories intern” at Harper’s Bazaar.“I’d been dreaming of standing in their offices for fifteen years,” she says. “I was so ready to give everything I had. I couldn’t imagine that the dream of mine was becoming real.”

At 27, she was older than the average magazine intern. After graduating from Ohio State in 2010, Diana spent a year working for a pharmaceutical company in Columbus, Ohio, saving up so she could afford to live in New York as an unpaid intern — a gig she’d heard was a necessary first step to getting a job in fashion.
“This was going to be my only ticket to the industry,” she says. “I didn’t have unlimited resources. I was going to make the time worthwhile. I was going to be remembered by people.”

And she will be, but not because she’s on her way to becoming the next Melanie Ward, a stylist she revered. In February, Wang sued the Hearst Corporation, Harper’s Bazaar’s parent organization, for not paying for her work. The lawsuit, which accuses the company of violating federal and state labor laws, has since become a class-action one — including about 3,000 former Hearst interns — and may be decided as soon as early 2013.

By Ginia Bellafante

In February, Xuedan Wang, a 2010 graduate of Ohio University, received modest attention after she filed a lawsuit against the Hearst Corporation claiming that the company violated labor laws when it did not pay her for the work she had done as an intern at Harper’s Bazaar, one of its magazines, over four months last year.  Speaking to New York magazine last week, on the occasion of Fashion Week, Ms. Wang, who goes by Diana, explained that she had spent more than half of her life dreaming of Bazaar and approximately 12 months working at a pharmaceutical company in Columbus in order to save enough money to realize her Manhattan vision.

Then she found herself spending as much as 55 hours a week at a job she likened to “working in shipping and receiving.” At the end of it all, she couldn’t secure a paying job. For someone with her particular aspirations, only the HVAC industry could have contained greater indignities.

Internships are a problem, as Ross Perlin wrote in his 2011 book, “Intern Nation,” and others have effectively argued, not only because they impede efforts to reduce unemployment, but also because they assist in perpetuating inequality, privileging the already-fortunate who can afford work without pay.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/nyregion/seeking-chic-edgy-brilliant-intern-to-thread-needles-free.html?_r=1

By Chad Bray

A federal judge has conditionally granted class-action status on behalf of a group of Hearst Corp. interns who allegedly weren't paid for their work at 19 of the company's magazines, including Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping.

Xuedan Wang, a former intern at Harper's Bazaar from last August to December, sued Hearst earlier this year, alleging the company violated federal and state labor laws by misclassifying her and other workers as unpaid or underpaid interns, rather than employees. As a result, they were denied pay and other benefits, the lawsuit said.

In her lawsuit, Ms. Wang claims she regularly worked more than 40 hours a week for no pay as an intern and, sometimes, as many as 55 hours a week. She was a head accessories intern at Harper's Bazaar during that period, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in February in Manhattan federal court.

"For now the plaintiff need only establish that other employees 'may be similarly situated' to her," U.S. District Judge Harold Baer in Manhattan said in conditionally certifying a class of interns in an order issued Thursday.

The judge said Ms. Wang, at this point in the case, made sufficient arguments to certify a class. He said she provided affidavits showing that Hearst made a uniform determination that interns weren't employees, required all interns to submit college credit letters and used interns to perform entry-level work with little supervision.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304373804577523353691226294.html?KEYWORDS=hearst