Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC office, was quoted in CommonWealth Magazine, in “Trump Makes It Easier to Not Pay Interns,” by Colman Herman.
Following is an excerpt:
The Trump administration just made it a lot easier for for-profit employers to legally benefit from the work of interns and not have to pay them, according to new rules released recently by the US Department of Labor.
This comes after several legal challenges were filed against the previous set of six rules adopted by the Obama administration that greatly favored paying interns. Even if just one of the six rules was not met, the intern was classified as an employee and was entitled to the minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act. One of the rules said: “The employer that provides the training should derive no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.”
Paul DeCamp, a Washington, DC, employment lawyer and a former administrator of the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, said the new rules provide a lot more leeway.
“The original standards as written were ridiculous if you tried to apply them literally,” he said. “The new rules are more flexible.”
Under the new rules, whether an intern must be paid or not is based on who the “primary beneficiary” of the relationship is – the intern or the employer.
People
- Member of the Firm