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Lawsuits over Unpaid Internships Took Root in 2013
Eric Glatt was in the library at Georgetown Law Center when he got the call last summer. On the other end of the line was his lawyer, Juno Turner, an associate at New York's Outten & Golden. “We won,” she said. With those two words, Glatt, who holds an MBA from Case Western University and is now working toward a law degree, became the unconventional hero for unpaid interns everywhere. Nearly two years earlier, Glatt and co-plaintiff Alexander Footman had filed a lawsuit against Fox Searchlight Pictures. They accused the studio of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act by not paying them minimum wage for the services they provided as interns on the production of the film Black Swan.
After his first-of-its-kind lawsuit was filed in September 2011, a dozen other groups of former unpaid interns followed Glatt's lead, suing high-profile employers in the film, media and music industries including The Hearst Corp., the Charlie Rose show on PBS and Elite Model Management Corp. The suits also sought back pay under the FLSA.
In early June 2013, U.S. District Judge William Pauley III in Manhattan certified the class of interns seeking back pay after finding that Fox should have paid the interns because they were essentially regular employees. Glatt v. Fox Searchlight Pictures Inc., 11 Civ. 6784 (S.D.N.Y. 2013). After Judge Pauley's decision in June 2013, eight similar suits hit the courts. The majority of the cases have been filed as class actions in New York ' where the statute of limitations for wage-and-hour claims is six years.
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