Unpaid Internships Since recently being added as a requirement for many college degrees, internships have seen a huge increase in the number of participants. According to the research firm Intern Bridge, it is estimated that “undergraduates work in more than one million internships a year, an estimated half of which are unpaid”(Greenhouse). Unpaid internships have become a huge debate over the past couple years. There have been many cases in which interns have gone to court, suing their employer for not paying them throughout the internship. Such as the case for Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, production interns for the movie “Black Swan,” who sued Fox Searchlight in September of 2011 according to the news article written by Steven Greenhouse for the New York Times. The judge in their case ruled that both should have been getting paid while participating in the internship, since both “were essentially regular employees.”(Greenhouse). Anya Kamenetz, an op-ed writer who also writes for the New York Times wrote an article titled “Take This Internship and Shove It,” explaining how society views unpaid internships as valuable and argues that we are viewing them all wrong. Kamenetz’s main claim in her article is that unpaid internships are bad for not only labor market but also for an individual’s careers. She argues this claim with two main arguments. First being opportunity costs such as an individual’s loss of wages and not to mention the living expenses on top of that. She goes on to say how there are even some internships you have to pay money for in order to participate. Her last argument is that “unpaid interns are like illegal immigrants”(192). This is because the unpaid interns are adding to the population of people who are willing to work for very cheap or nothing at all. Kamenetz’s conclusion is that although she disagrees with the idea of unpaid