United Taps Criminology Students to Uncover Patterns in Accident Data | Hacker News Reader

United Taps Criminology Students to Uncover Patterns in Accident Data

wsj.com

15 pointshelloworld8 comments

> United says the program’s costs are “negligible” because its own technical department provides the computing power and the unpaid interns work with existing employees to collect and load the data.

Not having to pay people is a great way to save costs.

Considering how valuable the benefit United received, United could have coughed up the money.

Not only could they have, but this type of unpaid internship is pretty clearly illegal: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm

They'll claim to be exempt:

> In general, the more an internship program is structured around a classroom or academic experience as opposed to the employer’s actual operations, the more likely the internship will be viewed as an extension of the individual’s educational experience (this often occurs where a college or university exercises oversight over the internship program and provides educational credit).

It's still possibly over the line, and tacky as all get-out.

It's hard to tell from the article exactly what "intern" means in this context. If it's effectively a full semester unpaid co-op job then I tend to agree. If it's more along the lines of a class project then that's extremely common, mutually beneficial, and nothing I'm going to get very excited about.

Often when it is a class project the department or the professor's lab can collect the payment as a sponsorship instead of the students. Still sketch, but arguably at least the company is forced to pay someone for the labor, and arguably better than the company getting work for free.

That's arguably even worse, especially considering the price the students pay to attend the institution and the extra costs they pay for lab credits.

I assume that intern means intern, but I'm sure that "work with existing employees to collect and load the data" means data entry.

The key criterion is:

> The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded

This disqualifies nearly every unpaid internship in the country. This kind of thing is super common, and these guidelines are almost never enforced unless someone sues, but I just wanted to point out that this is not supposed to be unpaid whether or not the employer is feeling generous.

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