Condé Nast – one of the nation’s largest magazine publishers and home to Vogue, Vanity Fair and Glamour – is stripping its internship program all together starting in 2014, according to Women’s Wear Daily.

The discontinuation comes after two lawsuits, filed by former interns, who claimed the media company failed to pay them minimum wage at their internships in 2009 and 2010.

The former interns — Lauren Ballinger (W ) and Matthew Leib (The New Yorker) — claimed in their suit they were paid less than $1 an hour. The case is still pending.

Other media companies, such as Hearst Corporation, have faced similar scrutiny regarding internship programs — long hours and insufficient payment.

In Feb. 2012, a former Harper’s Bazaar intern, Xuedan Wang, sued Hearst saying the company breached overtime and minimum wage laws.

Gawker and Fox Searchlight have also been sued for similar reasons.

All current Conde Nast interns will remain with the company through to their prearranged terms, according to WWD.

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Do you have an internship story to share ?

In 2013, I saw an article asking if unpaid internships were possibly illegal. Well, I will say that the internship of today has gone from work in the industry you were interested in to work on the cheap by college students then work on the cheap with college credit only or maybe some pay. The fact is, some businesses use interns instead of paying an adult out of college a living wage and while I have know idea how long this has been going on, it is happening more frequently than parents probably are aware of. The idea that companies are choosing to add to our jobless by sidestepping possible living wages to folks who want to work not just cost effective for them it is not hard to understand and sad.

On October 30, 2013 I posted the following …

I spent some time looking for the old story in Conde Nast about ending internships and why on their website, but found nothing. I have/had a subscription to subsidiaries of the magazine and still deciding if it is time to move on … not that ending my free access will make an impact. This intern story is not new and while it is old news, the rules keep changing. I have experience as an intern and as someone who had a few interns work for me. In my opinion, it is possible the whole idea of what an intern does, why and salary requirement needs a major makeover.  In the old days, interns actually were assigned to positions that gave them a taste of what their field or degree of choice was like and when those options dried up the disbursement of internships became tied to money, 19 credit hours and or what the department or company needed. I believe internships are important. The fact is, and unfortunately, they have definitely become a way of getting part-time or fulltime work wages for what seemingly looks like on the cheap and students are very lucky if it is tied into your degrees. I know that some of our interns were ok with filing, data entry and answering phones because they had plenty of exams, a lot of reading while others were going into the service industry on some level. The lack of training or experience in their specific area of choice was not a big deal while getting credit; it also was a break from 20credit qtrs. or more and with lunch …well, when they actually allowed themselves to eat lunch and do some homework

I also feel getting students to work on the cheap, allowing them to believe they would not only be performing duties in their field of choice then find out something different when they get to the office is unacceptable. It is not only a problem for their credit hours, but most students are unable to opt out easily to go work somewhere else, top that off with the possibility of long work hours and little or no pay, it’s just wrong.

… PointCounterPoint