Summations Only

No, you are not reading "this right". What crashfrog says is that the solution to not having enough employees to get the work done is to hire an unemployed person. And your solution to this problem is slavery?

Of course. Many internships are unpaid work. Some internships end up being job interviews. Volunteer work is unpaid, and I don't hear anyone complaining about that.But these kinds of things are subject to abuse whenever commercial interests are present, and the abuses are difficult to police. The best protection against abuse is the fact that unpaid work is strictly voluntary. Add a compulsory component to a commercial motive and the potential for abuse seems pretty clear.

Law professors vary greatly in experience, and I wouldn't try to make such a sweeping statement. Lots of top professions perform as adjunct professors. During my own time at school I had classes taught by a judge on the state supreme court, by a practicing patent attorney with decades of experience, a very experienced tax attorney, and by very experienced constitutional law professors. But there were also instructions who had spend nearly all of their time in academia and had limited experience practicing law.One peculiarity about law schools is that the higher ranked law schools don't teach much about the actual practice of law, and tend to concentrate on teaching the principles behind the law. Those schools teach a generalization of the law and don't teach the black letter law even of the state. But most of their graduates won't practice in state anyway. By contrast, the lessor known, regional schools tend to focus more on being able to open a law firm in the state in which they reside one day after graduation.But guess which set of graduates law firms want to pay huge salaries to upon graduation. Not the ready to practice graduates who know how to practice in state, but the graduates who can be apprentices in any state.My experience as an engineer is that the typical engineering graduates ready to be an apprentice and that no one would expect a newly graduated civil engineer to be able to design a bridge or any other project impacting public safety on his own.

What law are you referring to here? Is it the Fair Labor Standards Act?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Crashfrog may have missed the point that US law doesn't apply, but in the US there are laws related to free internships. But your project likely would have been a legal unpaid internship in the US.

You are likely correct about this. UK law makes exceptions for work by undergraduates as part of a degree program. So does US law. The laws are subject to abuse, and some companies do cross the line. But I don't think you've given out enough details to make it clear the line has been crossed in your case. What you describe sounds to me like the classic legal unpaid internship.

That is at best a paraphrase of US law, and the difference between your paraphrase and the actual law is on point here. Further, as I understand it, UK law is far less strict than US law in this area.Here is what FLSA requires for unpaid internships(emphasis added by me):Fact Sheet #71: Internship Programs Under The Fair Labor Standards Act | U.S. Department of Labor

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he following six criteria must be applied when making this determination:
1. The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment;
2. The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;
3. The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;
4. 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;
5. The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and
6. The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

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The actual regulation is something less clear, and I would argue that Stragglers project met the requirements.My understanding, probably imperfect, of UK law is that a student doing work as a part of an educational plan whose temporary work, and not exceeding 12 months is legitimately an unpaid internship.http://blogs.findlaw.co.uk/...nternships-are-they-legal.html

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However, National Minimum Wage legislation says that all workers in the UK who are over 16 are entitled to be paid at least the National Minimum Wage, unless they are covered by a particular exemption within the legislation. The only exemptions relevant to internships are:

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students undertaking work placements as part of higher education of up to one year; and

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volunteers, who are under no obligation to perform work, have no contract, can come and go as they please, and have no expectation of and do not receive any reward for the work they do.

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