"Unpaid jobs: The new normal?" by Katherine Reynolds Lewis

To the editors,

Your article "Unpaid jobs: The new normal?" by Katherine Reynolds Lewis glibly offered readers advice on how to break laws meant to protect workers. Lewis discussed the benefits of getting people to work for free under the guise of "internships" and profiled Kelly Fallis, who uses 50 unpaid interns in her business. Explaining her decision she says "From a cost savings perspective, to get something off the ground, it's huge."

The law explicitly forbids using interns for "cost savings." See item 4 on this Department of Labor fact sheet http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm. Under the "test for unpaid interns" the fact sheet explains that to legally use an intern "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"

I trust that Fortune would not publish an article on how to run a Ponzi scheme. Why would it run an article like this?

Sincerely

Rob Loftis