Confronting the worst job market in decades, many college graduates are turning to unpaid internships to get a foot in an employer's door.

While such internships have long existed in the film and nonprofit worlds, they have recently spread to many other industries.

Melissa Reyes graduated last May from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, about 140 kilometers north of New York City. With a degree in fashion merchandising, she applied unsuccessfully for a dozen jobs. She was thrilled to land an internship with the Diane von Furstenberg fashion house in Manhattan. "They talked about what an excellent, educational internship program this would be," she said.

But Ms. Reyes often worked 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., five days a week. "They had me running out to buy them lunch," she said. "They had me cleaning out the closets."

Although many internships provide valuable experience, some interns complain that they do menial work and learn little.

Yet they say they often have no choice. Job growth is weak, and the jobless rate for 20- to 24-year-olds in the United States was 13.2 percent in April.

Labor Department rules say unpaid internships must resemble vocational education, interns must work under close supervision, and their work cannot be used as a substitute for regular employees and cannot be of immediate benefit to the employer.

But the department rarely cracks down on offenders, saying it has limited resources and that unpaid interns are loath to file complaints for fear of jeopardizing future job searches.

There is widespread agreement that the number of graduates taking unpaid internships has significantly increased; the jobless rate for college graduates age 24 and under has risen to 9.4 percent, the highest level since federal record keeping began in 1985. (Experts estimate undergraduates work in more than one million internships a year, with Intern Bridge, a research firm, finding almost half unpaid.)

"A few years ago you hardly heard about college graduates taking unpaid internships," said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic Policy Institute. "But now I've even heard of people taking unpaid internships after graduating from Ivy League schools."

Matt Gioe, who graduated with a philosophy degree from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, last year, took an unpaid position with a Manhattan talent agency that booked musical acts. He said he received virtually no guidance on how to strike a deal or how much to charge for bookings. But the boss did sometimes ask him to buy groceries.

"It was basically three wasted months," he said.

Eric Glatt, who interned for the movie "Black Swan," is one of the few interns to sue for wages.

With master's degrees in business administration and international management, Mr. Glatt, then 40, wanted to get into film. For "Black Swan," he prepared documents, traveled to the set to obtain signatures on documents, and tracked employees' personnel data. "I started kicking around in my mind how unjust this was," he said.

Fox Searchlight Pictures, which produced the film, says it fully complies with the law.

Some interns say their experiences were quite helpful. Emily Miethner, a fine arts major at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, took an unpaid job at the news and gossip site Gawker after graduating in 2010. After two months, she moved to an unpaid internship at Flavorpill, an online cultural guide.

She said the knowledge she gained, as well as "being in a great company culture and meeting a lot of people," was crucial to her landing a $35,000-a-year job as social media coordinator at Sterling Publishing.

Xuedan Wang, known as Diana, who graduated from Ohio State University in 2010, interned at Harper's Bazaar magazine, working 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. overseeing eight other unpaid interns.

She sued the magazine, accusing it of wage violations. "It was real grunt work," she said.

Hearst Magazines, which owns Harper's Bazaar, said its internship programs fully complied with the law.

Joyce Lee, who received a film degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 2010, moved to Los Angeles and did six unpaid internships, including one for Scott Rudin, a top producer.

"Scott Rudin is made of money," she said. "I don't think it would be so hard for him to pay five interns the minimum wage."

Ms. Lee, who is now in New York making her own film, said interns deserved better.

"If I ever become a famous filmmaker," she said, "I promise I will pay my interns."

The New York Times

(China Daily 05/20/2012 page9)