Time to pay up

Ian Richard Jones' devil didn't wear Prada or edit a high-fashion magazine. He wore a newsboy cap and oversaw a small literary press in Logan Square.

Like many Chicago-based college students, Jones was hoping to get a leg up in the publishing field by trading free labor for insider access when he began an unpaid internship in the summer of 2010. But soon, Jones said, he was running personal errands for his colleagues and trading passive-aggressive emails with his boss more than doing actual work. And he didn't see his colleagues doing much work, either.

"I was told I could do this and then I would know how to run a small press," he said. "Of course what I was doing was some other dude's bitch work. I realized right away this would never get me a job. I don't even put it on my resume."

To many unemployed college students and recent grads, unpaid internships seem exploitative or unethical. In some cases, they even are illegal. But employers and career experts increasingly believe they play a necessary role in the changing workplace, where a spot in the entry-level could require years of dues-paying.

By some accounts, the war on internships already is on. Its rallying cry may be a recent federal court ruling that found Fox Searchlight Pictures erred in failing to pay two of its production interns. Legal experts expect this decision will bring more scrutiny and regulation upon internships in the future.

In the meantime, some former interns are fighting back, with lawsuits against the employers who made them pick up their dry-cleaning and catalogue fashion merchandise for 12 hours a day. Others take the path of least resistance and simply quit.

Jones said the final straw in his unpaid internship came when his bosses asked him how to improve audience outreach, but vetoed his ideas for a revamped website.

"I was like, 'I know a fake Facebook profile about a cat that has more clout than you.' But they didn't think I knew what I was talking about," he said.

So when other staffers started quitting, among them "the finance guy, the graphics guy, the Web guy ... ," Jones followed.

Some interns who decide to tough through a disappointing experience later regret it.

That was the case for Derek Serafin, 29, of Lincoln Square, who agreed to work for free for the now-defunct Lakeshore Theater, a Lakeview comedy club, after he was laid off from his job as a public relations professional in 2009.

"They told me, 'We're hoping in the next few months, tops, we'll be able to offer a full-time paid position in our marketing department,'" he said. In the meantime, "I did everything from working the box office to checking IDs for shows and handing out tickets at the door. None of it had to do with marketing."

Six weeks later, Serafin's boss told him the job was just never going to happen.

"He said this is just what happens in the comedy world," he said. "But I didn't want to climb the ladder in comedy."

Serafin now works for a PR agency, and he said he expects his interns to come away from an internship with "real-world," relevant experiences in communications.

Anything less could be illegal.

"An internship is not free labor, it's an educational exchange," said Katherine Lelek, an employment coordinator at Columbia College Chicago. "If you want [your intern] to totally create a website for you, or be your social media marketing coordinator, but you don't want to pay them, and you don't have anyone doing that yet, then no, that's not an internship."

But Lelek said the internship has gotten something of a bad rap lately, and students shouldn't discount them outright.

"Prior experience, like a part-time job or especially an internship, is the No. 1 thing that employers are looking for in entry-level folk," she said. "It's crucial for students to have some kind of experience that they can point to."

Internship horror stories aren't just for interns. Jonathan Alvin, 29, of Albany Park, a recording studio manager, found out the hard way when he posted a Craigslist ad looking for an intern to help with a band's recording session. The man Alvin hired showed up late, offered the band members a stream of unsolicited advice, and then proceeded to get "totally trashed" off the whiskey the band brought.

"I had to pull him out to the kitchen and say, 'Look man, one, you shouldn't be drinking, it's also 1 p.m. at this point and you are smashed. You have to get a ride and you have to leave,'" Alvin said. "He just got all puppyfaced."

rcromidas@tribune.com