Unpaid internships: the law argues about the label, nobody counts the people

The interesting question about unpaid internships isn't whether they're legal. It's who can afford them. Courts moved toward a 'primary beneficiary' test after Glatt v. Fox Searchlight, and the Labor Department dropped its older six-part test in 2018. So the legal argument has become one about labels. Meanwhile, a 2025 federal-sector analysis admits we have little way of knowing how many federal unpaid internships exist, and that data on who fills them is virtually nonexistent. That gap is the story. We regulate the paperwork of unpaid work with great care and count almost none of it. An arrangement that sorts people by whether their families can cover rent for a season is hard to defend on a spreadsheet nobody has built.