What Constitutes Internship vs. Employment?

The important question for determining whether a job posting is in violation of the FLSA is whether the position constitutes a valid internship or employment. According to the United States Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division:

The 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.

If an unpaid internship does not meet these criteria, it constitutes an employer-employee relationship, and failure to pay the employee is a violation of federal law. According to these guidelines, the vast majority of writing “internships” I’ve seen posted are in violation of the FLSA.

The really useful criteria to look at seem to be items one through four, with most employers violating the FLSA by replacing regular paid staff with unpaid interns. According to the FLSA, unpaid interns may only work under the supervision of paid employees for the benefit of the intern – unpaid interns can’t work in the place of regular, paid staff.

The other major criteria that many employers violate is: “the employer that provides the internship derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.” In many cases where an unpaid internship legally constitutes employment, the employer directly benefits from the services of the intern.

What to Do if You’ve Been an Unpaid Employee

If you’ve been unlawfully retained as an unpaid employee under the guise of an “internship,” you have some legal recourse options available. First, report your employer to your local Wage and Hour Division. The United States Department of Labor has a list of Wage and Hour Division by state here: Wage and Hour Division Local Offices. Contact your local office and report the violation. The Wage and Hour Division office should give you some more information about dealing with these situations.

Depending on the circumstances, you may be eligible to pursue a civil case to recover unpaid wages. There is legal precedent in some U.S. states for unpaid interns to recover employment wages when the courts have ruled that it was unpaid employment instead of a valid internship. The Wage and Hour Division office can advise you if you should pursue legal action to recover lost wages. You may be eligible to recover two to three years of backpay, as well as legal fees and court costs.

Additionally, people who violate the Fair Labor Standards Act may be subject to criminal prosecution and a $10,000 fine. Repeat offenders may be imprisoned for violating the FLSA.

So if you’re an employer looking to score free labor, think again. You might be paying far more than a reasonable rate if you’re reported for violating the FLSA. And if you’re a writer who has been a victim of an unpaid internship scam, you have a right to recover wages – report your employer. Don’t let them keep getting away with this egregious abuse.

Writers Don’t Work for Free

Period. Real writers are professionals who work to get paid, just like in any other field. We train to write; we’re educated and may have specialized knowledge in a niche or with a particular style of writing. Many of us pursue ongoing education to stay current with marketing and copywriting trends; particularly in a world where online writing is literally exploding. SEO techniques, generating quality content for clients, various marketing tricks; all of these things constitute a writer’s expertise.

Think of it this way: you wouldn’t go to your mechanic and ask him to fix your car for free for the opportunity to get some word-of-mouth advertising. You wouldn’t walk into a lawyer’s office and expect him to represent you for free; you wouldn’t go into a dentist’s or doctor’s office and expect to get free work done, so why do people assume writers will work for free? We’re professionals, too, just like any other professional field.

You Get What You Pay For

From the perspective of someone who is looking to hire a writer for free, this is a horrible idea because writing is a field where you very much “get what you pay for.” Well-established, high-quality professional writers get there because they spend years refining their skills, educating themselves and working within the industry. They charge higher rates because their services are worth it, and truly professional businesses understand this.

Writers who are willing to work for free or for pennies on the dollar aren’t the experienced, well-established professional writers who have refined their craft and produce high-quality materials. They’re stay-at-home-moms, kids who have just graduated college (or are still in college) or people from other countries that can afford to work for cheap, because cheap is still a lot of money to them.

These people don’t have the well-established and highly-honed skills of a professional writer. Occasionally you find an individual within this set who produces reasonable-quality materials, but for the most part, what you get is poorly-written drivel that won’t help you achieve your goals. This is a self-reinforcing cycle, because companies that won’t pay to hire professional writers only get low-quality materials, and then they think “Wow, I’m glad I didn’t pay for that! I’ll never pay for writing if this is what I can expect!” And the cycle continues.

If you’re a business who wants to hire a writer, please understand and accept that writers are professionals who are worth the same rates you’d expect to pay other professionals. By trying to hire a writer at a lower rate, or for free, you’re practically guaranteeing that you’ll get low-quality materials which can reduce the value of your brand and hurt your marketing efforts. Pay to hire a professional writer, or abandon your project; don’t try to cut costs here or it can and will come back to haunt you.

On December 6, if all goes well, my partner and I will be flying ourselves and our motorcycles to Buenos Aires to start our trip. We’re going to ride the bikes down to Tierra Del Fuego, to Ushuaia – The End of the World. From there, we’ll be riding the motorcycles overland home to Boston, Massachusetts – a trip of roughly 20,000 miles through 14 countries (maybe more, depending on how widely we wander). We’ll be traveling south to north through South America, Central America and North America until we arrive home in Boston. We’re expecting the trip to take roughly 4 months, depending on how many unexpected delays we encounter.

For my clients or potential clients, this means I’ll be largely unavailable from the beginning of December through mid-to-late-March. I do intend to have intermittent email access, and I will be doing some work for my ongoing clients during this period of time, but I won’t be accepting new clients and my availability will be limited for existing clients. I’ll be in touch with each of my regular clients individually to make arrangements for your ongoing projects, and if you’re a new client, I’m sorry the timing won’t work out!

Being a writer, though, and having enjoyed uniting my love of motorcycles and my writing skills – my partner and I will be publishing a magazine from the road. We’re producing an iPad magazine based on our travels, full of information about the places we’ll be visiting, the people we’ll be seeing, the food we’ll be eating and the minutiae of the trip. Our current plan is to release an iPad magazine monthly, and to do a quarterly print magazine featuring highlights from the electronic version. We’re very excited about this project, as we’re doing it entirely in-house and we’ve got some great ideas! We’re currently working to set up a website for the publication, and I’ll be posting it here for anyone who might want to know more about the magazine or the trip we’re planning.

Needless to say, I’m very excited about this trip. I’m extremely fortunate to be able to do something like this, and I’m really looking forward to sharing my experiences via iPad magazine, the website and the print publication! If you like travel stories or want to hear about the adventure, I invite you to contact me via my contact form or keep an eye out here for a link to the trip website and magazine information.

In the meantime, I’ll be accepting new clients through mid-November, depending on the size of your project, and I’ll be in contact with my existing clients to discuss our arrangements. I hope your fourth quarter goes well, and may 2011 start with a bang!

Professional Writers have Years of Experience
Experience is a huge factor in hiring professional vs. non-professional writers. Non-professional writers are typically starting out, hoping to become professional writers, or they may be moonlighting to supplement their incomes. Or non-professional writers may be employed in other professions, such as marketing professions, and try their hand at writing because their company needs copy or other written materials and they attempt to fill that gap. This kind of experience can accumulate over time, but it takes a lot longer for a non-professional to garner experience.

Professional writers, on the other hand, write prolifically. They write many words per day. They have experience with many different types of projects. They’ve had an opportunity to refine their writing through practical application, and this makes a world of difference in the end product.

Think of it like this: a professional writer spends 8 hours per day, or 40 hours per week, writing. A non-professional writer may spend 2 to 4 hours per week writing, or even less. Over a month, this adds up to 160 hours of writing for a professional, or up 8 to 16 hours of writing for a non-professional; 10% or less of the experience that a professional writer gains per month. Over a year, a professional writer spends over 2,000 hours writing, while a non-professional may spend 100 to 200 hours writing.

A professional writer with 10 years of experience has spent 20,000 hours writing.

A non-professional writer, even with 10 years of experience, has only spent 2,000 hours writing; the same amount that a professional does in a year.

The experience scale is skewed heavily in favor of the professional writer. And when you hire a professional, you’re getting the benefit of that experience; which is part of why professional writers cost more than non-professionals.

Professional Writers Use the Right Words
I was recently working on a project writing school descriptions, and one school website described themselves as a “chain of schools” throughout a specific area. This made me cringe. To me, the term ‘chain’ evokes thoughts of a chain restaurant; overpriced, not particularly noteworthy, bland, generic, food-in-a-box, franchised dross. There are many ways to express the same general thought using words that don’t evoke such negative images. For example, they could have called themselves a “family of schools” or a “network of schools” – either of which would have been preferable to ‘chain.’

This is a classic example of non-professional versus professional writers. Non-professionals may be able to convey their meaning through words, and may even do so with relatively few grammatical errors or sound sentence structure. But professional writers have a sense for the cadence of language, and we think about the images that a word evokes. We don’t just use any word – professional writers spend time and energy finding the right words.

My tagline is: “I write what you meant to say.”

I don’t write what you tell me to write. I don’t write what you say. I distill what you say to write into its component parts, and refine it, and deliver it polished and shining. I write the best version of what you intended to say.

I write what you meant to say.

That’s the difference between a professional writer and a non-professional writer.

Yes, we cost more. But if your message is important, we’re worth the cost.

We deliver. We boost your ROI. We polish up your message until it shines, and reach more people, more effectively with our words.

When you hire a professional writer, you’re getting years of experience and skills. You get a customized message, tailored to your needs, designed to grab your audience and convince them that your product or service is the answer to all their problems.

When you hire a non-professional writer, you get cheap.

What do you want? A professional writer, or a non-professional?

Charging by the Word

Many writers use rate structures based on a per-word rate. Magazines and newspapers typically pay per word, and most professional freelance writers (as opposed to novel and non-fiction book authors) do some magazine or newspaper writing. Keep in mind that magazine and newspaper per-word rates vary, but they typically range from as little as $0.10 to as high as $3.00 per word for some magazines. This means that if your writer was writing a 500-word article for a newspaper or magazine, the rate could potentially range from $50 to $1,500 per article.

Many clients who want to hire writers have no idea what reasonable writing rates actually include. $0.30 to $0.50 per word is not uncommon among professional writers. If your budget is $3 for a 500-word article – a rate of just over half a cent per word – you’re probably not going to be able to hire a professional writer for that rate.

Writing Rates may Vary Depending on the Content

Many writers use variable rates depending on the content of the materials. More technical subjects, or content that requires more research, is typically charged at a higher rate. Likewise, content that might require a specialist is almost always more expensive than general content that everyone can write. A writer might charge $0.10 per word for an article with a very general subject that won’t require much research, but writers can charge $0.30 to $0.50 per word for more technical projects – or even more for projects like user documentation, etc. Consider what you’re requesting when you go to hire a writer in order to figure out if you’re likely to face higher rates or if you have a relatively inexpensive project.

Experience Level and Demand Influences Writer Rates

Another factor that has a direct impact on writer rates is experience level. A writer that has been writing professionally for a decade is likely to charge a somewhat or significantly higher rate than a writer that’s just starting out. Writers who have been writing for a decade have grown their rates with their client base and experience, and typically represent a better value – or more effective writing – than writers just starting out. Hiring a writer just starting out is fine if you’re on a budget, you have very general content and you’re not too particular about grammar, sentence structure and having a well-researched product. These are skills honed over time, and the experience level of the writer almost directly correlates with the amount of work he or she has done (and the rates he or she is charging).

Additionally, writers who are in high demand might charge higher rates for a specific project. For example, if a writer currently has a full workload but is contacted about a project, he or she might bid higher on the project to make it worthwhile to take on the extra work. If writers in high demand lose a project because of high prices, it typically isn’t much of a problem. However, earning the higher rate makes it worthwhile to take on the extra work if the client is willing to pay it.

Rates are Directly Related to How Much Time Writers Spend on a Project

Think about this logically: rates are directly related to how much time writers spend on a project. Writers are people who have to make a living, just like you. If they expect to spend 5 hours on your project, writers might charge anywhere from $50 to $300 for your project, depending on their hourly rate. Think about that when you evaluate writer bids and consider placing an ad for a writing project.

Consider how much time your project is likely to take, and how much an experienced writer might charge per hour. If your project is going to take three hours and you only want to spend $5 per hour, you’re not going to get a professional writer. (In fact, that’s even lower than minimum wage in the United States, so keep this in mind if you want to hire a U.S.-based writer!)

Deadlines Influence Writers’ Rates

If you need a project in a hurry, it’ll typically cost you more. Writers must prioritize their projects to ensure they meet all of their project deadlines on time. Taking on a project at the last minute, or accepting a project when a writer is overloaded, means the writer has to put in overtime to complete your project in the time allotted. You get better values when you don’t have a 24-hour deadline, so try to plan ahead when you want to hire a writer so you can have a longer lead time and get a lower rate. With an extremely short deadline, you might risk not finding a writer or getting a rushed job.

Decide where to advertise.

The first question you face when hiring a writer is to decide where to advertise. Do you place an ad, or do you contact a writer directly? A Web search can potentially turn up writers and copywriters in your area, but without contacting them, you have no way of knowing whether or not they’re right for the work you have in mind. You can review website materials and get an idea of their experience and writing style (if it’s a comprehensive website) but you don’t have a lot to evaluate. I have had clients contact me through my website, but many clients prefer to use a freelance website to place an ad and select a provider.

If you’ve decided to use a freelance website, you have two options: job-posting boards, or full-scale freelance websites. Job posting boards enable you to post an ad and get email responses. However, these boards provide you no way of evaluating your providers – you’re just sending your ad off into the ether. This is fine if you know what you’re looking for and are satisfied to handle your project independently, but doesn’t offer any additional protection.

Full-scale freelance websites, on the other hand, such as Elance and Guru, give you an entire system to manage your freelance job from start to finish. You can place an ad, evaluate providers, agree to project terms, arrange payment and leave feedback all through these freelance systems. While these systems confine you somewhat within the terms of use, they provide a valuable tool for clients who are searching for a new writer or hiring a writer for the first time.

Map out your job before you place an ad.

One cause of contention between clients and writers is not having the same picture of what a project entails. A client may believe that the project is fairly straightforward, and have a perfect sense in his head of what a project should be. Writers aren’t mind-readers, though, so unless you give your writer a clear idea of what you expect, you’re more likely to be disappointed than not.

To avoid disappointment, or to avoid falling victim to a project that unexpectedly changes scope, map out your job before you ever place an ad. Get a picture in your mind of exactly what you want. If you’re picturing a series of 500-word articles targeted to a specific keyword, convey that in your ad. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a 10-page report to distribute to mailing list clients, make that clear to a writer up front. If you don’t know quite what you want, you might want to give it some more thought before you place an ad to hire a writer.

Be clear when you place an ad.

When you do place an ad to hire a writer, be clear about what you want. I see ads all the time where clients say things like “I need 10 articles” or “I want to produce a weekly newsletter for my mailing list clients.” This is a good place to start, but you need to flesh out the project so writers know what you need and can bid accordingly. What’s your niche? On what subject would you like articles? How long is your project? What’s your timeframe? The more information you can provide a writer, the better your chances of finding a writer who fits your needs.

A good writer bids on projects for which they’re qualified.

By providing clear information about what you need and expect, you’re automatically narrowing down the list of writers who might apply for your ad. If you say something generic like “I need 10 articles,” you might get upwards of 20 or 30 responses – or more. A good writer will ask you for more details, but many responses will simply quote you a rate without any information about expertise or how a writer handles your niche.

However, when you say “I need 10 articles on Web design, CSS and HTML5,” you automatically self-select the writers who apply for your project. While you may still get some generic responses, you’ll get more responses by writers who are familiar with your content and can provide you samples of their work on related topics. You automatically reduce the number of people who reply to your ad, while simultaneously eliciting information specific to your topics. This saves a ton of time when you’re narrowing down your short list of writers by giving you information about a writer’s qualifications specific to your project.

Determining budget.

Generally speaking, if you pay a low rate, you’ll get a low-quality writer. In theory, anyone can call themselves anything – I could sign up for a freelance website or create my own website right now saying that I’m a Web designer. However, a real Web designer with years of experience – the kind of Web designer who produces websites that make you happy to browse – has experience, references and samples, and typically comes at a premium.

The same thing holds true for writers. When you’re looking to hire a writer, you might get a host of responses from people with no real writing experience. These might be students fresh out of college, teachers trying to make money on the side or even housewives trying to supplement their income. These people might have a range of experience and skill levels from non-existent to quality work. However, the real writers – the people who have been doing it for long enough to hone their skills and learn about the industry and niche – cost more. They spend more time on their work, and therefore must charge more for it.

When you’re considering budget, think about what you want. Do you simply want content? If you’re not looking for high-quality work, you might be able to afford to go low-budget on your project. However, low-quality content produces a poor ROI, and you simply don’t get the same results. When you’re setting your budget, ask yourself what you want your content to be, and what you want it to do.

If you need content that performs, you might need to pay more for a writer up front to yield better rewards and ROI. Be clear about your budget in your ad, though, so you don’t waste your time following up with a writer who is out of your price range, or a low-budget writer who can’t deliver what you seek.