After allegedly being fired from her unpaid position as a New York City Council intern for labor organizing that aimed to push the legislative body to pay her and her colleagues for their work, Mina Farahmand is now taking the city to federal court to seek wages there.
Farahmand, 21, filed a class action claim earlier this week under the Federal Labor Standards Act, asking Manhattan’s federal court to force the city to pay its $17/hour minimum wage to her and hundreds of other unpaid interns that the city legislature has employed over the years. She sees it as the next logical step in her fight to end the city’s practice of using unpaid labor to run its legislative body.
“I and others have had stolen wages, and we’re going to win those wages back because that is what we deserve as workers,” said Farahmand, who helped start an organizing campaign in June to get all Council interns paid $32/hour and healthcare while serving as a legislative intern for Council Member Harvey Epstein (D-Manhattan). “I believe that people deserve to get paid for their work.”
“Unpaid internships do not work for working-class people,” she added. “Ultimately, my internship was an illegal, unpaid internship where I deserved wages, and I was illegally fired for organizing.”
While it may seem like a long shot to argue that one is entitled to wages for a job that had not been a paid position from the start, attorneys told amNewYork it’s not an uncommon or unrealistic claim.
Legal standard for whether an intern must be paid
Internships are allowed to be unpaid in New York City if the primary beneficiary is not the company employing them, but the intern themself, via educational or vocational training, legal experts said.
If unpaid interns are doing the same work as paid employees or are primarily doing work that does not offer them a learning experience, new skills, or job training — such as fetching coffee, making copies, or taking out the office trash — then it is illegal for them to be unpaid.
“If the city is mainly using the intern as a worker, and having the intern perform regular job duties that otherwise would be done by paid employees, then the intern’s going to be more likely an employee who must be paid and therefore is protected by the FLSA,” said Kyle Winnick, an attorney at labor rights firm Sayfarth. “You see this a lot with interns who aren’t really learning much. They’re basically just performing low-skilled work, as opposed to having something akin to a classroom experience.”
Farahmand alleges that was her experience as a City Council intern.
She claims that she was denied the opportunity to join legislative meetings that would have taught her about the inner workings of a Council office; never received any job training or education “whatsoever;” completed all her work off prior knowledge; and was frequently asked to print, staple, and organize documents into binders.
“Unpaid interns, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, deserve an educational experience in which they are the primary beneficiary,” Farahmand said. “If you are printing, stapling and putting things into binders, you are not the primary beneficiary.”
“Also, I had never received any training,” she continued. “However, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, you deserve training. You deserve an educational experience as part of the primary beneficiary test. Because I had received no training, it is even more abundantly clear that I was not the primary beneficiary.”
Moreover, Farahmand alleges, there was no difference between the work she was doing and the work paid interns, who make $32/hour, and some staff were doing in the Council. Under the New York City Workers’ Bill of Rights, she says she is entitled to “equal pay for equal work.”
Farahmand’s attorney, James Murphey, says all of this sets Farahmand up for a suit he thinks will be successful.
“When people perform work that benefits employers, they deserve to be paid for it,” said Murphey, who works for labor firm Virginia & Ambinder LLP. “Having had extensive conversations with [Farahmand], it’s my belief that this internship primarily benefited the City Council more than it benefited her.”
“This is a case where a worker was performing work and was providing an economic benefit to the City of New York that was wildly greater in proportion than whatever educational benefit was received by her for her experience with the internship, if there was any educational benefit at all,” Murphey said.
The city’s Law Department said the case was under review when asked about it. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on Farahmand’s firing and the suit.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who has said she’s “looking into” Farahamand’s firing and the possibility of paying all interns, declined to comment directly on the suit, but told amNewYork all interns in her office are paid.
Epstein’s office didn’t respond to amNewYork’s request for comment on the matter or to questions on what Farahmand’s tasks as an intern were. His office previously said Farahmand was let go due to performance issues, but Farahmand told amNewYork she was always on time and consistently delivered high-quality work, including seven work products in the two days before she was fired.
Her firing happened hours after she publicly posted on social media about the organizing campaign. She said she will file a separate claim with the National Labor Relations Board over retaliation.
This isn’t the first time the Council has been hit with a suit of this nature.
A few years ago, another unpaid intern, Madeline Ball, levied the same argument — that the Council, not herself, was the primary beneficiary of the internship — against the city’s legislative body, and won, in 2018.
“However, [the] City Council has decided to continue to steal wages from their youngest public servants even after they were found to be stealing wages,” Farahmand said. “We know that we can change this, and we will show that we will keep suing you for illegal, unpaid internships, and it will force them to switch to a system that works for working-class New Yorkers.”
Not everyone’s convinced Farahmand’s argument is a winning one, however.
Former city attorney and current New York Law School professor Stephen Louis told amNewYork he does not think her suit was likely to be successful.
“The claim seems to be simply, I wasn’t paid. I should be paid,” Louis said. “I don’t think there’s anything in the law that indicates that should happen. So, I don’t really see a strong basis for a claim there.”
He said that governments and nonprofits sometimes have more leeway in not paying interns, and though he felt unpaid internships had certainly been exploited over the years, he didn’t think it was going to be a successful claim.
Even if she was primarily doing “low-skilled” tasks, like photocopying and stapling, Louis suggested that does not necessarily mean that it isn’t a valid introduction to what the workforce will be like.
“I know there was a complaint about the nature of the work, that it was extremely humdrum, like photocopying, taking out the garbage,” Louis said. “I think interns are meant to get a sort of broad sense of what the work is, and that could include that kind of stuff.”
What happens if Farahmand’s suit is successful?
If she does prevail in court, Farahmand and any unpaid Council intern who can show they were similarly misclassified would receive at least minimum wage for the hours they worked.
However, it will not mean that the Council has to change its practice of not paying interns. Winnick said it’s more likely that the Council would simply reevaluate its unpaid internship program to ensure it is sufficiently educational to allow the legislative body to keep relying on free labor.
“Whenever these types of lawsuits come out, it’s a good opportunity for companies that do have interns just to review their programs to make sure that this is really a learning environment,” Winnick said. “That does not mean that they can’t be required to perform work-related tasks like everyone has to do, low-skilled stuff every now and then.”
Louis said that if Farahmand wins, it could mean fewer opportunities for people who are open to doing unpaid work to build their résumés, as the Council may offer fewer internships overall if all must be paid.
Murphey said he hopes that the Council “does the right thing” and starts paying all of its interns after Farahmand’s suit wins (he is confident she will claw back her wages, he said, saying he does not take cases he’s not certain have merit).
“The New York City Council and the New York State Legislature have been leaders for well over a century in protecting the rights of workers and in advancing living conditions and labor standards,” Murphey said. “The amount of money it would take to pay these interns a livable wage for the work that they performed would be a minuscule blip on a line item in the city budget, and it would be consistent with the principles espoused by the City Council.”
“They should hold themselves to the same types of standards of social justice for workers who work for them that they have consistently held for workers who work in the private sector,” he added.
