It probably goes without saying that if you're planning to sue your employer, you shouldn't use your work email address to contact your lawyer. However, if you did do that, according to a California court, that email is not protected by attorney-client privilege. I don't find this to be all that surprising (or really, problematic). It's quite common that employers control the rights to your work emails, so it's hard to see why that wouldn't extend to emails you send your lawyer. All it really makes me wonder is why someone would use their work email for sending those types of emails.

Many companies have long been taking advantage of young, bright-eyed students and recent college graduates who are eager to work for nothing (or practically nothing) in the hopes that their work experience will eventually land them their dream job. But is it legal for a for-profit company to not pay a full-time intern? Talk to your lawyer, but generally, the answer is no. Only government and non-profit organizations are allowed to use unpaid interns without worrying about breaking the law. Given the rampant (ab)use of unpaid interns during this recession, the Department of Labor is starting to crack down on employers who don't pay their interns fairly. The confusing part, though, is that labor laws are somewhat outdated and open to interpretation.

The six federal legal criteria that must be met in order to hire an unpaid intern are based on a 1947 Supreme Court decision about whether the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was applicable to prospective train yard brakemen. (Hmm. When was the last time you heard about a good train yard internship?) Under the current FLSA, employers can hire an unpaid intern if all of the following conditions are met:

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to that which would be given in a vocational school or academic institution. The idea here is basically that any work should be for training purposes only -- not for the sake of getting real work done at the company.
2. The training is for the benefit of the trainee. This is generally true. Interns are happy to work for no pay if it means that in the end, they can put a company's name on their resume or even get a paid full-time job at the company.
3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under close observation. This implies that interns shouldn't be doing actual work that might displace a paid employee.
4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees and on occasion the employer's operations may actually be impeded. When doesn't an employer gain an advantage from having an intern? This is where many companies can get into trouble. The definition of "immediate advantage" leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the completion of the training period. Companies often use internships as "working interviews" where the intern is hired as an employee after the internship is over if they perform well.
6. The employer and the trainee understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training. This is generally not a problem, since both parties should agree to the scope of the internship.

So it's quite difficult to meet all six criteria, and hiring an unpaid intern based on a loose interpretation of the laws could cost employers more than just compensating for minimum wage and overtime. Think potentially huge fines and legal bills -- as well as long drawn-out legal proceedings. However, since the enforcement of the intern criteria has been lax for some time, many companies haven't put too much thought into their internship programs. Some startups have even incorporated somewhat questionable unpaid internship work into their business models. Just last year, the Huffington Post famously had an auction where the winner actually paid $13,000 (which went to charity) for an intern position. Clearly, the rules governing internships have not been well-established according to the 'modern' workforce.

The upshot of all this, though, is that unpaid interns have hidden costs and liabilities -- which can be significant. Labor laws seem to favor the benefit of the intern and seem to frown upon companies that might be trying to just get free labor. But besides running afoul of labor laws, unpaid interns without proper supervision can also come back to haunt employers, especially when interns represent the company and are trusted with interacting with clients. Add the Department of Labor looking into the issue, and there are even more reasons to double-check and make sure internship programs make sense.

What has your experience been with internship programs and training interns? What are your motivations for offering intern positions? Do you think labor laws need to be adjusted to reflect more current trends in the workforce? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

A court ruling in New Jersey doesn't seem all that surprising, but may lead to more legal questions in the future. The case involved an employee who was stealing from his employer. The employee was eventually found guilty of the theft, but argued that the evidence used against him was gathered illegally, in that it was in a password protected file on his company-owned laptop. It's actually a little more confusing, as the guy actually claimed the laptop was his, but that turned out not to be true. He had originally purchased the computer using his employers credit card... but then still pretended the computer was his personal laptop. Yet, later, he "sold" the laptop to the company -- so realistically, the company had bought the laptop twice.

So, then the legal question was whether or not the guy had a "reasonable expectation of privacy" for stuff stored on that laptop, especially in a password protected file. The court ruled no, that an employee does not have a reasonable expectation for privacy, and that, effectively, anything on the computer is fair game for the employer (even if it's password protected).

You can understand the reasoning there, as it makes sense that a company should feel free to go through the contents of a computer it owns. However, it does raise some other questions. Earlier this summer, we wrote about another case in which a company continued to read the personal email of a fired employee, because he had left his personal online email account logged in from the company-owned laptop. While that seems different, is it really that big a leap from data stored on the local hard drive, to data stored on a remote hard drive, accessed via a web browser? It does, however, start to become a much trickier question, especially as more data and apps move from the local laptop into the "cloud" and as work and life boundaries blur.

Consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas has come out with a study this week claiming that nearly one in four companies blocks employee access to social networks like Facebook and MySpace. It's a good story, which is why you see various news organizations picking up the story and running with it. Of course, if this sounds kind of familiar, that's because less than a year ago, some other company (this time it was a security company) came out with a report claiming that half of all businesses were blocking Facebook. Now, if you assume that both reports are true, then that would suggest that fewer firms are blocking Facebook than were last summer. Of course, chances are neither report is all that accurate. And, to be fair, the "headline" from the press on the second story was inaccurate: the actual study suggested that nearly half of all employees were banned from accessing Facebook. In theory, that could be true if a few large companies banned their employees from using the site. Either way, there are companies who probably ban Facebook at work -- just like in the early days of the telephone there were those that banned telephones at work, and, more recently there were companies that banned email or the internet at work. Eventually, companies recognize that fearing communication tools tends to backfire. Embracing them tends to be a lot more productive.

While we already know that plenty of companies have systems in place to monitor your corporate email, what about your personal email accounts? And, just to make it more interesting, what about your personal email accounts after you are no longer employed at the firm? That's what's at stake in a new lawsuit, filed by a guy who was fired from a company, and later learned that they were reading his personal Yahoo email -- including messages he sent to his lawyer about responding to the firing.

Apparently, he left a computer at the office logged in to his Yahoo account, and that made it easy for the company to read his email -- and the company claims that since it's on a company computer, it's fair game. It's not exactly clear how he found out they were reading his email, however. Also, the company claims that the reason they looked at his email was because after getting fired, he used a computer (in plain view of other employees) to send himself various confidential company info. Even if that's true, it's not clear that the company should still be able to read emails in his personal account.

We've been saying for years that the notion that employee web surfing at work constitutes "lost profits" is nonsense. There is an infinite number of ways employees can waste time at work, from chatting with coworkers, reading magazines, or even taking a nap. Monitoring and restricting web surfing isn't likely to make employees procrastinate less, it'll just make them procrastinate in ways that are harder to monitor, and annoy them in the process. The Wall Street Journal has the latest example of surfing-at-work hysteria. Apparently the latest crisis is the time-wasting potential of Internet video sites. The funny thing about the article is that it inadvertently does a pretty good job of illustrating why blocking web-based video isn't a very good plan. One employee actually looked at clients' videos as part of his job, so he had to waste his own and the IT department's time seeking an exception every time he had a video he needed to watch in order to do his job. In an even more ridiculous case, an office had a mass shooting occur in a nearby mall, and all of the employees in the office apparently spent time complaining to the boss for permission to watch the news about it. Here, it was clear that the employees were already sitting around reading stories about the shooting, so they obviously weren't getting much work done. Yet for some reason the boss still seems proud of himself for preventing his employees from watching videos of the event. The article also cites bandwidth limitations as a reason for blocking online videos, but that seems like overkill. If upgrading bandwidth isn't an option (and bandwidth is getting cheaper every year) it seems like a much more straightforward approach would be to simply monitor total bandwidth consumption and warn the heaviest users to keep their consumption down. That would keep the network humming without treating employees like they're children.

I came across two separate stories today at about the same time, which seemed to be saying very different things, but seem worth discussing together. The first is about how big companies are increasingly technology savvy in spying on workers in everything that they do (sent in by reader gonzogirl). It notes that while CIOs used to worry about how employees would react to being spied on, these days it's barely a second thought, as it's become almost standard. The other study involves some research suggesting that employees are becoming a lot more tech savvy than their employers and trying to drag them into the 21st century. The researchers behind that report say that employees understand technology much better than their own CIOs.

At first glance, the two reports may seem to contradict each other, but that may not really be the case. It may actually show a lot more about where the priorities are for CIOs of large companies these days: fearful of what employees are doing, rather than looking for ways to help them get things done. Thus, when employees show up with new tools to make them more productive, the response isn't too embrace them, but to fear them (or figure out how they can be monitored). This wouldn't be particularly surprising, but it should be troublesome for those large companies, who are breeding atmospheres of distrust and trying to hold back the innovation needed to boost productivity and compete with more nimble companies.