How’s this for a bummer? Work from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., five days a week, answering phones and making coffee and copies in a Manhattan office. Oh, yeah, and there’s no pay, no career training and no academic credit.
That’s how Kyle Grant allegedly spent nine months in 2012 and 2013, working at Warner Music Group’s Warner Bros. Records unit. Why Grant would exhaust almost a year of his young life this way is anyone’s guess, but for employers the important thing is what he chose to do next. Last summer, Grant hooked up with one of the plaintiffs firms behind a growing wave of employment class actions in New York federal court, claiming that WMG violated the Fair Labor Standards Act when it failed to pay him and about 3,000 other ex-WMG interns for their work.
