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Media Decoder Blog: ‘Charlie Rose’ Show Agrees to Pay Up to $250,000 to Settle Interns’ Lawsuit

5:08 p.m. | Updated Charlie Rose and his production company have agreed to pay as much as $250,000 to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by a former unpaid intern who claimed minimum wage violations.

Under the settlement, Mr. Rose and his production company, Charlie Rose Inc., will pay back wages to a potential class of 189 interns. The settlement calls for the interns to receive generally $1,100 each — $110 a week in back pay, up to a maximum of 10 weeks, the approximate length of a school semester.

The main plaintiff was Lucy Bickerton, who said she was not paid when she worked 25 hours a week for the “Charlie Rose” show from June through August 2007. Ms. Bickerton said her responsibilities at the show, which appears on PBS stations, included providing background research for Mr. Rose about interview guests, putting together press packets, escorting guests through the studio and cleaning up the green room.

Ms. Bickerton in an interview described the settlement as “a really important moment for this movement against unpaid internships.”

This is the first settlement in a series of lawsuits brought by unpaid interns who asserted that they had suffered minimum wage violations. Other such lawsuits have been filed against the Hearst Corporation and Fox Entertainment — both companies deny that they failed to comply with wage and hour laws regarding their interns.

The settlement agreement states that Mr. Rose and his production company “do not admit any liability or wrongdoing” and says they agreed to the settlement “solely for the purpose of avoiding the costs and disruption of ongoing litigation and to settle all claims.”

The settlement also calls for $50,000 in attorney fees for Ms. Bickerton’s lawyers.

A statement issued on behalf of Mr. Rose and his production company, explained the context behind the decision to settle. “Our interns are not employees; they did not perform ‘work’ for the program and none of them ever expected to be paid for their internship,” the statement reads. “We adamantly deny the allegations of wrongdoing in the complaint — which were made by only one intern — and we regret that we will not have the chance to formally oppose them. However, the expense and time that would be required to effectively litigate these claims would be too burdensome for us.”

Rachel Bien, a lawyer for Ms. Bickerton, said, “We are very pleased with this settlement, and hope that many former interns will come forward to claim the amounts they are due for their work.”

The agreement covers interns who worked for the Rose show between March 14, 2006 and Oct. 1, 2012. Under the agreement, individual interns will need to file a claim to be part of the settlement.

The 10-week maximum will not apply to those who interned for the show for more than one semester. The $110-a-week settlement payment is based on an average internship day of six hours and an average internship week of 2.5 days.

Ms. Bickerton’s lawsuit was brought under New York State law, which allows plaintiffs to seek back wages going back six years, and not under federal law, which sets a three-year limit.

The lawsuit noted that unpaid internships have proliferated among many white-collar professions, including film, journalism, fashion and book publishing.

Workplace experts say hundreds of thousands of young Americans work as unpaid interns each year as they seek to gain experience and get a foothold in with highly desired employers in coveted industries. But some interns and labor advocates assert that many employers who use unpaid interns are violating federal and state laws by using them essentially to do the jobs of other workers and by not providing a true educational experience.

Ms. Bickerton’s lawsuit asserted that according to the New York State Department of Labor, “an unpaid internship is only lawful in the context of an educational training program, when the interns do not perform productive work and the employer derives no benefit.” The lawsuit cites guidance from the state Labor Department that says: “If an employer uses trainees as substitutes for regular workers or to augment its existing work force during specific times or in general, these interns would be treated as employees.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/charlie-rose-show-agrees-to-pay-up-to-250000-to-settle-interns-lawsuit/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Burdened by PBS Dues, Stations Consider Withdrawing

But while Ms. Smith’s keynote address and the gloriously sunny skies contributed to an overall atmosphere of enthusiasm among member station representatives, some executives did not see much of the nice weather. They were holed up trying to fashion a plan to keep public television programming on the air in Orlando after June 30, when WMFE — the city’s major public broadcaster — ends its contract with PBS. The station is being taken over by the founders of a religious programmer, Daystar Television.

WMFE announced in April that it was selling its TV station (it will keep an NPR-affiliated public radio station) because it was unable to pay its PBS dues of just under $1 million annually. José A. Fajardo, the station’s president, said that the public television model was no longer viable because of decreased donations, including a 34 percent drop in pledge contributions from viewers.

And WMFE is not alone. In this financially troubled time, some PBS stations are questioning whether they can continue to find a way to make the PBS business model work.

In Los Angeles, KCET, a PBS station for four decades, quit PBS on Jan. 1, and went independent, citing PBS dues. Unlike in Orlando, a much smaller nearby PBS station quickly stepped up to continue providing PBS programming to the Los Angeles area.

This year, PBS narrowly averted another major loss in Chicago, where the board of WTTW-TV told management to examine the question of withdrawing as well. “Our board, they are smart business people, and when they look at our business model they scratch their heads and they say this is upside down from a business standpoint,” said Dan Schmidt, WTTW’s president and chief executive.

In Chicago, as in Los Angeles and Orlando, one crucial issue is that there are simply too many places to see PBS programs; each of those cities has more than one PBS station. The biggest station pays the highest amount of PBS dues and gets rights to all of PBS’s marquee shows, like “Masterpiece Theater” and “PBS NewsHour”; smaller stations pay less but can still broadcast some of the most popular shows, as long as they wait eight days.

“Others pay pennies on the dollar and run the cream of the crop,” said Mr. Schmidt, whose station had a $4.2 million operating deficit last year. His station pays $4.5 million a year in PBS dues, and yet “viewers can see that content on other stations and increasingly, whenever they want to on PBS.org,” Mr. Schmidt said.

WTTW decided to stay in the fold — for now. Leaving, Mr. Schmidt said, “was on the table along with everything else, but at this point we are committed to making this work.”

What no one knows is how many other stations are contemplating quitting. The PBS station in Waco, Tex., shut down last year for financial reasons, and there are murmurs of half a dozen more stations, at least — no one will name them on the record — that are on the fence and could leave depending on whether state and federal financing fall through.

“I don’t think this is necessarily going to be limited to these two stations,” Orlando and Los Angeles, said Steve Bass, president and chief executive of Oregon Public Broadcasting.

PBS is retooling its dues formula, which may help some big stations and will also require each market’s secondary stations to pay more. Ms. Kerger said that she did not foresee other stations dropping out, but that over the next several years she expected the difficult economy would force more consolidation among stations.

In the New York City area, WNET-TV is among those bidding to take over NJN in New Jersey, which is losing its state financing in coming weeks. Ultimately, she said, if consolidation leads to “fewer stations but stronger stations, that ends up being healthy for the system.”

But each station that leaves also means less money for PBS to put toward its programs; PBS’s programming budget is dropping by $5 million in fiscal 2012 to $202 million, according to the trade publication Current, partly because of losing KCET dues.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=46d6ab114cfee936514294a0579ce2d7

Media Decoder Blog: ‘Charlie Rose’ Show Agrees to Pay Up to $250,000 to Settle Interns’ Lawsuit

Burdened by PBS Dues, Stations Consider Withdrawing

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