Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images
Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) speaking at a press conference on July 29, 2021
On the issue page of her campaign website, Rep. Haley Stevens has a list of priorities. The first sentence of the first paragraph reads, “The Congresswoman was an original cosponsor of the Raise the Wage Act of 2019 and voted for its final passage in July, 2019.” This act would serve to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Stevens goes on to boast of her working-class bona fides, saying that she has a 100 percent score from the AFL-CIO.
Yet, despite all of this voting for change, Stevens has not fully embraced creating these conditions for all the workers on her campaign. The Prospect can report that Stevens does not pay her campaign interns any compensation.
According to internship listings, as well as a former intern for the campaign, Stevens employs but does not pay interns who are expected to do donor research and help with the coordination of field volunteers.
Ahmed Harajli is a former campaign intern for Stevens. After learning about an internship for high schoolers when Stevens made an appearance at the Michigan High School Democrats, he gave the campaign his email and shortly after started doing donor research for the campaign.
Harajli said the campaign told the interns, who were working remotely, that there would be some form of compensation for the interns who performed the best. The work involved looking up donors from campaign finance websites, searching for those donors’ contact information on the internet, and sending it to the campaign. Interns were expected to find around 120 potential donors for the campaign each month.
Harajli said he was highly motivated, hoping to possibly be promoted on the campaign, and would sometimes find 200 or even 300 donors each month. But his compensation at the end was a Starbucks gift card.
“Just knowing I was potentially raising over $10,000 for her each month and getting $20, $10 Starbucks or Target gift cards, that was really insulting,” Harajli said. He said the campaign also motivated them on false pretenses, telling the interns they were raising money to go up against a Republican challenger in a general election. After Harajli realized that the campaign would be squaring off against Rep. Andy Levin, someone Harajli respects and likes, he quit.
According to the listing for the 2020 field internship, candidates for the internship were expected to be available for a minimum of ten hours a week for a three-month period. They were expected to organize and facilitate door-knocking and phone-banking, as well as to “compile and analyze voter responses using VAN to produce daily and weekly reports.”
Harajli, a finance intern, said that he felt exploited by Stevens and her campaign. While the campaign staff was never mean or aggressive toward the interns, they were still exploiting young high school students who knew little about the political process and were eager for letters of recommendation for college programs.
The Stevens campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The writer of this article did apply to work for Stevens’s district office internship in 2020, but was rejected because of the pandemic halting in-person internships.
Stevens employs but does not pay interns who are expected to do donor research and help with the coordination of field volunteers.
Stevens is in the midst of her toughest primary fight yet. She is up against fellow incumbent Rep. Andy Levin after the recent redistricting process split up both their districts, and both chose to run in the 11th District. An investigation by the Prospect of property records, as well as video footage, has raised questions about whether Stevens has been claiming to live in the 11th while actually staying in her home in the Tenth District.
Wherever she spends her evenings, Stevens is not hurting for cash. The primary has brought about some large fundraising numbers for her—particularly the support of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a group that traditionally donates to Republican candidates, as well as Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. In her most recent campaign finance filings, she reported making $1 million last quarter, with $1.8 million cash on hand.
On the other hand, Rep. Andy Levin raised about half as much as Stevens did in the last quarter. His cash on hand is $1.1 million, which would be sizable if he were going up against any candidate other than Stevens. According to campaign finance filings, last year Levin’s campaign provided a $500 stipend to participants of the national program Democracy Summer Fellows. This year, Levin hired campaign interns, paying them a stipend of $1,500 to work from June to August.
On top of that, outside spending from the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated political action committee, has totaled more than $2.4 million in media exposure for Stevens. Outside spending for Levin has largely come from J Street, a more progressive nonprofit that has advocated for peaceful negotiations around settlements in Israel and the Middle East. J Street’s political action committee, J Street Action Fund, has spent around $700,000 in ad buys on behalf of Levin.
Levin also co-sponsored the bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. He and Stevens were also co-sponsors of the Protecting the Right to Organize bill, better known as the PRO Act. But Levin has spent a considerable amount of time advocating for the ability of different classes of workers to unionize, including college athletes. More recently, he has introduced the resolution for congressional staffers to organize into the Congressional Workers Union, and his office was one of the first to unionize. This has earned him the title of Congress’s “shop steward.”
Unpaid internships are very common throughout the country, with one study suggesting that one-third of all internships were without pay. They can be theoretically legal thanks to a Supreme Court case called Walling v. Portland Terminal Company, which says that under the Fair Labor Standards Act, workers who are being trained to work jobs are yet to be considered “employees.” A company, the Court reasons, is actually taking on a loss by training the worker because the worker stands to gain more from the training than the employer does. Thus the Department of Labor has produced a “primary beneficiary test,” which examines whether the employer or the intern is benefiting more from the internship.
As a result of this ruling, unpaid internships have become an important part of many industries, particularly within politics and nonprofits, despite the fact that interns commonly perform work that is undeniably similar to what normal employees do. The White House, for instance, will not pay interns until this fall. Unpaid internships are inaccessible for students who can not afford to be without a paying job.
One would think that Democratic Party campaigns that have the money would work against this system of unpaid labor, which only widens the gap between lower-income students who are locked out from unpaid internships and the affluent students whose parents can cushion their child’s exploitation. But in the case of Rep. Stevens, apparently not.
