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**JULY 28, 2022**

Rep. Haley Stevens Isn't Paying Her Campaign Interns

BY DANIEL NETTER

Despite her campaign raising millions, one intern got a single Starbucks
card.

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 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.

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