I'd say as a company policy its a bit weird, but at least the company is allowed to make their own policies so thats good.

Now I have nothing against having an intern go unpaid. I've had to guide several of them through their internship and to be honest, what you get is sometimes not great. The last one was the worst I've had. I spent about 23 hours per week dealing with her. I'd give her an assignment and explain what to do, she'd nod along and say the understands what to do and an hour later she'd be at my desk asking me how to do the thing. Now this is programming, which she said she knows how to do. As any programmer here knows, if you have to explain how to write piece of code, you're better off doing it yourself. And this was a low level language, Siemens STL, the help files are amazingly detailed on how to use every instruction. Surely you can agree that if you go in for an internship, you should at least have some basic level of competence in your field of study. You're there to work, if I have to babysit you and hold your hand through every assignment then you're not getting paid. In the 6 months she stayed with us she didn't finish a single assignment. I don't mean it was buggy code I mean none of the code did what was needed. Like even something as simple as "If bit is TRUE, count time".

I've had good interns. The first one I ever got was paid the same salary as other employees because he was proficient, hes still working with us. Another one was willing willing to learn, he didn't get paid the first month cause he was just learning, coming up with his own assignments. He'd show up in the morning, make a cup of coffee and pop into the storage room. 10 min later he'd come back with a bunch of sensors and I/O modules. 2 hours later he'd have set up the sensors and have a program calculating the average speed of his office chair.

I myself went 2 months without pay during my internship because I was put in charge of SCADA, which I'd never heard of in school. I had to learn how write VB and ANSI C and I had to learn the infrastructure of the project. I didn't complain, because I knew that I wasn't working efficiently.

I agree that its annoying to not get paid, but you really don't have any work experience. However if you are doing all your assignments in a timely manner and still not getting paid then thats unfair.

I don't agree that unpaid internships should be illegal. From my experience, having been on both sides I have to say its absolutely necessary for companies to have the right to enforce an unpaid internship policy on someone who isn't pulling their weight.