Unpaid, Untracked, Unspoken: The Student Volunteers Who Ran ICFHR 2022 — and What Their Badges Say About America's Internship Gray Zone

Ask anyone who attended ICFHR 2022 what made the conference run, and you will hear about the keynotes, the poster sessions, the exhibit floor. Almost nobody will mention the students.

That silence is the point. Behind the program committee's careful curation stood a workforce of more than sixty student volunteers — graduate students mostly, many from HR programs at state universities across the Midwest and South — who scanned badges at 7 a.m., shepherded panelists between rooms, and reset microphones between sessions. Their compensation typically included waived registration, a meal stipend, and a conference tote. In exchange, they performed what one former volunteer described to us as "real operational labor, just without the payroll line."

For a conference devoted to the science of work, the arrangement deserves scrutiny. And for American HR practitioners, it should feel uncomfortably familiar.

The Test We Keep Failing

The US Department of Labor's primary non-employment test for for-profit internships, adapted from Walling v. Portland Terminal Co. and outlined in Fact Sheet #71, turns on a deceptively simple question: who benefits more? If the employer derives immediate advantage from the intern's work, the intern is likely an employee entitled to wages. If the experience is primarily educational — training that transfers value regardless of placement — the internship may legitimately go unpaid.

Apply that framework to a conference volunteer shift and the picture blurs quickly. Volunteers staffing registration desks were, by any honest account, providing immediate operational advantage. The conference could not have run without them. Yet the counterargument is real too: many volunteers told us they gained conference access they could not otherwise afford, met scholars whose work they cite in dissertations, and — in at least three cases we verified — converted hallway conversations into postdoctoral interviews.

"I'd never have gotten in the room otherwise," one volunteer from a Texas public university told us. "But I also missed two sessions I'd paid travel money to attend, because I was re-folding lanyards."

Both statements are true. That is exactly what makes the gray zone gray.

What HR Should Recognize in This

American HR departments will find nothing novel in this tension. The same ambiguity governs internship programs from Chicago ad agencies to Atlanta hospital systems. A 2022 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that unpaid internships correlate strongly with students from families able to subsidize the experience — a class filter that quietly narrows the pipeline long before anyone mentions diversity targets.

Conferences amplify the problem because they operate outside the normal oversight infrastructure. There is no HR department, no onboarding file, no performance review. The volunteer coordinator is usually a faculty member with limited time and no legal training. The result is a system governed by custom, emails, and good intentions.

Good intentions, history suggests, are not a compliance strategy.

A Fairer Model, Borrowed From Our Own Research

We propose that ICFHR and conferences like it adopt a model we might call structured reciprocity — and that US employers could adapt the same principles for their own early-career programs.

Cap the labor, define the scope. Volunteer shifts should be limited to a fixed number of hours, disclosed in advance, with no expectation of coverage during research sessions the volunteer identifies as priorities. In employment terms: job descriptions, not vibes.

Fund the access, don't discount it. If waived registration is the currency, fund it centrally — through sponsorships earmarked for volunteer support — so that no single department or coordinator absorbs the cost silently. Travel stipends for out-of-state volunteers should be the norm, not the exception.

Document the learning. A one-page agreement, signed before the conference, should specify what the volunteer will do, what they will receive, and what skills or access the experience is designed to build. This mirrors exactly what the DOL test rewards and what employment litigation punishes when absent.

Close the loop. Post-conference, volunteers should receive a written acknowledgment and, ideally, a structured debrief. Several former volunteers told us the most valuable part of the experience was a single twenty-minute conversation with a senior scholar. Make that a deliverable, not an accident.

Why This Belongs in an HR Conference's Own House

It would be easy to frame this as a problem for other industries. It is not. HR research thrives on field data, and field data depends on early-career labor. If the discipline's own infrastructure runs on arrangements its own scholarship would flag in a corporate client, the credibility cost is not hypothetical.

The volunteers we interviewed were not bitter. Most were grateful. But gratitude is a poor substitute for structure, and the students least able to afford ambiguity are the ones most likely to be filtered out of this profession before they ever publish a word.

The next conference cycle is already recruiting. Sixty lanyards are being ordered. What those lanyards represent — opportunity or extraction — is a decision someone will make, deliberately or by default. It should be made deliberately.