Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen famously shared the role of Michelle Tanner on ABC sitcom Full House because of strict Hollywood child labor laws.
So when they hired interns for their Dualstar Entertainment Group production company, they may well have assumed every self-respecting young professional starting out in their career had a twin or doppelganger of some kind with whom to share her workload.
That might explain why approximately 40 current and former interns have filed a class-action lawsuit in Manhattan supreme court alleging exploitative conditions, including 50-hour workweeks, without pay or academic credit.
“I was doing the work of three interns,” said Shahista Lalani, the lead plaintiff in the suit and a former design intern at the Row, the Olsens’ fashion label.
If the Olsens had indeed assumed Lalani was a set of triplets, splitting the work between herself and two siblings, this would have left each intern with a much more agreeable 16.6-hour work schedule.
As the Olsens may realise as the case progresses, office life can be difficult for those without a twin to share the burden of data entry and fetching a superior’s asparagus water.
Of course, if Dualstar was aware of the disgruntled interns’ alleged mistreatment and lack of twin siblings, it would fit into an established pattern of so-called “glamour industries” relying on uncompensated and under-compensated labor, which largely restricts the industries’ talent pool to the privileged and blocks applicants already saddled with student loan debt from applying ... twin problems.
