The latest high-profile business to be sued by an intern for labor law violations is Sirius XM Radio.

Melissa Tierney, a former intern on the satellite radio broadcaster’s Howard Stern Show claimed that during her five months on Stern’s show in 2011, she spent as many as 36 hours a week running errands, reviewing news clips and going on food runs for on-air personalities and their guests, earning exactly nothing.

She says Sirius illegally misclassified her as exempt from minimum wage protections. The company, says her complaint, “would have hired additional employees or required existing staff to work additional hours” if it didn’t have the services of unpaid interns like her. This violates federal and New York State minimum wage laws, she says, as well as a New York ordinance on wage theft.

According to the Sirius XM website, its internships are unpaid and available only to enrolled college students who will receive credit.

Some people claim that unpaid internships deprive people of modest means from sometimes valuable work experience, because only the well-off can afford to work for free. That’s not a labor law issue, just an element that makes these cases about more than fair wages. The legal issue here is about who benefits more from the intern’s time — the intern or the company — and how much the intern can reasonably be expected to learn from the experience.

Even the White House has come under scrutiny for its unpaid internship program, but government offices are exempt from the rules covering when an internship must be paid.

Read the whole story on the Huffington Post.