When Fox Searchlight Pictures‘s $300 million-plus grossing “Black Swan” sought to control its production budget, in part by staffing with unpaid intern labor, it was contributing to the normalization of a practice that has no defensible basis in ethics or law. It took advantage of people’s desperate need to distinguish their résumés and the acceptance of this commonplace if peculiar fact of the youth labor market. Somewhere along the way, a laudable idea that work experience could have academic merit metastasized into an ad hoc free-for-all in which there is little consistency in policy (whether among employers or colleges), little governmental enforcement, and every reason for exploited young workers to cross their fingers and hope that they’re expected to labor for free for only a brief period.