Unpaid internships have always been an opportunity for the privileged to consolidate their access to competitive industries. But until recently they were at least supposed to have a narrow scope. Prior to changes made at the beginning of this year, the legality of unpaid internships at for-profit companies hinged on adherence to all six criteria laid out in a Labor Department fact sheet. The strictest among them was a rule prohibiting employers from gaining an “immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.” In practice, these rules were rarely enforced, but they at least made clear that unpaid interns were not supposed to do real work for a company and that, in certain cases, it would be reasonable for the employer’s operations to “actually be impeded” by the internship. The principle undergirding this was simple: labor should not be free.

As Paul DeCamp, an attorney at Epstein Becker & Green, a firm that often represents employers, told Bloomberg, in the past, “If the intern did any productive work it would — at least according to a strict reading of the test — be required that activity be paid.” To DeCamp, that notion is ridiculous: for him and the employers he represents, requiring remuneration is unreasonable, a barrier to the free labor to which they believe themselves entitled.

No longer, says the new Department of Labor. On January 8, 2018, the six criteria were replaced with seven, and unlike before, there is no requirement that all of them be met. Instead, whoever is seeking to determine the legality of an internship will have to judge “the extent to which” each criteria is true and decide on a case-by-case basis. Gone is the rule preventing companies from benefiting from their unpaid interns. The closest facsimile says that a legal unpaid intern’s work “complements, rather than displaces, the work of paid employees.”