WASHINGTON, D.C. – The nation’s second largest teachers union is now required to negotiate wages and working conditions with interns.

“Low paid temporary work has become the norm,” Lou Wolf, organizer for The Office And Professional Employees International Union, told National Public Radio. AFT interns “need a living wage, and they are not paid one. And may laws do not protect interns.”

Intern union organizers negotiated with the AFT for a year over the details of forming their own union before 15 AFT interns voted last week to make it happen, My Fox New York reports.

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Those interns are already paid, unlike many others, but the vote is the latest development of a movement in recent years to pay interns a “living wage.” The AFT must now negotiate wages, hours, benefits, and presumably working conditions.

“The main argument against internships is that they filter out lower income students who may lack in means what they have in potential,” NPR reports. “As NPR’s Anya Kamenetz wrote in a 2006 op-ed for The New York Times: ‘they fly in the face of meritocracy – you must be rich enough to work without pay to get your foot in the door. And they enhance the power of social connections over ability to match people with desired careers.’”

AFT president Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten applauded the recent vote in a one paragraph statement:

“We respect the decision of the American Federation of Teachers interns to form and vote for a union—the first intern (nonmedical) union in the nation. As an employer that pays interns a wage, and as a union that believes in workers’ right to organize, we know that people are more likely to succeed when they have a real voice on the job. Our interns have been invaluable, and we look forward to an ongoing, productive relationship with them and their union.”

The newly formed union is set to start negotiations in July for a contract. The AFT already negotiates contracts with staff unions, a process that can get embarrassingly nasty.

Those negotiations, however, might be tricky considering the fact that interns are typically only employed for a few months at a time, usually in the summer, before heading back to school. Even those who intern after college only hang around long enough to secure more permanent employment.

New York University student Haley Quinn was interning at the AFT office in Washington, D.C. last year when she started organizing her co-workers, all of which have already moved on, she told The Washington Post.

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She said AFT interns earn $12 per hour as undergraduates and $14 as graduate students – less than the $15 per hour fast food workers are demanding, the Post reports.

“I’m still in school, but a lot of us aren’t still in school,” Quinn says. “You can’t pay rent and all of your expenses on what interns make. And in a lot of places, internships are more of an entry-level position.”

Despite the turnover, however, Quinn was able to convince her AFT office’s 15 current interns to join The Office And Professional Employees International Union last Thursday.

Wolf said he’s now looking to start more intern unions other union, government, and media organizations.

We’re hoping actually that this could be the beginning of an effort to organize interns at other locations,” he said. “The economy in many ways has shifted to low-paying or no-paying jobs, particularly for the entry level, with the result being that people in their 20s and 30s are finding it difficult to get their feet on the ground and accumulate a little wealth.”