Internships, while starting with the best of intentions, are turning out to be little more than legalized slavery. A ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York claims, in a catch-22, that interns can’t claim sexual harassment because they work for free. The ruling was a response to a suit filed by a former unpaid intern at Phoenix Satellite Television in New York.
According to the court, protections against sexual harassment are an employee benefit and since interns aren’t paid, well, they don’t get that benefit. Cause, you know, the right to not be fondled or ogled at work is exactly the same as not getting a 401k.
The intern alleging harassment, Lihuan Wang, filed a suit against Phoenix in January. According to the complaint, in early 2010, two weeks after Wang started working at the Chinese-language media company’s New York office, her supervisor and bureau chief, Liu Zhengzhu, invited her and several co-workers to lunch. Wang claims Liu asked her to stay after the meal to discuss her work performance and then asked her to accompany him to his hotel so he could drop off a few things. In the hotel room, she alleges, Liu took off his jacket, untied his tie, and threw his arms around her, exclaiming, “Why are you so beautiful?” She claims Liu held her for about five seconds, tried to kiss her, and squeezed her buttocks. According to the complaint, Wang pushed Liu away and left the room, and when she later asked about job opportunities, Liu invited her to Atlantic City.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found that because Wang was an unpaid intern, not an employee, she could not bring a claim under the New York City Human Rights Law. This discrepancy’s not new: Unpaid interns aren’t covered by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and while local laws can protect them, New York’s state and city laws do not.
Source: Bloomberg News
It wouldn’t be a huge leap to guess that New York City has more unpaid interns than any other city in the U.S., yet the New York City Council has declined on several occasions to add protections to unpaid interns.
Unpaid interns are also not covered by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which means that companies are allowed to discriminate based on race, national origin, sex or religion (sexual orientation is not part of the Civil Rights Act). Of course, if a company were to hire only from their pool of interns, this is an easy way around the Civil Rights Act altogether.
While some might argue that an unpaid intern could easily quit with no real consequences, it does look bad on college transcripts, but more specifically to Wang, she is claiming that she wasn’t hired for a paid position because she didn’t give in to the demands.
Phoenix denies that Wang would have been hired at all. Liu no longer works at Phoenix and they have declined to say why.
