Businessweek: There’s plenty for unpaid interns to complain about—mainly, the lack of money—but apparently it gets worse. Because they’re not paid and don’t receive remuneration such as pension and life insurance, interns don’t always count as employees, which means they’re not always entitled to certain employee protections. For one former unpaid broadcasting intern at Phoenix Satellite Television U.S., that means not being able to bring a sexual harassment claim against her former supervisor, according to a Bloomberg BNA report.
6 comments:
That's a little ridiculous. If she can't sue under the company, sue the man himself. Some people get away with too much in the aspect of sexual harassment. Bosses think that they can get away with things because they have leverage over the female employees by saying that it could make or break the woman's career. Basing a job position on whether or not someone has sex with you is not an efficient way to go about hiring people. In fact it is one of the worst ways. A person could be really good and bed, but utterly useless in the workplace.
However, it is also possible that she is over reacting to a situation that didn't happen. Maybe he was drunk and didn't know what he was doing. If anything, she should take it as a compliment and move on with her life. Nothing really bad happened. So, he hugged her and grabbed her butt a bit. These are just physical compliments.
This is awful! Here's another item to add to the list of why NOT to take unpaid internships. I agree with Kristen, in that I wonder why Wang did not go after Liu as an individual when filing a sexual harassment claim through the company didn't work. To be honest, I don't know a lot about how those things work, though. Perhaps she couldn't file a personal claim because the incident was work-related and the claim filed through her work was ultimately dismissed? Aside from any legalities standing in her way, though, I can also imagine the fact that it would have taken a lot on Wang's part, financially and emotionally, to go after Liu on her own (and with her own representation).
While I agree with Kristen on that previous point, I must say that I completely disagree with her in commenting that Wang was overreacting and that she should have just taken the whole thing as a compliment and moved on. What Liu did was not okay in any way, and it's bad enough that Wang wasn't protected when she had the courage to stand up and speak out against him. The victim should not be made to look like the one in error. I can't truly imagine being in her situation, but I can imagine that unsolicited and unwelcomed touching of that kind from a boss would not go lightly by me. I don't care if Liu was drunk, I don't care if it was only five seconds- it was unacceptable and wrong. He should have been punished for it and Wang should have been protected by the company. Bottom line, end of story. Sexual harassment in the workplace of any kind should not be taken lightly.
It seems that the law and justice are pretty far apart these days. This is reminiscent of the Zimmerman trial where legally there was no way to convict him, but morally it seemed pretty obvious. In this case they just used some legal loophole to get him out of trouble. It is depressing how much power the people with the money have over their workers, and how much it protects them.
What struck me most about this situation is that New York's City Council has apparently had opportunities to expand protection to unpaid interns and failed to do so. That's ridiculous! Hopefully the publicity surrounding this will push them to reexamine their stance. I would have thought that anyone, paid or unpaid, with a contract to be a certain place at a certain time fits the definition of "employee" but maybe not.
This is gross. It's absolutely terrifying and unacceptable that things like this are so common and it is even worse that this poor girl can hardly do anything about it because she was "not technically an employee." I disagree that the situation was a physical compliment; yes it is nice to be called beautiful but under the circumstances, when she was manipulated into going to his hotel room, when it was her boss whom she was expecting to remain professional, I wouldn't call her reaction overplayed. It's scary to think that this happens to people and it's scarier to think that they aren't protected and that it's very possible I and/or many of my friends could end up in a situation very similar to this one.
This sounds like just another way that institutions get off the hook for having to deal with instances of sexual assault. It's just another "she was dressed that way so she was asking for it", "She didn't say no so it's kind of her fault", or "legitimate rape". "She's not technically an employee" just says to me that the company doesn't want to deal with it and in addition supports this behavior so that this man could do this to every intern he hires and they would turn a blind eye every time. It's just amazing to me, does Phoenix Television want a reputation of hiring rapists?? They are not the only ones, not only has this happened all over the country at college campuses everywhere but there are countless companies that have had employees or "not legitimate employees" come forward with sexual assault cases and no one does anything. It's happened at Disney, Mitsubishi, UBS, New York Knicks, Chrysler, Ralphs and I'm sure countless other companies.
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