At the beginning of October this year, an unpaid intern at Phoenix Satellite Television U.S. in New York tried to file a lawsuit for sexual harassment. This intern, Lihuan Wang, could not bring a sexual harassment claim under New York human rights laws because she was not paid, meaning she was not considered an employee. This is a problem, not only in New York, but also in Georgia. We need to stop putting sexual harassment on the back burner and consider unpaid interns humans as well.

The protected classes under Human Rights law include: race, creed, color, age, national origin, citizenship status, gender, sexual orientation, disability and partnership status. This looks like it covers everyone besides unpaid interns. This is taking advantage of the intern’s work and means they can be taken advantage sexually as well. Sexual harassment needs to be seen as a top priority issue, not something that does not matter if it happens to an intern.

Also, the complainant of sexual harassment does not have to be the person at whom the offensive conduct is directed, but anyone affected by the conduct. So, in other words, in order for an unpaid intern to have sexual harassment filed, they must have someone else do it because apparently they cannot have their own voice in that regard. So not only are these interns not getting wages and benefits, but also do not seem human enough to be protected from sexual harassment. 

These interns might not be receiving money for what they are doing, but they are still working. Shouldn’t Georgia keep that in account? So there are two solutions for you states that have not revised their human rights law: these unpaid interns can either be able to file a lawsuit for sexual harassment just like the other people who work for the company, or all interns should be paid. Interns are at work and are humans too; they should be treated as so.