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Health & Fitness

Unpaid Interns Are Not Employees & Have No Civil Rights, Either

Remember when Iowa City Manager Tom Markus advertised for an unpaid intern to work in his office? I don't know whether he was successful in hiring such an intern. 

However, Bloomberg Business News posted an interesting article recently about just how disastrous such a position can be for the intern. Based on a case that recently progressed through the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, unpaid interns, who some attorneys consider to be illegally employed because they do work that workers would ordinarily be paid to do, not only are not employees. They also have no civil rights, according to the NY court. Unpaid interns have no protection against sexual harassment or any other infringement of their basic civil rights, whether it is protection from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

So Lihuan Wang, a young female intern, was not only sexually harassed on the "job," but she had no recourse. She was punished for complaining about her boss' sexual advances by being cut off from any possible job opportunities with the company, which was Phoenix, and worked with the company for no pay for nothing, essentially. 

New York Democratic lawmakers are attempting to change the law to give unpaid interns civil rights, according to a Wall Street Journal legal blog.

Temporary workers are also exploited if they don't know their rights and allow their supervisor to exploit them. Do you have a temporary job with the City of Iowa City? Do you have a supervisor who works on salary and prefers to work through his lunch break?

Know that he's on salary, and his job may be his life. However, that doesn't mean you aren't legally entitled to a 15-minute break for every four hours of work per Iowa state law. If you're making $10 an hour as a temporary worker, a job that normally pays much more in a nonexploitative environment, you don't have to work through your lunch break just because your obsessive/compulsive supervisor with a nice, comfy salary chooses to work through his lunch break.

Don't say "no" explicitly. Just don't work through your lunch break. The law is on your side.

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