If your internship has you feeling like you’re not a person, that’s because legally in the District of Columbia, you aren’t. As one New Jersey college student discovered in December when she tried to bring a sexual harassment suit against her employer, unpaid interns in D.C. currently have no right to sue their boss for harassment or discrimination.
That all may change if Councilmember Mary Cheh’s (D-Ward 3) Intern Anti-Discrimination Amendment Act passes. The bill, which she introduced in January, aims to amend the D.C. Human Rights Act.
Although D.C.’s worker protections are already fairly advanced compared to those of other states, according to Jeremy Faust, Cheh’s Director of Legislative Affairs, it’s great that the Councilmember realizes that they’re not comprehensive enough yet.
“It boggles the mind that interns have been denied these basic legal protections,” Cheh said in a statement.
And how. The D.C. Human Rights Act has been around, without adequate legal protections for interns, since 1977. Stephen Block, Legislative Council for the ACLU, said that the lack of protections in the original Act was likely due to a lack of oversight.
“When you think of an employee, you think of anyone working in an office,” he said.
Nonetheless, it is worrisome that we will never know how many interns felt pressured to remain in an uncomfortable work setting without legal recourse against discrimination.
No one, including Cheh’s office and Georgetown’s Career Center, keeps reliable statistics on how many unpaid interns work in the District, but if D.C. is not the mecca of unpaid internships, it’s certainly one of them. For a city with some of the most sought-after unpaid positions in the nation, leaving interns without protection any longer would have been embarrassing, and we owe Cheh a round of applause for taking up this cause. Let’s hope that when her bill comes up for a hearing on February 27, the rest of the Council will agree.
Send your resume to Molly at mredden@staff.georgetownvoice.com
