We have all thought about working for free, even if we can’t afford to. Internships, long associated with glamour occupations in the arts or media, are now prerequisite for almost any entry-level position. Those who lack the cash to work for free in expensive cities scramble for a dwindling number of paid positions.

I am one of those scramblers, which is why I reacted so strongly to seeing my perfect summer job as  an unpaid internship. It hit me in the gut. Just one year ago, I was paid to do a job very similar to it.  My living expenses haven’t gone away, so why has my paycheque?

The ubiquity of the unpaid internship is hard to overstate. From Kanye West interning at Fendi, to last summer’s ‘farmer interns’, it is difficult to find a field where some young sucker doesn’t toil away for no remuneration.

Cultural references to internships abound. On a 2012 episode of the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert referred to “cotton internships,” alluding to another era where people did real work for no pay. The comparison is exaggerated, and most critics would say that it leaves out the fact that today’s interns have a choice. Choice, however, is a slippery word in the context of precarious employment. If most interns had a choice, they would probably choose to get paid.

The law regulating internships varies from province to province. Ontario has some of the clearest legislation on this topic. According to Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, for a position to be called an internship, the employer should “derive little, if any, benefit from the activity” and the employee should receive training “similar to that which is given in a vocational school.”

Last year, an Ontario court awarded settlements of around $10,000 to two former interns of a software engineering company. In Girex Bancorp Inc. v. Hsieh, the court held that “aside from a reference letter of dubious value,” the employer reaped all the benefits of the “voluntary trainee” labour. Sound familiar?

The Canadian Association of Career Educators & Employers’ statement on unpaid internships, which McGill has endorsed, echoes some of Ontario’s criteria for acceptable unpaid internships. Despite this, a quick search on CaPS’ job database reveals postings for unpaid internships of dubious legality. Reference letters, networking opportunities, and yes, even “experiential learning,” are not acceptable substitutes for a living wage by any legal or moral standard.

A common counter-argument to the idea that people should be paid is that employers, particularly non-profits, cannot afford to pay their (young, temporary) employees. There is nothing unprecedented about the financial squeeze on non-profits and, while it is unfortunate, it is no excuse for making the opportunity to work at a non-profit the prerogative of the rich alone. The homogenous life experiences of people working in the non-profit sector are a real problem that the reliance on unpaid interns only exacerbates.

A good first step to navigating the rampant illegality of unpaid internships is simple: refuse to work for free. If the thought of demanding a paycheque makes you feel so weak, scared, and alone that you would rather work for free, then work away. Once you are finished volunteering your summer for an investment bank, do what the two young interns in Girex Bancorp Inc. v. Hsieh did: complain to your local labour board. If there is anything encouraging about the legal situation of unpaid interns in Canada it is that there is nothing like the threat of a future lawsuit to make employers follow the law– and this time, the law is on your side.

Josh Mentanko is a first-year law student. Josh can be reached at josh.mentanko@mail.mcgill.ca.

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Arguably, most of us identify as students. This identity might conflict or coincide with our racialized, gendered, and classed identities, but it still takes up a sizeable chunk of who we think we are. And why shouldn’t it? We spend a lot of our time at the university, so isn’t it only natural that we start to connect our sense of self to our scholarly success? I would like to trouble the notion that intellectual exploration of the university is a universal good, not only because the university’s standards for measuring  our development are absurdly narrow, but because it sets itself apart as the site to learn and discover.

As neoliberalism advances, jobs in the arts, humanities, and education, which unite creativity and intellectualism, are being ruthlessly cut. While we can all admit this, it is more difficult to grasp how corporatism and managerial groupthink have rooted themselves in the few remaining jobs. Instead of creating intellectual communities, we are told to network. Instead of randomly curating our intellectual interests, we adhere to rote specialization. We spend so much time writing applications to justify our existence that we become our worst critics. A related effect is that we refrain from research that granting agencies will not fund, and we begin to craft our intellectual pursuits to align with market imperatives.

The fight to preserve spaces like universities from the parasite of managerialism is a worthwhile one, but I am not convinced that it is the best use of our energy. We are not saving ‘intellectual life,’ but the ability of a privileged few to hold tenuous positions in a system that has already been refigured for the purposes of a neoliberal economy. Why should we direct the grassroots energy of so many of us to fight the battles that will only benefit the most privileged in our (intellectual) communities?

For working class students in particular, trying to explain how blue-collar work might be intellectually gratifying to economically-privileged students – who divide working life into a binary of “working with your mind vs. working with your hands” – is degrading and should be unnecessary. It doesn’t matter what your job is; you can still imagine a better world. In fact, those of us who have traversed the worlds of academia and low-wage labour already know that our best insights in the classroom are often thanks to our work planting trees or in the service industry.

Neoliberalism’s dirtiest trick was encouraging us to invest our creativity and love of learning into the indifferent machine of the modern research university, deluding us into believing that we could only find intellectual satisfaction in white-collar work. In an era where the possibility of finding the kind of work that aligns with our intellectual (nevermind our political) interests is increasingly out of reach for all but the privileged few who can afford endless rounds of unpaid internships, or the uninspired few whose sense of self is determined by their GPA and CV. We need to imagine other ways to be creative and forge intellectual communities. To this end, not getting into grad school might be the first step to a better future.

Josh Mentanko is a first-year Law student. You can reach Josh at josh.mentanko@mail.mcgill.ca.

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