The Ontario Ministry of Labour decided to crack down on unpaid internships, shutting down two programs at the Walrus and Toronto Life magazines over complaints about unfair labour practices.
Toronto Life’s four-month intern program has been running for around 20 years, and while it initially paid a stipend, payment stopped in 2009, after the magazine suffered a financial crisis.
The Walrus employs 11 interns for six months at a time. At both magazines, interns were told they no longer had a job, with the exception of those completing school credit.
The Ministry’s publication on labour standards says the title “intern” is irrelevant, and if you work for an organization, you are an employee, entitled to minimum wage under the Employment Standards Act.
With the exception of placements completed through a college or similar institution, unpaid internships are only allowed if they meet all of six criteria. The position must be similar to vocational school training, the training cannot take someone else’s job, and the placement must overall be for the benefit of the intern—not the employer.
At Carleton, journalism students like me can apply for apprenticeship placements through the school starting in our third year. These are mostly unpaid positions that would still fall under the Ministry’s allowed placements.
In my five years here, I’ve completed three placements at different news organizations, two of which paid me a small honorarium for my work at the end. I’m grateful for my positive experiences at each placement, which lasted between two weeks and a month. One even led to a full-time, fully-paid summer position that was not initially promised to me.
Many journalism students will likely tell you unpaid internships are a necessary evil. The idea is if you want a publication to pay you, you’ve got to work for free for a while and accept you’re just going to have to find some other way to pay the bills.
Internships can be valuable. Depending on the program, it can lead to your work appearing in respected or wide-reaching publications, allow you to make connections with established professionals, and most importantly, give you an idea of whether this line of work is actually something you’d want to do. If you love something enough to do it for free, you’ll work harder if you think you’ll eventually get paid for it.
Journalism isn’t exactly a growth industry right now, and many publications are hemorrhaging money. I’d like to believe this is the reason why many unpaid internships currently exist in my field, not that students and recent grads are being deliberately exploited.
But these financial obstacles get passed down to interns when publications can’t afford to pay them. Journalism is cost-prohibitive, because many students or recent grads simply can’t afford to work for free.
I’m pretty fortunate in that all my placements were in major cities near to where I already had a place to live—my hometown of Markham is a short commute to Toronto, and I go to school in Ottawa. But my experience is the exception, not the rule. My peers have struggled to find places to live for short periods of time in unfamiliar cities, especially on already-limited student budgets.
There’s a fine line between getting experience and exposure, and doing the same work as a paid employee for free. If the latter is what you’re doing, then you’re the one adding value to a publication—not the other way around.
A couple of weeks is one thing, but it’s pretty unrealistic to expect someone to work full-time, for free, for months at a time. How much are you paying for your “real-world experience”—whether it be in accommodation in a new place, transportation to and from work—and how much is it paying you?
