By Jeff Lagerquist
TORONTO (CUP) – Internships can put some real world experience on your resume and even land you a job, but some employers see them as an opportunity to get cheap labour. With students desperate to build their portfolios, working for little or no money can seem like a viable option.
The problem arises from the vagueness of laws surrounding internships, and their lack of enforcement. In the case of unpaid internships, many students end up working in illegal environments without realizing it.
“Unpaid internships are being used as a proxy for entry-level positions and they’re allowing companies to not hire people, but to use a revolving door of unpaid interns to sustain the business and the operations,” says Andrew Langille, a labour and employment lawyer in Toronto.
The Employment Standards Act (ESA) — relevant in both Ontario and British Columbia — states that in order for a position to be exempt from the ESA and from minimum wage laws, it must be “‘hands-on’ training that is required by the curriculum, and will result in a certificate or diploma.” This means that co-op programs can be exempt, but that it is illegal for recent graduates — no longer students — to work at a free internship.
Langille says that internships fall under precarious employment.
“Precarious employment is where you don’t have a lot of ties to the employer; it’s generally on a short-term basis on a contract with the employer. You may not get benefits,” he said. “If you’re making coffee, filing papers, photocopying, inputting data and so on and so forth, it’s probably not a training program, it’s probably illegal and it probably violates the ESA.”
Bruno Quarless* is a senior journalism student who had a summer internship at a well-known Toronto sports network.
“That’s one of the reasons I moved to Toronto, I wanted to work for them,” he said. “Then I found out it would be unpaid, which was OK. Most are, which sucks.”
Quarless was working on search engine optimization content for the network two days per week. During his shifts he would write five to six 500-word stories on major sports, but said he received very little feedback on his work in the four months he was working for the network and didn’t feel that he had benefited at all from his time there.
“Basically I spent two days a week for four months cranking out 2,000 to 2,500 words of useless bullshit that no one saw, with no byline, no money, and not even something that I would put in my portfolio,” he says. “I worked at a place that I always wanted to work at — and hated it and became completely disillusioned.”
Although the laws are vague and the risk of exploitation is always a factor, internships can be an extremely effective means of gaining real world experience before graduation.
“The thing that’s so good about intern programs is that it gives people a relatively simple way to find out if they want to do this stuff, whether they enjoy it, and whether they are good at it,” said Roger Gillespie, the man in charge of hiring student interns for the Toronto Star, which pays its interns.
Gillespie explains that student internships also serve as a way for employers to see potential hires in action before offering a job. He makes it clear that interns should not expect full-time jobs.
“Don’t rely on some notion that you are going to get hired here, because that’s a stupid thing to do,” warns Gillespie.
Last year, the Star employed 22 interns for their three programs, none of whom were hired full-time. The interns themselves often set the pace of competition for scarce positions.
“Almost no one gets into our program who isn’t prepared to give up a chunk of their life,” says Gillespie.
Outworking your peers isn’t always the challenge, especially if you’re a business student. Sometimes staying focused on monotonous yet important tasks is the most difficult part.
Fourth-year business technology management student Paul Benton interned with CIBC World Markets for four months. After a rigorous three-part interview process, he found himself spending hours in front of an Excel spreadsheet filing reports for traders.
“I would say we were being exploited, but we were paid quite well. Twenty-two dollars per hour is at the higher end of the scale,” says Benton.
As boring as it was, the experience paid off.
“Getting a job is a lot easier if you have an internship on your resume. It’s a big part of landing a position after you finish school,” he admits.
Practical work experience is an important part of a resume, but arts industries are less likely to pay for your time.
Louis Calabro is a manager of the Genie and Gemini awards for the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television (ACCT). The ACCT hires unpaid interns for six-month internships. The workers are required to come in for 12 hours per week.
“We’re a not-for-profit organization so we don’t have a lot of excess cash floating around,” explains Calabro. “The internship is a way to provide experience for somebody who’s maybe just coming out of school or who may be in school at the same time. It’s not really meant to be a situation where you’re going to be making tons of money.”
The ACCT generally hires interns from arts and science programs. The interns’ responsibilities range from labeling, filing, and boxing things up, to putting together screener packages for nominating committee members and organizing information for the nominating committee. “We function like any production company would on the office side of things. So I truly believe that does provide a lot of experience,” he says.
While internships provide real-world experience before graduation, there are other ways to build a resume and break into your chosen profession, argues Ivor Shapiro, chair of Ryerson’s journalism program.
“There are other ways to gain professional experience,” he says. “I find that increasingly many students in the journalism program are working at a professional level almost from day one and keep on doing so even if it’s as a freelancer, part-time, or contract, in their summers or spare time.”
Despite this, the job market’s demand for practical workplace experience is a reality for most Ryerson students.
“This has a wider impact on society because people are putting off life milestones, such as getting married, moving out of their parents’ home, entering into relationships, having kids, buying a house, saving for retirement,” says Langille.“This is a phenomenon that is affecting [current] generations and will affect the coming generations that are entering the labour market.”
*NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED
