Labour laws in Ontario allow internships associated with an educational institute or a vocational school to be unpaid. But with rising tuition fees and living expenses, many international students are questioning the fairness of these arrangements.
For this reason, co-op and internship programs should be planned in an inclusive manner to lift the financial burdens of international students in the country.
Radhika Mehta, an international student at Humber College’s Lakeshore campus, said she had a tough time managing multiple jobs during her co-op term last year.
“I absolutely couldn’t afford to stop working part-time as the co-op was unpaid,” Mehta said.
She said most of her classmates, who were international students, could not find paid internship opportunities.
“It is unfair for international students who have to manage everything on their own, from working to paying off living expenses, and also having the heavy burden of student debts,” she said.
According to statistics by Erudera, an educational platform, there are almost 390,000 international students enrolled in higher education in Canada in 2022. Ontario is home to more than 190,000 of them.
Unpaid internships are illegal in Ontario. However, an unpaid internship is deemed to be legal if it falls within any one of the exceptions under the Employment Standards Act in section 3(5). These exceptions include being a secondary school student, working under a work experience program, and if a school board has authorized the work.
“Co-ops were traditionally designed as sort of an earn-while-you-learn type of scenario,” Toronto labour lawyer Andrew Langille said. “It’s unfortunate, but there’s been quite a bit of growth in this unpaid learning and training while in academic programs.”
Zainab Laila, a Marketing Management student at the Lakeshore campus, said the uncertainty of not having a paid internship is causing her “more stress and anxiety.”
“It’s extremely difficult for students to find internships in their field in this competitive environment and the repercussions of which are even more draining on these students’ bank accounts,” she said.
Carlo Fanelli, a Work and Labour Studies professor at York University, said Canada has had four decades of stagnant wages across labour markets which is “in conjunction with the explosion of incomes at the top end of the spectrum.”
Fanelli, who also is one of the authors of From Consent to Coercion: The Continuing Assault on Labour, said data shows international students, racialized groups and women are “more likely to be engaged in this type of unpaid work.”
“One of the ironies is that those most likely to be able to engage in unpaid internships are those at the upper end of the spectrum because they’re often from well-to-do families and have secondary familial support,” he said.
Laila said international students are constantly struggling with increasing expenses and rising tuition fees, and “doing full-time unpaid internships means taking away from the time from paid part-time jobs to save up money.”
Langille said unpaid training and the unpaid work is necessarily bad.
“I don’t think anybody is necessarily starting from that viewpoint because I can see a lot of benefits to that potential,” Langille said. “But it’s often not delivered in a way that has a lot of quality.”
Unpaid internships have long been a popular way for employers to provide job experience to students and recent graduates. But, as an international student, I believe unpaid internships not only take advantage of young workers but also create an uneven playing field for those who cannot afford to work for free.