Students’ voices can create change in the fight for fair wages
by Priya Duguay Toronto International Film Festival is creating quite the buzz again this year as a flurry of fans, film aficionados, and film fraternity (aka. Hollywood’s elite) arrive for the highly respected film festival. As a media student at Ryerson University’s Radio and Television Media Production Program (RTA) I’m constantly, like many of my […]
CWA Canada Votes to Protect Interns
by Kayla Perry At CWA Canada’s National Representative Council (NRC) meeting on April 17, voting members unanimously agreed to endorse two documents, both of which aim to protect media interns in the workplace. The first document presented to the NRC by the CWA Canada Associate Member Steering Committee was a policy statement on the equitable […]
Unpaid internships: A moral dilemma for journalism students and the media community
by Zoe Melnyk Journalism students across Ontario are struggling with the moral dilemma of participating in unpaid internships while trying to build experience for their portfolios. Journalism students are being taught that simply having a degree isn’t enough to get a job anymore. Students are being pushed into doing internships and the majority of the […]
Canadian journalism schools and the internship issue… Work for pay or pay to work?
by Sara Tatelman “Volunteer to do something which is at least somewhat related to your expertise,” Stephen Poloz, governor of the Bank of Canada, urged unemployed youth in a widely criticized November 2014 speech. More often than not, following this advice would mean undertaking an unpaid internship rather than helping at a food bank, […]
The state of the unpaid internship
by Rachel Sanders “Don’t devalue yourself.” That’s the number one piece of advice that Claire Seaborn offers young people looking for work these days. It’s kind of the opposite of the advice offered by the governor of the Bank of Canada last fall. Stephen Poloz’s suggestion that young job hunters should take unpaid work to […]
Who’s afraid of an unpaid internship?
by Maggie Reid Less than two weeks after Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz advised youth to take unpaid positions to boost their resumes, a group of aspiring and emerging media workers, activists and academics gathered to tackle the weight of these words. On November 12, the Communications Workers of America-Canada’s Associate Member program […]
What do student journalists need?
by Kayla Perry On July 19, student journalists associated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and CWA Canada gathered during the Netroots Nation conference to answer one question: what do student journalists need? During the three hour meeting, attendees discussed what student journalists need in order to succeed, in both their university careers and their professional careers once they graduate. Included […]
The Born Freelancer on Interning for Free
This series of posts by the Born Freelancer shares personal experiences and thoughts on issues relevant to freelancers. Have something to add to the conversation? Your input is welcome in the comments. Whenever I read stories about corporate media insisting they have no money to pay their hard working interns (such as Derek Finkle’s […]
The Unpaid Internship Conspiracy
Why Toronto Life’s first intern backs the Ontario labour ministry in shutting down the magazine’s twenty-one-year-old internship program and others that don’t pay by Derek Finkle I won’t lie: when John Macfarlane called me in May of 1993 and offered me a four-month internship at Toronto Life, the magazine he then edited, I was overcome. I […]
Crackdown on unpaid internships a positive step, but the collective struggle must continue
This week, the Ontario Ministry of Labour told The Walrus and Toronto Life to bring their internship programs into compliance with the Employment Standards Act (ESA). Both publications had a long history of offering full time, months-long, unpaid internships for contributing to the main work of the publication. Instead of apologizing and figuring out […]
