Students threaten action over paid internships
Acoalition of Quebec student groups has doubled down on its promise to cause disturbances following the budget announcement Tuesday by Quebec Finance Minister Carlos Leitão that still excludes internships from coverage under the reformed Labour Standards Act.
“Despite budget cuts totaling more than $4 billion since his election, Finance Minister Carlos Leitão has not found it necessary to release the funds necessary to improve the lot of all interns, while he handed out pre-election goodies,” a coalition press release says. “This is enough to once more insult the student movement, which has been actively pressing for the remuneration of all internships for two years. Just last Thursday, student midwives, on strike for a third day this semester, gathered in front of the National Assembly, accompanied by trainees from other disciplines, to demand recognition of their work. Since the beginning of the quarter, more than 20,000 students have taken part in strike days for the same reason.”
The coalition argues that, in this context, the announcement of compensation of $15 million a year to improve the lot of fourth year education students is a small advance. “The details of the measure, which covers only one of the four stages in the curriculum, remain unclear and uncertain,” the coalitions says. “Above everything else, this single-sector improvement won’t make us forget the non-recognition by the National Assembly of the value of the work carried out by the tens of thousands of trainees, including many women who work in the traditionally female-dominated fields of nursing, social work, and midwifery studies.”
"At a time when it’s fashionable for politicians to claim to be pro-feminist in the media, the gendered injustice of unpaid internships cannot be corrected by the awarding of a scholarship only for women graduating in education,” says UQAM social work intern Sandrine Belley.
The coalition asks how the government can justify that only trainees in education should be targeted by this measure while nursing students complete 1,035 hours of internship, those in social work, 945 hours, and future midwives, 2,350. Students in these programs have been actively mobilized for two years. In response, the government has decided to offer more tax benefits to their bosses. The government will release additional millions of dollars to encourage businesses to hire trainees, while not caring in any way about the working conditions of the trainees.
“Faced with Liberal contempt, the movement for the remuneration of internships will continue its march towards a 2018-2019 that promises to be full of disturbance,” the coalition says. Last Friday, the Montreal Coalition for Internship Compensation passed a mandate stating that if the government refuses to meet the demand for pay in all internships, it will call on all its member associations to start an unlimited general strike of courses and internships as early as the winter of 2019.
The coalition consists of 25 student associations from Sherbrooke, Trois-rivières, Chicoutimi, Rimouski, Québec City, Montréal, and Gatineau.