CCLA ‘volunteers’ should be paid interns

Re Civil Liberties Association relies on volun

teers, Letters, Jan. 24 Michael Bryant, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), must be incredibly dense if he honestly does not know the difference between charitable volunteerism and an exploitable internship scheme.

Here’s the first clue: If you require your “volunteers” to commit to a minimum of 16 hours a week for eight weeks, then that is an unpaid internship.

Here’s a second clue: Do you require your volunteer board members, lawyers and front-line helpers to make the same time commitment?

The description on the CCLA website under 2018 Summer Legal Volunteers clearly describes a summer job for legal students. The CCLA should do the right thing and pay its summer students. Joel Myerson, Richmond Hill The CCLA isn’t alone, and there are serious repercussions from this model. The dirty open secret of the not-forprofit sector is that it relies on unpaid internships and that anyone who wants to work at an NGO is all but obligated to start in an unpaid position. This has the perverse effect of excluding the marginalized populations that such organizations are meant to support. Who else can afford to work for free except the wealthiest segments of our society? Jeremy Greenberg, former unpaid intern, Toronto