If the Hamilton Tiger-Cats can't excel at winning, at least they excel in other areas. Too bad one of those areas appears to be exploiting young workers trying to gain a toe-hold in the professional sports industry. From a gander at the Ti-Cats' website there's an extensive internship recruitment process underway in preparation for the 2012 CFL season.
The problem is that it appears that all of the positions being recruited for contravene provisions contained in the Employment Standards Act, 2000 ("ESA") governing the use of unpaid interns. The advertised positions appear to breach multiple prongs of the six-fold test enumerated under s. 1(2) of the ESA and it's arguably a case of misclassification of employees as interns.
I'll let people judge for themselves the legality of these positions, but it's troubling to see a major Hamilton institution embroiled in a situation of questionable legality. Unpaid internships have become a blight on the economic and job prospects of too many young workers in Ontario. This sort of unpaid labour does little to transition students into the labour market, rather it serves as a form of exploitation of young people with dimming job opportunities and perpetuates the deteriorating youth labour market in Ontario.
Hopefully the Ti-Cats organization will see the possible error of their ways and offer their summer employees minimum wage at the bare minimum. It should be noted that I discovered this job posting on the York University Career Centre's website. It troubling that post-secondary institutions in Ontario don't engage in simple due diligence to see if job postings contravene the ESA. For some of my past articles on unpaid internships, see: here, here, and here. Finally, what would a football story be without some nostalgia, so here's a choice clip from 1983:
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