The Future is Unwritten: Precarity, Cultural Apartheid, and Unpaid Internships

Note: Last Friday I was a part of a panel discussing internships at the Canadian University Press's annual conference. The following are my comments and it focuses on the growth of unpaid labour and the emergence of cultural apartheid in key professions in Canada's labour market. I've inserted some hyper-links to key material that I relied upon in crafting my remarks.

First off, thank you to the organizers of NASH for inviting me to speak. It's great to be speaking with all of you this morning and I hope you're all enjoying your trip to the centre of the universe. 

The topic today is whether internships are invaluable or exploitative? I come at this issue from a legal perspective as my graduate research has focused on issues relating to the unpaid labour that young workers engage in during the school-to-labour market transition. My comments today are aimed at the deeper cultural, political, and economic implications arising from the rise of unpaid labour in Canada's labour markets.

I'm going to cover three areas. I'll frame the overall issue with a particular focus on some of the underlying inequalities that are implicated. I will argue that internships are a form of cultural apartheid. Finally we'll end by talking about why this issue matters to you as journalists. 

Framing the Problem of Unpaid Internships

Let us take a look at the dimensions of this issue. 

I want to begin by casting cast internships as an issue that implicates inter-generational equity. This concept relates to how societal resources are distributed over the spectrum of age; the intergenerational differences in access to economic resources and social mobility; and, how any differences are accounted for within law, public policy, and institutional structures. 

One of the profound problems with unpaid internships is that this type of employment specifically targets youths. Our parent's generation didn't have to engage in nearly the same level of unpaid labour; it's the new normal after thirty years of successive governments actively ignoring and not responding to the changes within Canada's labour markets.

The growth in unpaid labour is linked to the feminization of Canada's labour markets. This is concept that holds that jobs are increasingly resembling the conditions that women have historically faced in the workplace. This is a process of gendering-down which sees lower wages being paid, few or no benefits, low levels of regulatory protection, and little or no control over the conditions of work. The foregoing being a deviation of the post-war standard employment relationship. 

Journalism is an industry that features a growing level of feminization. This is evidenced by: a high-level of labour market insecurity, a reliance on freelance or contract workers, and stagnating wages that often can't adequately sustain the necessities of life.

We all exist in a "gloves-off economy". One that has been buffeted by thirty years of austerity, cuts, structural adjustments, and profound changes. Consider McGuinty's illegal imposition of contracts on teachers or Harper's assault on families and workers by slashing at heart of EI and CPP. Governments are increasingly attacking workplace standards, promoting policies that download risk onto individual employees, and tactics aimed at eroding of the living standards that our parents and grand-parents enjoy. 

Young people have been sold a bill of goods, this is a false prospectus of massive proportions. Students have been told by government, their parents, and schools that if they obtain post-secondary educations they'll get a good job and earn more. Currently we have youths beset by the triple whammy of high tuition, un(der)employment, and debt. A shrinking minority are still able to land decent work, but the majority are forced to make due with what Douglas Coupland (originally coined by sociologist Amitai Etzioni) termed a McJob - "a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low benefit, no-future job in the service sector." 

Every year in Canada young workers engage in somewheres between 100,000 to 300,000 illegal, unpaid internships. These positions are used as pools of cheap labour which employers directly benefit from. The growth of unpaid labour in the youth labour market has a destabilizing effect on Canada's labour markets. 

Consider the impact: wages are driven down, paid employees are replaced with unpaid ones, youths are forced to incur higher levels of debt, entry level jobs become scarce, underemployment becomes commonplace, and the youth unemployment rate increases. The rise of unpaid internships in Canada corresponds to the growth of precarious work among youths such as temp, unpaid, freelance, contract, and part-time positions which deviates from the post-World War II standard employment relationship characterized by full-time positions, living wages which could support a family, and job-security. 

Beyond the labour market impacts there are larger socio-economic trends engaged. Young people today are engaging in post-secondary education in much higher numbers than previous generations. Tuition fees are at high levels with little chance of abating in most provinces. There is a troubling increase in mental health issues amongst youths. More that half of millennials now live with their parents. Relationships, marriages, household formation, and the birth-rate have been declining over the past two decades. Youths also face stagnating wages and difficulty in finding good jobs with benefits.

This all points to the fact that youths are facing declining living standards and deteriorating economic conditions as compared to previous generations. 

Is Cultural Apartheid Emerging as an Effect of the Growth of Unpaid Labour?

Journalism has become an "elite pursuit", a "glamour industry" if you will for the privileged elite of the post-industrial age. In the wake of the Internet the industry has been in a permanent state of upheaval and disruption. To enter the field inevitably requires aspiring journalists to engage in unpaid labour, be it at student publications, as part of their degree requirements, or as a precursor to paid employment. 

What has occurred is that journalism as a profession has generally been cut-off as a possible career to youths from lower socio-economic classes which also has linkages to social locations such as racialization, immigration status, or disability. To become a journalist now literally requires start-up capital or incurring debt for school, stints doing unpaid work, and to bolster low starting wages. Now, all of this is deeply troubling, so let us explore some of the deeper implications that I see on the rapidly approaching horizon.

Look around this room, consider who is attending this conference. Or look in the conference guide to see who's reflected in the presenters at this conference. I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but I'd suggest what's on display is undeniable privilege. My aim here is not to criticize, but to point out how power structures within our culture are being replicated and sustained.

Over the past eighteen months Canada has seen the emergence of a number of social movements: Occupy, the Maple Spring, and now Idle No More. All of which are contesting the prevailing social and economic conditions in Canada. Like clockwork each of these movements faced sustained vitriolic attacks from the mainstream media. For the most part the demands were marginalized, the leaders mocked, and the underlying grievances and possible remedies largely unexamined. I would suggest that none of the foregoing are particularly positive developments for either the media or our democracy.

Consider the cartoonish capitalist horror-show duo of Lang and O'Leary preaching the gospel of unrelenting greed, Ezra Levant's venomous diatribes against Aboriginals, Muslims, Roma refugees, and the poor; or the idiotic, provincial ramblings of Wente, Blatchford, and Levy aka the Holy Trinity of Hate.

This is what passes as "journalism" these days in Canada, a form of tawdry infotainment devoid of perspective and heavy on mocking anyone not falling outside a narrow, uncritical corporate mould. I could move on to other examples, but I'm certain you get my point that currently there's little evidence that a marketplace of ideas is on offer within the mainstream media in Canada, which are the exact places that many of you, I would imagine, want to end up working.

Underpinning all of this is an unstated subtext at work that demands interns: look like us, talk like us, and be from money. If you look at the national, regional, and local media outlets in Canada our country's diversity isn't well reflected; there's a profound lack of racialized perspectives, little differing socio-economic angles, few viewpoints from Aboriginals peoples, and a deep gendered bias that ignores the insights of women. 

Many key media outlets now regularly use unpaid labour as part of their business model, locally organizations like The Walrus, CTV, BlogTO, Rabble.ca, This Magazine, Spacing, and The Grid all use unpaid internships. The growth of unpaid labour contributes to exclusionary conditions where historically marginalized groups are denied the opportunity to fully participate in key institutions in Canadian society and face structural glass ceilings that aren't easily broken. The alienating and socially exclusionary nature of internships can be easily characterized as an emerging form of cultural apartheid that strikes at the heart of democracy, equality, and diversity. 

My worry is that one of the long-term implications we're starting to see from the deployment of unpaid labour in Canada's labour markets is the enclosure of certain key professions, be it the law or journalism, via economic and social barriers which will prevent members of historically marginalized groups from obtaining paid employment and establishing themselves in these professions.

So Why Does All of This Matter?

So why should the growth of unpaid labour matter to young journalists? Well, there's the personal angle in the fact that many of you will need to engaged in prolonged periods of unpaid labour to establish yourselves as journalists in Canada's labour markets, but there's a deeper lesson in this issue with troubling dimensions afoot. It's about untold stories, about narratives that are ignored, and the hidden issues that are being faced by growing segments of our society.

We face immense challenges as a country in the decades ahead. Consider that we face a rapidly aging population, crumbling infrastructure, a broken political system, and an economy that will be only growing slowly going forward. Amid this environment many people will be experiencing profound precarity in their lives, insecurity in the labour market, and uncertainty as they navigate new socio-economic realities in Canadian society. As a society we need stories about these sorts of issues told, desperately, as increasingly we're living in country that delineates the haves from the have-nots.

That's where all of you come in. There's a dire need to explain, contextualize, and account for what's occurring in the labour market and wider society. Currently there's a dearth of coverage about what's happening to regular Canadians in their day-to-day working lives. The struggles, the triumphs, and how the daily grind impacts upon our families, the communities we live in, and larger society. 

Somewheres along the way we stopped telling stories about labour and work, this needs to change going forward. Hopefully some of you will begin to tell our stories about the dignity or indignities that jobs bring. As Joe Strummer, the lead singer of the Clash, once remarked "the future is unwritten", so go write it. 

Thanks, that's all I have for today.

(This blog post is dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Aaron was an Internet pioneer and information activist who helped create much of the infrastructure that bloggers rely on to disseminate information. He was charged by the U.S. Federal Government over a trivial matter related to his activism and committed suicide last week in the lead-up to his trial where he was facing a possible sentence of forty years in prison.)