Wage Theft, Misclassification, & Glass Ceilings: Unpaid Internships at the Walrus

Today's blog post is going to examine the labour practices relating to unpaid internships at the Walrus, one of Canada's pre-eminent magazines, to unmask one of the most prolific illegal unpaid internship scams currently in existence in Canada. For the uninitiated, the Walrus is a magazine that positions itself as the Canadian equivalent to Harper's or The Atlantic Monthly. It derives funding from donations, advertising, and circulation. Over the course of its existence the Walrus has become a financially sustainable enterprise with a sizeable reserve fund.

John Macfarlane, the Editor of the Walrus, posted a bizarre article yesterday defending the practice of using a revolving stable of unpaid interns at the magazine. The piece trumpeted the benefits of these internships and highlighted that many of the interns have gone on to careers in the magazine industry. Absent in Macfarlane's piece was any acknowledgement that the Walrus' use of unpaid interns is utterly illegal under Ontario's Employment Standards Act, 2000 as it's tantamount to wage theft and employee misclassification (it's clear that points one and three of the six-prong test aren't being met).

The Walrus uses interns in all aspects of its operations - in the art, digital publishing, marketing, and editorial departments - with the currently website advertising five separate internships. These aren't internships targeting students, no the internships explicitly target graduates who are starting their careers. These internships aren't terribly educational, rather the interns are doing work and performing functions critical to ongoing operations of the magazine. Simply put, without interns the Walrus wouldn't be able to function or would face severe operational restrictions. One interesting point is that originally the Walrus had a paid internship program, but decided to stop paying their interns around 2007 for unknown reasons.

What the Walrus has done is structure its workforce into two-tiers: a permanent core of handsomely paid full-time staff working alongside a temporary, precariously employed group of misclassified employees (i.e. the interns) who are illegally denied the minimum wage. This is a fabulous way to save money, but a rather insidious practice that denies people from historically marginalized groups (who often cannot work for free) the ability to obtain valuable experience, connections, and training.

One of my enduring concerns about the rise of intern culture is the danger posed via stealth cultural apartheid. Look like us, talk like us, and be from money - that's the subtext underpinning unpaid internship in the Canadian magazine industry. This reality cloaks the White privilege, the class inequities, the power imbalances, and exploitation inherent within Toronto's intern culture.

What occurs is that entire segments of the youth population (the poor, racialized, Aboriginal, disabled, etc.) are shut out from being able to access entry-level positions (that what internships are) in professions that control the levers of power in Canada. Be it law, teaching, journalism, politics, or medicine - youths from historically marginalized groups face new structural barriers arising from intern culture from fully participating in economic, social, and political life of Canada. Call it racism, class inequality, or a new glass ceiling - what's on display at the Walrus keeps the great unwashed of the North on the outside looking in - the development of intern culture into a structural part of the youth labour market should concern us all.

For more critical commentary on unpaid internships in the media take a look at these articles: here, here, here, and here. Finally, take a peek at this amazing documentary addressing the implications of the rise of intern culture in Ontario, see: