This blog post is a bit wonky, yet extremely practical. I'm discussing the lack of official statistics related to unpaid internships and highlighting the Canadian Internship Survey (which you should fill out right now and send it to your friends).
Why is the Lack of Official Statistics a Problem?
One of the issues underpinning the raft of problems associated with unpaid internships in Canada is the lack of official data. Statistics Canada simply doesn't engage in tracking the amount or forms of unpaid labour that youths engage in as part of the school-to-labour market transition. We simply don't know how many unpaid internships are being deployed within Canada's labour markets, nor do we know who is taking them, which industries are using them, or any of the personal characteristics of the interns themselves. This is a major problem given that solid public policy is rooted in having an understanding of the dimensions of an issue and presents a barrier to formulating appropriate regulatory responses.
For more on the necessity of data collection, read this piece by UWO professor Mike Moffat or listen to his interview on Cross Country Checkup. There is one Statistics Canada report that might capture part of intern culture in Canada, but the results are inconclusive and the underlying questionnaire didn't specifically ask about unpaid internships. This issue has also entered the political realm as MP Scott Brison recently called upon Statistics Canada to begin tracking the prevalence of unpaid internships in Canada's labour markets.
Some Notes on the Number of Unpaid Internships in Canada
Previously I've estimated that the number of illegal unpaid internships, those violating employment standards laws, occurring in Canada every year hovers between 100,000 to 300,000. This figure is separate from the unpaid internships that students undertake as part of post-secondary education programs, which are often, but not always, legal under employment standards laws. The number of unpaid academic internships that post-secondary students undertake each year in Canada easily surpasses 200,000 and probably runs far higher given the deployment of work-integrated learning within university and college programs. In combining the two figures I estimate that approximately 500,000 unpaid internships are occurring annually in Canada, but in reality the actual number might even run higher. This 500,000 figure is a solid, defensible number which I am willing to stake my reputation as a researcher on.
Those estimates may seem high at first blush, but if anything it represent a conservative estimate of the number of unpaid internships in the labour market. A few things need to be stated. The overall number of people in the 15 to 34 age cohorts is approximately 9.5 million and the total number of post-secondary students in Canada is approximately 2 million. So if you apply my estimates on the number of unpaid internships to the actual figures it becomes apparent that only a small percentage of youths (around 5.3%) in the 15 to 34 age cohorts actually have to undertake unpaid internships to reach the 500,000 estimate.
The nature of unpaid internships needs to be analyzed as well and one cannot conceptualize internships as a regular job. At the core, unpaid internships are a form of precarious employment. These positions are often short-term (i.e. one to six months), temporary, can be part-time, and typically offer no pay or benefits. Young workers undertaking unpaid internships generally simultaneously participate in post-secondary or have paid employment (some holding multiple jobs). It's also important to note that young workers can be undertaking multiple unpaid internships at the same time. Given the short-term, temporary nature of unpaid internships the estimates above make a lot more sense and it doesn't take many youths doing unpaid internships to hit the 500,000 mark - all it takes is 5.3% of the total youth population in Canada (people between 15-34) doing an unpaid internship at some point during the year either as part of a post-secondary program or on their own accord.
There's is a bit of data on unpaid internships already. Alex Usher, the President of Higher Education Strategy Associates, penned a blog post earlier this summer about HESA's annual employment report. His data suggested that 5.4% of current university students did an internship in the summer of 2013. Approximately half of students were doing an internship academic internship (i.e. classroom teaching or social work practicums), while the other half were doing the unpaid internships which works out to be approximately 27,000 students. Now this data only tracks current university students, so there's no data for other types of students (i.e. high-school, college, or career college) or for recent graduates.
What Kind of Data Needs to be Collected?
The next area that needs to be addressed is what sort of data should Statistics Canada be tracking in relation to unpaid internships in Canada's labour markets. I've come up with a schema that would assist in categorizing the different areas of data.
The first category is personal characteristics and the data points needed are: age; gender; is the intern racialized or part of a historically-marginalized group; immigration status and whether the intern is a recent immigrant; marital/relationship status; disability status; is the intern a student; level of educational attainment; and, geographical location. The second area of data relates to socio-economic status: what is the parental income of the intern; is the intern going into debt from the internship; what is their yearly/monthly income; and, what are their sources of income. The third area of data relates to the internship itself: what's level of remuneration; is the hourly minimum wage being paid; duration of internship; how many hours per week does the internship involve; is the internship is part of an academic program; and, which industry is the internship in.
In terms of a starting point for collection, the major urban centres of Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia could be used as locations to start collecting data as these areas have the largest intern cultures in Canada. Once the data collection methods have been tested and established, tracking of unpaid internships should occur across Canada on a monthly basis so governments, post-secondary education institutions, employers, think-tanks, young workers, and the general public can have an understanding of what's occurring within the youth labour market in Canada. As a country we simply need far better statistical data that tracks what's occurring to youths within the school-to-labour market transition.
The Canadian Internship Survey
Finally, I want to alert everyone to the Canadian Internship Survey. The survey is being run by Isabelle Couture and James Attfield, two graduate students at the University of Victoria, as part of their work for their master degrees in public administration. This research fills a critical gap in our knowledge of precarious work in Canada. It will go a long way in mapping out the dimensions of intern culture in Canada and will inform a lot of public policy discussions going forward. The survey can be found here and I recommend that all former interns reading this fill it out.
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