Doug Ford's Illegal Unpaid Internship Scam

Respect for the little guy seems to be pure lip service in the bizarro world of Ford Nation (spot the face tattoo). Last month I reported how Rob Ford's now-defunct mayoral campaign was running illegal unpaid internship scams, now I can report that Doug Ford's mayoral campaign is recruiting unpaid interns into positions which contravene Ontario's Employment Standards Act, 2000 ("ESA").

The Ford's aren't strangers to wage theft or exploiting young workers, oh no. In the aftermath of the 2010 municipal election Nick Kouvalis, Rob Ford's then campaign manager, bragged in speech that "I wanted young kids because I could pay them nothing and they would do what I told them to. I paid them $500 a week and I wanted 60 or 70 hours a week out of them." That statement was a prima facie admission that they were violating the law around minimum wage and overtime pay. 

The advertisement states that the Doug Ford campaign wants interns to "work a minimum of 15-20 hours per week" and undertake tasks like "answering emails, inputting campaign data, doing research, assembling and bundling campaign materials, working with volunteers, attending events". These duties are what workers normally get paid for and it's clear that not paying these interns would be a violation of the ESA.

In the last four years both Doug and Rob Ford have done next to nothing to address the skyrocketing youth unemployment rate in Toronto or the chronic underemployment which is now a structural feature of Toronto's youth labour market. Now Doug Ford, who is an absurdly wealthy individual, is caught redhanded here demanding young people to work for free. It's just another greedy demand that highlights the core hypocrisy of claiming to be the underdog while exploiting the very people he claims to represent.

The advertisement appears in a password protected section of York University's Career Centre website, so I can't link to it directly. I have provided a screenshot of the advertisement below. For more of my articles on politicians exploiting unpaid interns, see: here; here; here; and, here.