Will Work for Crack: Rob Ford's Illegal Unpaid Internship Scam

Rob Ford holds a very dear place in my heart. Back in 2010 the first press that this blog got was for covering the comments of Nick Kouvalis, Rob Ford's then Campaign Manager, who boasted about underpaying staffers when he said: "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 clear admission that the Rob Ford campaign was breaking the minimum wage rules under Ontario's Employment Standards Act, 2000 ("ESA").

Fast forward to 2014 and Ford is back at it with more wage theft, employee misclassification, and flaunting his ability to violate the ESA. Jeff Corbett, the Rob Ford campaign's Intern Coordinator, confirmed to me this afternoon on a telephone call that the Rob Ford campaign is actively recruiting unpaid interns. Currently there are advertisements on Kijiji and Craigslist recruiting unpaid interns (I've included a screenshot below).

The advertisements state that the Rob 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 people normally get paid for and it's clear that these internships would be in clear violation of the ESA.

Last week Doug Ford said "There's no one that even stands close to Rob Ford when it comes to supporting youth." That's simply not true - from sexually harassing a former staffer to charging user fees to impoverished children for recreation programs to ignoring young unemployment in Toronto to forced labour to making his players roll around in goose shit - what we have currently is a mayor with policies that are explicitly anti-youth and who literally abuses young staffers. Why would a multi-millionaire demand that young people work for him for free? It's a greedy demand and one that highlights the core hypocrisy of an extremely wealthy individual running on a populist agenda.