Stop making students pay to work
Unpaid internships shut out low-income students and reinforce inequality
The first real test of a student’s career shouldn’t come without pay.
Students go to university to learn, gain experience and prepare for a career. But unpaid internships force many students to choose between “experience” and basic survival—between building a résumé and paying rent.
And in 2025, with Montreal’s cost of living spiralling, that tradeoff has become impossible to justify.
Rents keep climbing. By spring 2025, average rent in Greater Montreal hit $1,991 a month, up 3.9 per cent from the year before.
And while students are being told to work for free “for their future,” inflation continues to chip away at their present.
According to Statistics Canada, in November 2025, Canadians were paying 2.2 per cent more than the year before for everyday goods and services including essentials like food and transportation.
Yet internship expectations haven’t evolved, with 80 per cent of internships in Quebec being unpaid.
Worse still, many internships count as course credits, meaning students not only work for free, but pay tuition fees to do it.
And despite this, interns are still expected to work in placements that often look indistinguishable from paid labour: managing accounts, doing administrative work, supporting client-facing operations—the kind of work that keeps organizations up and running.
This isn’t just “learning.” It’s labour.
And when that labour goes unpaid, it creates a system where only certain students can afford to participate.
Another gap is especially clear in arts, media and social services, where students are often required to complete unpaid internships to gain “real-world experience,” leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and low wages once they enter the workforce.
Meanwhile, STEM interns, from generally male-dominated fields like engineering and statistics, earn significantly more than their counterparts. This is mainly because they are in markets with high demand and profits where even junior work is quickly monetizable, while arts, journalism and non-traditional fields often operate on thinner margins, heavy competition and weaker labour enforcement, which depresses or eliminates pay.
Yet, the work of artists, journalists and social service professionals is equally essential. They connect communities, inform the public and maintain social cohesion. Their labour deserves fair compensation just as much as those in STEM fields.
Unpaid internships are not a tradition worth preserving. They are an inequality machine. They reward students with money, time and social capital and punish everyone else for not being born with it.
In 2025, working for free is no longer sustainable. Students deserve pay that reflects the value they produce, no matter their gender, origin or income background.
If an organization needs interns to function, then it can afford to pay them.
If it can’t pay them, then it doesn’t deserve their labour.
