Those who govern us teach us that an internship is “a practical training or learning experience, with an educational purpose, that is supervised and allows for the observation, acquisition, or application of skills in a work environment.” Really now! Many of us, precarious students who have experienced the exhaustion and precarity of internships, would have a lot to say about that definition.
The statement above reveals one of the essential mechanisms of the discourse of power: presenting coercion as opportunity, exploitation as a benefit, or even a favor, offered to the very people who are forced to work without recognition. We are made to believe that our internships are something other than preparation for becoming submissive, alienated, and exploited workers, a fate reserved for most of us within the framework of the economy. Because that is indeed what most internships are: forced, unpaid labor used to operate companies and institutions of capitalist society at the lowest possible cost.
This economic machinery, disguised behind the hollow pretense of “learning,” is not gratuitous cruelty but a material necessity for a society and its ruling class to reproduce itself at minimal cost. The problem is simple: how do you get the essential work of sustaining the economy done as cheaply as possible? The solution is clear: force future workers in training to perform this labor without pay, claiming that it is for their own good and for their development.
From the most insidious violence of domestic labor assigned to women in the patriarchal family to the extreme violence of forced labor in prisons, capitalist societies have always needed to maintain different forms of unpaid work and exploitation beyond formal employment in order to reproduce labor power and infrastructure at low cost, ensuring the continuation of capital accumulation and maximum profit for the owning class.
Unpaid internships are structurally gendered and represent a contemporary form of exploitation rooted in the patriarchal structure of work. Some types of labor are deemed unworthy of pay, while others are not. Internships are not just another form of training or a concrete step toward the labor market. They are real work, with schedules, workloads, and colleagues, and should be recognized and compensated as such.
The unpaid labor of interns in so-called feminine sectors, like nursing, teaching, or social work, is a major feminist issue that must be understood as such. Masked by rhetoric about love, vocation, devotion, or passion for care work, this essential labor deepens the precarity of those who perform it and maintains the functioning of the system that exploits us.
Indeed, it overwhelmingly affects women. In Quebec, in the health care and social assistance sector, 81 percent of jobs are held by women. Furthermore, within the internship environments themselves, numerous issues and examples of exploitation and sexist violence have emerged and been denounced, notably during a strike in the fall of 2022. Interns and students from ADEESE, the Association of Students in the Faculty of Education at UQAM, AGECAR, the General Student Association of the Rimouski campus of UQAR led a strike of several months to denounce exploitation, sexism, and harassment in internships while demanding fair working conditions and compensation. The mobilization highlighted the often invisible sexist violence in internships, linked to the lack of clear policies and adequate protections.
Capitalism relies on this unpaid and reproductive labor to exist, a labor that encompasses but far exceeds internships. The unpaid labor performed by women is the paradigm that helps us understand other forms of exploitation serving capitalism, such as volunteer work or unpaid internships. The patriarchal logic of work denial has shifted, focusing less on the home and more on public institutions, including hospitals, schools, and community organizations. By framing care as a naturally feminine disposition, we legitimize the exploitation of a massive, invisible, yet vital labor force. The government, by refusing to recognize internships predominantly performed by women in the public sector, perpetuates this gendered injustice.
From this perspective, paying interns is far more than an economic whim. It is a political demand. It is a refusal to continue supporting a model that exploits the time, energy, and knowledge of those in training. Recognizing internships as work and compensating them is necessary, but not sufficient. Universities are built on unpaid labor, which manifests most clearly in the alienation and exploitation of unpaid interns. Without this unpaid work, many university structures would collapse or at least weaken. Student labor, including research, theses, projects, and analyses, is not just a learning exercise; it is real knowledge production. Whether theses, dissertations, or published work, these contributions are made freely accessible online, advancing knowledge and boosting the prestige of academic institutions, which thus profit from the unpaid labor of their students. The time, energy, and knowledge interns and students contribute to these institutions should no longer be seen as personal investment; they should be recognized for what they are: a tool that allows capitalism to reproduce itself.
It is crucial to denounce the alienation and exploitation faced by students forced into internships, first and foremost because doing so can foster combative organization and the emergence of a subversive student political force. We are aware of the constant institutional obstacles that the educational and state apparatus imposes on achieving real gains for interns. The concessions possible under late-stage capitalism are extremely limited, and its managers know this well. The recent rejection of interns’ unionization by the Administrative Labor Tribunal in early October illustrates this clearly. We start from our condition of precarity and everything that produces it to organize practices of solidarity, community, and struggle in favor of concrete measures. We stand firmly in solidarity with interns, advocating for fair compensation and dignified internship conditions.
However, we aim to anchor ourselves in a much broader struggle and horizon. We want to contribute to a wider process of building a subversive student political force capable of confronting the multiple crises and forms of domination inherent in today’s capitalist reality. We seek to affirm an openly intersectional, revolutionary, and combative feminism that tackles oppression within the university and beyond.
Only when we realize that scams like unpaid internships are merely symptoms of a system that fundamentally relies on exploitation and destruction can we gain the revolutionary consciousness necessary to organize collectively as a political force that does not limit itself to passive dialogue with authorities for minor material gains. Against the crises and domination that poison our lives and destroy the world, student environments have been and can again be a fertile ground for building opposition to capitalist power and preparing the conditions for a radically emancipatory transformation of society. It is up to us to organize.
If you want to start organizing and acting to build this force within student spaces, get involved with CASSE. We are a group of student activists fighting against precarity, alienation, and student debt from a radical, anti-capitalist, and emancipatory perspective. You can follow us on Instagram or contact us by email to learn more and find out how to get involved.