Work Won't Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe

Author:Sarah Jaffe [JAFFE, SARAH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

SWATHED IN COATS, SCARVES, HATS, AND HOODS AGAINST THE QUEBEC cold in the winter of 2019, tens of thousands of interns took to the streets bearing signs in French and English, decrying unpaid internships. “It’s not complicated, all labour deserves a fair wage,” “L’exploitation n’est pas une vocation” (Exploitation is not a vocation), and “Ne soyons pas invisibles, femmes devant!” (No longer invisible, women rise!) were just a few of the signs they bore. One demonstration, titled “J-F better have my money,” for Jean-François Roberge, the minister of education and higher education in Quebec, saw the interns surging down the streets of Montreal; in the smaller city of Gatineau, they marched behind a sign that read, “Pas de salaire, pas de stagiaire” (No salary, no interns). Interns struck as well in Rimouski, Sherbrooke, Saint-Jérôme, and Quebec City.

Camille Marcoux and Chloe Cabral were among the crowds in Montreal, on strike against the internships that were required for their degrees. Their demands were simple: they wanted a wage, and they wanted to be recognized under labor law like any other worker.

The strikes were organized by the Comités unitaires sur le travail étudiant (Student Work Unitary Committees), known by their acronym CUTEs. A network of autonomous student organizations, they aimed to counteract some of the top-down structures of the 2012 student strikes, and therefore applied an explicitly feminist lens to their organizing as well as to their analysis of internships. Inspired by the Wages for Housework movement, they began organizing in 2016 around the idea that school work, too, was a form of reproductive labor. Unpaid internships, then, were a natural target, particularly since they were most common in fields where women predominated. The CUTEs were given a boost by the victory of psychology interns in Quebec in 2016, who won a financial compensation package for their doctorate-level internships, though it came in a lump sum rather than a wage.38

The interns struck first in November 2017; thousands more struck in February 2018, and again for International Women’s Day, as Women’s Strikers organized around the world. Fifty-five thousand interns went on strike in the fall of 2018, and in the spring of 2019, more than thirty-five thousand. The interns in one action gathered to read aloud the letters or emails they’d received from supervisors encouraging them to cross the picket line and report for their unpaid jobs, dramatizing the expectations they faced on the job. And in 2019, they added a new tactic: staging roving picket lines at internship locations, creating an “internship tour” to make sure the companies knew of the interns’ demands. Previously, student strikes had mostly been located at the universities and CEGEPs, where strikers would go from class to class calling their colleagues out to join the action. But the picket lines were “a good way for us to engage with the colleagues in front of the schools,” Marcoux explained, “so the intern didn’t have all the responsibility to explain to all of the colleagues in the school why she was on strike and what the impacts were.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.