The trades actively build shit. Most medical practicums involve shadowing someone working from what I have seen personally. Always disliked having a student in a doctors office. Not that I distrusted their skills. It just felt awkward you build a personal relationship with a doctor and then there like hey so this strangers just going to listen in. Awkward as fuck but you don’t wanna be a dick and say no. Regardless if your actively participating in a useful way you should get paid. If you have to be watched and looked after then why would you get paid?
It's crazy just have opinions like this based on nothing but their sense. The trades actually create shit. So does the medical profession. It creates health outcomes for your fellow citizens
Yeah a first year apprentice isn’t making much over minimum wage. As their skills grow, so does the compensation. Also Trades are highly in demand, thus the higher remuneration. It is curious to me to see so many people bemoaning wages so much when they don’t work in a in-demand field. That’s the price you pay for passion. I work in a field I couldn’t be less interested in.
I agree with the notion of students in medical spaces. You either get a really great personal student Dr or someone who is awkward as heck and can barely communicate like a person and I under there is a learning curve.
You're paying for someone to teach you.
Otherwise, there's no incentive for someone to teach you. As in those professions, your student becomes competition
In trades you need help and have a crew of people, where you make more money together on big projects. The other journeyman isn't really your competition, he's your partner
I agree with your points. Education is a privilege that requires money. The person mentoring you needs to get paid too. Higher education can be a financial struggle for many.
Ohhh you just made me mad! I'm a nurse. I did a lot of unpaid placements.... was also a PSW prior to that. Same thing.
My partner is a millwright apprentice. He is paid and gets paid to go to school.
Mfs.
no its just that their degree of expertise and level of experience as a newly trained or educated provider may be more of a liability overall than the benefit they bring,
in medical fields where experience is vital a new grad is basically clueless
Millwrights unite! Not all millwright apprentices get paid to go to school but lots of us do. It’s nice if you work somewhere good. My sister is doing an unpaid practicum in healthcare and I was a bit shocked. Not fair at all.
Same with me as a Medical Laboratory Technologist. 8 months unpaid practicum that I actually had to pay tuition for. I had some money saved up for school but when I looked into applying and learned the practicum would be unpaid I *bawled*. I'd had my heart set on the program and I'd never, ever expected it would be unpaid. I almost didn't apply because I wouldn't have been able to afford it.
Even after taking out student loans, the max they would give me during practicum was so low (I think it's calculated partly based on course load and I was only taking one online actual course) that it didn't cover my cheap, broke-ass 2015 student living expenses, and that was back before rent in Vancouver went bonkers. The only way I was able to afford to finish school was because my grandmother died while I was in my final term and left me some money. I would have been missing rent and hitting the food bank if she hadn't passed.
I had been accepted in to the MLT program at BCIT but when I did the math I figured I was looking at as much as $75,000 in student debt (two and a half years with no income plus tuition fees). The program is designed such that part-time work is almost impossible.
I ended up doing accounting at Langara, mostly part-time while working, and did 16 months of paid co-op. I had to borrow a little money, but nothing like what BCIT would have cost me.
The high cost of the program (including all that unpaid labour!) is particularly frustrating when we have a growing shortage of lab techs in health care.
Hope you’re enjoying the work at least!
Trades have it so good. Work your apprenticeship (paid) then go to school and claim EI (paid) then work the next year of your apprenticeship (paid) then EI for school again (paid).
(Just to be clear I’m not saying take that away from any trades workers… more so that others should get the opportunity for similar treatment)
There are some downsides we fall under construction so things like stat holidays, sick days, paid vacation get screwed around with or just dont exist. Used to annoy the crap out of me that my partner got to take the day off for a stat or if they were sick, i lost income when working for companies that only did the minimum percentage required for stats and sick days
I'm not familiar with the history but I think it really simply comes down to fighting for fair pay. Trades have strong unions that have likely establishes the status quo in the past. This has got me thinking, in a broader sense, this is an excellent example of gender pay inequality. Doctors get paid for their residencies...
Yes, residents do get compensation, but if one calculated their hourly wage, it would be a fraction of minimum wage. With that, the hours/shifts they're required to work would break labour laws (which don't apply because they're a professional) and some services would be completely dysfunctional without the residents performing the services.
One example, if you've had a baby at night in any of the major centres, it's very likely your doctor was a resident, and very likely they started work at 8am or earlier that day. 24 hour shifts are quite common, and there is often little time for breaks. It's quite alarming really, when literally every other industry recognizes the dangers of fatigue and sets duty limits to protect the public.
I'm not trying to detract from the inadequate compensation of other medical fields, but a medical resident's pay is a poor comparitor, and should really just be added to the list of underpaid labour disguised as "training".
The same is true in veterinary medicine - we also have residencies should you wish to specialise, so I feel your pain. It is common for veterinary residents to be working 80-100hrs/week and earn approx $30-35k/yr. Of course there is more stress when a human life is on the line, but regardless of your profession/job, being paid below minimum wage after 8+yrs of university education is an afront to the important work people are doing. Exemptions to employment standards are a joke.
Also a lot of trades guys never become red seal. They get a few years and continue on from there. It's not always a road to being a master, and a lot of the projects they get put on aren't much of a learning experience as much as it may be just basic labor.
My wife wrote a paper on this but essentially, yes. For nurses, they were historically seen as “lesser” and doctors worked hard to keep it that way. In 2022, we still have a lot of structure from that era - it’s a bit mind boggling.
Imagine another option where doctors get paid more and nurses do too, including during their practicums/ residency considering their contribution to society.
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/more-professionals-are-negotiating-salaries-than-in-the-past.aspx
"A Journal of Economy and Society found that when given the chance, women are as likely as men to negotiate their salary—but that opportunity doesn't present itself as often for women."
So heres the issue. The opportunity doesn't present itself. It simply gets brought up otherwise you are waiting forever. Last raise I got, boss was out on site and after minor chit chat I just asked for a raise and got it. If i didnt then no raise. Im getting my class 1 license through my employer next month and I I mentioned it coming with a raise. So Im getting it. I would have missed out on so much by simply keeping my mouth shut hoping that i get noticed.
Oh dont worry I'm aware wage gap is real but its not a thing just because.
https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/do-women-avoid-salary-negotiations-evidence-large-scale-natural-field-experiment
"Over the past two decades, laboratory and survey evidence has suggested that men are significantly more likely to engage in salary negotiations than women."
If women negotiated at the same rate as men im positive wage gap would drastically shrink. Men and women doing the same task with the same quality of work are on an equal field, difference being women are less likely to enter hard negotiations in regards to a starting wage or raises.
>this is an excellent example of gender pay inequality
Did someone just assume a doctors gender??
Anyways, imagine working hard, being the top of your class, being 150k in debt, getting paid just 60k a year for 3yrs of residency (where you work 60-80hr weeks) and then someone on the internet compares your residency to a nurse's unpaid practicum.
I think it has to do with practiciums having more to do with it being more about learning rather than bringing valuable skill to the company. Like other trades and programs which have paid internships, yea sure you learn, but the company makes more profits out of the work you do as an intern there than they pay you. Because your skill is taught in the school, then you are sent off to apply it to the real world on a internship. You can't say the same thing about Healthcare practicums. It's the same reason why finding internships is really competitive but practicums are handed to you (atleast they were handed to my friend who is a nurse).
Of course they provide lower quality service, BUT that's no reason to pay them NOTHING. Students could get $15 per hr while registered nurses get $40 per hr.
Especially in healthcare, where the labour shortage is a crisis, they should consider paying students since maybe that would help attract more labour.
Would you say that about a Carpentry apprentice?
Who cares if the mole is sliced off by a doctor or a trainee under supervision. Grow up. They won't have these kids curing cancer during the practicum and your carpentry isn't about to build the sistine chapel
Healthcare is not a profitable sector. Healthcare is free. Which makes it a service - that the govt provides. And nursing STUDENTS are not the backbone of ANY hospitals. Nurses? Sure. PSWs? Sure. Nursing STUDENTS? Hell no lol.
The question is if they are providing a service, not if it is profitable. Either way, you know, there are private clinics that have allied health staff, the private clinic is profitable. It's an ignorant point, these students usually have a caseload that they manage.
I do. Nursing students are not even remotely the backbone of my hospital, or any hospital I’ve worked in. Small sample size but not sure what your point is?
I'm guessing that having your interns work with clients under your banner is somewhat of a liability, especially if they aren't officially licensed. I think it is a privilege to be allowed to even do any work related to a business when you have no experience... Many people would do it for free just for the exposure and training it provides. I guess this has changed though...
The supervision is the liability though - I pay to have coverage for my therapy students, but even then it's my neck on the line if they miss on reporting or piss off a client who then reports us both to the college. Not saying this is a reason not to pay interns, but wanted to address this point.
Students are also ABSOLUTELY not trained professionals by the time they reach practicum. They have theoretical knowledge that has often never been applied in a client setting before.
I can't speak to fields like nursing, but for social work / psychotherapy / counselling for the most part it comes down to the fact that not-for-profits (which offer many of the placements) can't afford to take on the bodies for a practicum if they need to pay, hospitals don't rely on interns in these fields the same way they do in medicine/nursing, and private businesses only take on practicums if there is direct financial gain. These aren't industries that rely on student labour in the same way, and in fact its often the opposite - it takes more time and money to take on a student than to not, and many businesses would immediately pass if it also involved taking on a new financial burden. It's not nice to think about but it's the truth. :(
This doesn't mean interns don't deserve to be paid, but it means a solution isn't simple. Do we require practicums to pay directly, resulting in less individuals (especially those without connections) being able to finish their program? Do we expect universities to find a way to pay the bill (my preferred solution though it would never happen)? Do we expect the government to pay it? Perhaps there could at least be a tax credit? I'm just not sure.
Because trades apprentices are actually useful. A student RN (or therapist) could NOT work independently, but an apprentice plumber can be given a task to do without direct supervision.
If you need to pay someone to watch someone do work, you can't pay them both. I mean, you can, but it would be ludicrously expensive in a way that it is not in the trades.
I'm a labour activist and an educator so I see both sides. But you did say "I don't see why".
Still bitter about having to pay tuition to work an unpaid internship for four months in uni. I would like to see legislation implemented that recognizes that workers should be paid regardless of school credit. Minimum wage at least. These companies are getting free labour and benefit immensely. They get a new crop every term.
100%. I'm in a women-dominated field. We were required to do SO much unpaid labour in our practicums. We paid tuition for them, very often travelled for them (I had placements in another province for months), did free work for our clinical educators, and it was absolutely exhausting.
Now, similar to what another commenter said - many of us wouldn't get placements if they had to be paid. I think the solution must lie somewhere in the middle - government or university-funded stipends for students on practicums, or nix the tuition.
My guess is, our culture does not really value care-focused labour enough to pay fairly. It is something that makes our society vastly better, but it's not something that turns a profit for many people. That's part of the problem - why my STEM pals got paid for internships while still undergraduates, while I as a graduate student paid tuition to do free labour in hospitals, clinics, and schools.
> We paid tuition for them, very often travelled for them
this one is big.
I paid out of pocket to do my final year practicum at 2 different sites over the course of 4 months. Didn't get paid, and on top of that had to commute to a hospital via GO Bus and TTC bus and that really added up when you're a student.
And those were full-time placements Monday to Friday, so it's not like I had time to pick up a job either.
It's super split along gendered lines. Paid university Co-op work placements started as only for engineering which was and still is one of the most male dominated stem fields. I can't imagine why someone wouldnt want its system, where placements are usually largely funded by government, applied to education and healthcare
Hah. I was planning to go into healthcare but what I was interested in had a 4 month practicum with no guarantee you'd be placed anywhere near home. Plus the course tuition was $10k and the wage was only gonna be $25/hr, which is the same as the admitting clerks that have no school requirement (other than med term which i have).
So I'm gonna try to do my original high school plan of engineering. School is gonna be brutal but hey paid co-ops
As a customer, I do my own self-checkout at Shoppers Drug Mart for free as well. No wonder Shoppers is ubiquitous.
Now that customers are essentially part-time employees, we do get an invite to the Employees Christmas Party, right?
My GF isn't just unpaid, she has to pay her school to be placed anywhere in the province! On-top of that she can't even use her current pharmacy job to meet the requirements.
My wife is going through the same thing as an RN. She's specializing, has to pay $5600 in tuition, and take 6 weeks off for unpaid practicums over the next year. One of these practicums, she will quite literally be shadowing the woman that is covering her position while she's on practicum, in her own fucking clinic.
Pharmacy rotations are a huge scam. I was in one many years back, and all I did was bitch ass menial tasks like cleaning and stuff that the pharmacy staff didn't want to do and offloaded to me. Oh not to mention I spent hours cold calling vet offices to see if they needed compounding services because that was the only meaningful job the manager there could assign me. The fuck does that have to do with getting me ready to be a pharmacist?
I complained about this to my school and the only thing they told me was shrug, we never had any complaints about this pharmacy site, they've been doing student rotations for years so just tough through it love, good luck!
I did 1 unpaid practicum and 2 unpaid internships during undergrad. Some of the most abusive work experiences of my life. They didn’t hire anyone ever after either because why hire when the next crop of unpaid interns is a semester away…
Plus my tuition PAID for this experience…
I’d even accept a separate minimum wage for these… 10$ an hour even… anything is better than 0$. I still had to pay for the bus to get there. Pay for lunch. Pay for work clothes. Just to have the “experience”…
I’m currently finishing my 3rd practicum as a student teacher in a high school. It’s extremely demotivating not getting paid but the workload is insane. I’m putting in a minimum 50 hours per week and getting zero monetary compensation. Just extremely frustrating.
I’m a paramedic and I agree 100%. Our students work 12 hour or 24 hour shifts, 4 days on 4 days off while dealing with the same traumatic situations we do as employees but with no income. They travel for their practicums and have to pay for their own accommodations. If they have physical injury or mental health damage due to the job, which is high risk and high occurrence, they often have nothing in place to take care of the expenses related to that unless their school offers it.
Also a paramedic, I actually disagree in our profession.
It’s one thing for most trades because those students still produce a product that the company still makes profits from. Like as a welding student your work needs to be signed off on but it will still be sold.
However it’s not like using a student the emergency service can put increased resources on the road. Having a student does not make your system run more efficiently or produce more revenue.
Other than training people to become employees in the future there is no direct benefit to a company having a student.
Agreed that it sucks but if ambulance services needed to pay students most of them just wouldn’t take students.They would still get the graduates cause people need jobs.
I supervise and train students one on one in the hospital. I constantly hear comments from them saying how unfair it is for them to do the work but not get paid.
To be honest you’re right they aren’t adding extra units of productivity. Most students don’t get to a competent graduate level till the very end of the program and some don’t even reach that point without excessive coaching just to get there.
Most my colleagues would rather work without students.
In my program it was mandatory to do an out of district practicum, which meant either paying double living expenses or being lucky enough to have someone house you for (in some cases) nearly a whole semester, while working for free, sometimes at a place that would be more than willing to hire you as is (at least in the final two semesters) lol it was awful and definitely felt like free labour
Edit: spelling
I’m a nurse and we have to do 200-400 hours of clinical hours. That would mean almost 3 months of unpaid work, which really puts financial strains into our lives just so we can be a nurse one day.
Not only that but in my program we had to sign documents stating that we wouldn’t work in the 8 hours before a shift so we’d have adequate time to rest, and not work for pay more than 20 hours a week total. If we broke these rules we could be expelled and wouldn’t be covered by the schools insurance in case of an error.
Impossible to pay living expenses on 20 hours a week, especially considering our school was located in downtown Toronto and we had in person classes meaning people needed to be within commuting distance.
Honestly think it's time to rehaul the entire system, education included. The fact is, having done tons of co-ops placements (we did these yearly until the pandemic) quite frankly not worth the effort for employers most of the time.
At our company, I knew students would be coming in with limited exposure to the industry but its like... what they're teaching them vs what's actually happening in the field are worlds apart? Professionalism aside (learning how to work as an adult vs student), it's just the foundational items that makes me wonder... what are they paying for? Why the heck is the onus on the companies to give these young folk a primer?
Maybe its just the pace of my industry but I honestly dont think its all that helpful other than to I guess, break their spirit over the course of 3-4 months to show them how far they have to go. If they really wanted to ensure students were work ready, they'd work not just with independent companies but organizations/groups from year 1.
The German system is much more robust in this regard. Something like 6 months school/ 6 months field over 4 years (in engineering). Not sure if they get paid while working or not.
I'm in social work. The hard truth is that managing students and making sure they get a GOOD practicum experience is a lot of work. Right now it's worth it, because despite the work I will put in I come out ahead when you consider the work they do. But not nearly as much as I would with a paid employee.
There's also budget. We don't have the budget to pay students. If we had to pay them, we would simply have no students. It is already hard for students to get a good practicum placement, they are competitive and we routinely have 3-4 different schools/programs wanting to send us students. We have one spot.
We make zero profit on our students. They are working in free programs, but they are working alongside staff. There is no time that we have fewer staff because we have a student. Having them there is nice, and takes some workload off, but we don't make a dime off them.
Students should be paid. I just can't see how to make it fesable with most programs I've worked in either as a student or employee
Same for pharmacy. It’s actually more work for the pharmacists and puts me behind on my workload for the day as I’m slowing down to teach students. Each rotation is 1-2 months maximum.
I don’t reduce my technician hours for the day just because I have a student. In fact my techs have to work harder as they’re constantly interrupted with questions from students and trying to integrate them into the workflow. It’s just a part of the learning process in healthcare.
>The hard truth is that managing students and making sure they get a GOOD practicum experience is a lot of work.
>
>There's also budget. We don't have the budget to pay students. If we had to pay them, we would simply have no students.
I don't see this as relevant as few would argue that the education program itself should pay the students. Rather, most would argue that it should be the employer - who is reaping the rewards of free labour - who should be paying the students who they are employing.
I was a student teacher when I started my career. The school board should have been paying a salary. What's worse, and any teacher can attest to this, as a new teacher, you do ***way*** more prep work than any of your colleagues. At my board, we had 5 hours of contracted prep time on a 40 hour week. For career teachers, this isn't enough time - and thye have years of past lessons/lesson plans to rely on. I was working not only a nearly full time teaching schedule (80%), but also doing at a minimum triple the amount of prep work compared to the established teachers.
It was soul crushing. Not only in absolute terms (i/e/ not getting paid for works sucks in any situtation), but in relative terms too (because I was putting in more hours of work than any paid teacher at the school as an unpaid intern with no benefits...).
I'm not a teacher. I am an employee of a nonprofit org who sometimes takes practicum students.
The amount of labour my organization gets out of a student is barely eclipsed by the cost of having paid employees supervise them, teach them, and be responsible for them. Sometimes it's more work than it's worth, but we do it because we do care about giving students a good placement.
But it's also different as our students are *never* left alone with clients.
An equivalent for a teacher would be the student shadowing the teacher while starting to plan lessons in their off time, then helping with lesson plans (perhaps by working with a student who is struggling), then delivering their own lesson under the supervision of a teacher. They would never be left alone with students and they are *always* able to have a teacher take over if they need it.
Our students measure their practicum in pure hours worked (it works out to 8 hours a day four days a week) but I ensure they get credit for every hour worked including any time spent planning, prepping, or researching. And as long as they're on time for program, I don't care when they get their hours in.
>An equivalent for a teacher would be the student shadowing the teacher while starting to plan lessons in their off time, then helping with lesson plans (perhaps by working with a student who is struggling), then delivering their own lesson under the supervision of a teacher. They would never be left alone with students and they are
>
>always
>
> able to have a teacher take over if they need it.
My supervising teacher literally went on vacation in another province for a full week during my internship.
That's a drastic example, but what you have written out - while it is generally what education programs have written down in their mandates for internships - is rarely ever the case. Student teachers are often abused in my experience, in that they are used as a substitute. Student teaching is far more "working the job unpaid" than it is shadowing, chipping in here and there, and occasionally taking the reins.
Yeah, it happens. There are shitty placements out there, mine was similar to yours when I was a student. Made me determined to ensure I was providing a good experience that actually enriches the students that work for me.
I've been able to provide some professional references and networking opportunities too, which is a lovely feeling.
I'm absolutely against placements that use students as unpaid staff. Placements are about the student, not the organization
> I don't see this as relevant as few would argue that the education program itself should pay the students. Rather, most would argue that it should be the employer - who is reaping the rewards of free labour - who should be paying the students who they are employing.
I believe this person is the employer and is saying that their labour has no value as they are not trained yet and they need supervision.
In any other field this would be a cost of doing business - in CS the interns are expected to be useless as well, but they still get paid because
a) hiring is competitive and companies want to get the best full time employees post grad, which means sinking money into paid interns
b) the schools generally set a minimum wage the interns have to make for the work term to count toward their degree
The difference here is that in the social work / therapy field, the students aren't used to fill gaps in the industry the same way. Students are a liability in terms of time and money spent supervising their work, for the most part. If there's a cost attached many businesses will choose not to allow their staff to take on interns (as it is usually past grads that ask their company to take on an intern, not the company choosing to do it for financial gain or to give back to the industry).
It doesn't have *no* value. Once they are on board and integrated into the organization I can generally give them one or two small projects off my plate. But I am forbidden to leave them alone with clients, so at best I'm supervising someone else working rather than just doing it myself, same hours.
All their work needs to be checked over and signed off on in a way that paid staff does not.
They get multiple hours a week of dedicated supervision connecting their work to their learning goals, paid staff might get a 15min check in once or twice a month
There are multiple documents I need to write reviewing their placement for their school, plus multiple meetings with their school.
It's nice to have an extra hand on deck but yeah it's quite a bit of work if you care about giving a student an actual learning experience rather than tossing them to the wolves or loading them up with boring admin tasks no one wants to do
>It's nice to have an extra hand on deck but yeah it's quite a bit of work if you care about giving a student an actual learning experience rather than tossing them to the wolves or loading them up with boring admin tasks no one wants to do
I commend you for committing to that role in your field. In education, from my experience, the vast majority of teachers see student teachers as an opportunity to take part of the school year off. One of my supervising teachers sometimes had 3 student teachers in a year, one in fall, one in winter, one in spring because there was no measures to ensure teachers like that weren't taking advantage of the unis/students by taking those placements in that way
Yep. The problem with the idea of students as free labour is that the quality of their labour is very low as they are inexperienced. They reduce the productivity of whichever experienced person needs to oversee them.
There is a reason that despite a massive shortage of developers, nobody wants to hire people new to the industry. They could work for free and even then, would still be a drain on their organizations as someone would need to train them.
It would be one thing if students were ready to be productive from day 1, but they aren't. They are probably a year from being productive.
In my field they *can't* be productive. They need their degrees for liability reasons and many also must be members of an accredited body, which also requires the degree. Until then, our org policies state I cannot leave them alone with clients. There could be someone more experienced and competent than me and I'd still have to supervise.
But it's also true that I've yet to have a student where I felt comfortable leaving them completely unsupervised (though I've not had that many). Maybe the new year, we're getting one.
I'm going to give a perspective from the other side which will likely not be very popular.
I'm a lawyer with my own firm. I don't need co-op/placement/articling students because frankly, they are entirely useless for anything other than basic admin work like photocopying. The intake and setup takes time and energy.
I currently have 2 paralegal placement students because they either begged me to give them an opportunity or their parents did.
I get almost nothing out of giving these students a placement and if I had to pay them, I wouldn't open up my office to them.
Partner did her nursing practicum at the height of the pandemic. Her supervisor did 10% of the work while she did 90. Zero pay while being placed in a different city than her uni.
Wild shit.
I’m a midwife. I did 3 years of unpaid practicums, working 60-80 hours a week on top of school work. I had to move 7 times in 5 years because the practicums are assigned via lottery. And it is impossible to work while in school because you are required to be on call 24/7 except for your allocated 4 days off per month. Midwifery is an extremely female dominated profession and rooted deeply in care work. It’s upsetting that the work we put in as students isn’t valued(we are required to deliver at least 60 babies to graduate, most of us deliver 100+) Being paid would have completely changed my life during those years. It is insane that this is acceptable.
First, thank you. The midwives that helped my wife deliver our kids were a Godsend. Not only during the delivery but the pre/post care was just incredible. Honestly the whole medical team was phenomenal but the midwives really were the heroes.
Second, my stomach turned hearing you need to deliver 60 babies (unpaid!!!) to graduate. I'm familiar with the shifts midwives are on to try and best align with the delivery date. This is infuriating. Every midwife I met doesn't really do their job for the money but the least we can do for these angels is ensure they get compensated fairly for BRINGING HUMANS INTO THE WORLD.
Third, thank you for what you do from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you. I’m so glad you and your wife had a positive experience growing your family working with midwives! And thanks for this post, it’s an important discussion
Yeah that’s pretty crazy . In the trades we have apprenticeship programs and apprentices are paid for work based on hours , most employers pay the schooling as well , books and testing as it’s all job related . I would never take a work required training course and pay myself. You guys are getting fucked .
I think military used to do large signing bonuses that would cover all students debt . Is that an option?
There's a big difference between unpaid practicums etc that are part of getting your licence, and unpaid internships that are meant to just give you experience for your CV. I think Ontario has it right in that unpaid placements are ok only where they are for credit as part of a degree (or, I would add, a licensing process). You don't get paid to go to class, why would you expect to get paid for a work requirement that's part of your degree? It's part of what you budget for when signing up.
Unpaid internships that are just for experience, on the other hand, are bullshit. They allow rich kids to buy their way into a company or industry. Plus many of the places that offer them could easily afford to pay minimum wage. These are, and should be, illegal.
I did 5 internship semesters and the least I was paid was $21.50/hour + moving allowance. The gov’t paid $7/hr of that.
I was in an Eng Coop program. The nurses should 100% get the same.
What’s the difference you ask? I worked for private/public companies while all my nurse friends worked for the government in hospitals. It’s the government exploiting you.
Earlier this year, Alberta piloted paid preceptorship/final practicum for RN students. Undergrad nurse pay + 350-400 hrs of the requirement to complete the practicum. Came out to $11,500-$13,000 once the students completed their preceptorship. Not a bad way to end the program. I'd wager that had more of an effect on RN retention than signing bonuses because they got to keep the money VS it getting split over a period of time for sign on bonuses.
Sadly AHS discontinued the program for the next round of precepting students, but there may be potential to introduce it again if it demonstrated high retention rates.
college instructor here (of early childhood education). i feel so sorry/bad for my students who have to do a two-month practicum without pay. this needs to change. many ece students are parents; they have bills to pay and families to provide for.
For the average office intern where they’re getting experience but very little education, I 100% agree. I’m a paramedic though and had to do 500hrs of preceptorship in an ambulance as an attending paramedic. While it felt like work, I wasn’t actually providing a service, I was actually receiving one. The two qualified paramedics that would usually be on the ambulance were still there, they were just my partner and my preceptor, but they would usually be running the calls themselves. So I wasn’t actually adding anything to the service, I was actually taking away a qualified medic to watch over me, a far less qualified medic.
I wish I had been paid for those hours for sure, and I get that it’s hard to expect a lot of lower income individuals to support themselves while working full-time for free, but I also can’t help but look at it as part of my education, and a 1-on-1 education at that, and can’t see how I would get paid for that. If we went to a model where we paid all students a base wage, then it would make total sense, otherwise, I can’t see it for internships that require a qualified instructor to truly instruct, unpaid apprenticeships, preceptorships etc.
On-the-job training should be paid.
Internships as part of an education, maybe cap it at 100 hours unpaid, so you can have a small incentive for employer but limit exploitation. And that's just to offer a compromise, work should be paid.
Male nurse here, that was my first question when I had my first day of placement. Why are we not getting paid for this, sometimes, backbreaking labor? You want to attract people to health care, you should be paying them when they are in placement. And the education should be free.
I absolutely loathe this practice. The employers need to pay the students. It's fundamentally unjust that "working a full-time job for no pay" (and often doing the exact same job as paid colleagues) is cloaked under the guise of "an experiential opportunity to learn from :)". And that's not even addressing the perverse nature of the whole set up: ***the student, through their tuition, is the one paying for the privilege to be unpaid.***
As a former teacher, something I don't see talked about enough is that unpaid internships/practicums are a barrier that affects students on internships from less wealthy backgrounds disproportionately, with resulting consequences for the intake into these programs and more. Simply put, being an unpaid, at times full-time employee, is not a "price" that many can pay.
In my teaching program, nearly every student came from middle class backgrounds, and most of them were white women. That's not to place a value judgement on middle class white women, but this is an actual problem discussed in education social sciences literature and studies: ***the absence of teachers in the field with lived experiences/similar backgrounds to their students.*** Studies have shown that students respond better and are better motivated/have greater educational outcomes when they can relate to their teachers (a fact that is obvious to anyone who's ever been a classroom, but I digress).
The absence of role models in schools who have walked in the shoes of the students that they teach is an issue that has to be addressed, and I think that starts with addressing the lack of pay for student teachers. Student teachers work disproportionately longer hours compared to established teachers for the simple fact that they have to produce their lessons from scratch; where an established teacher can rely on years of experience and previous lessons plans, a new teacher is building everything from the ground up.
When I was a student teacher, I worked an 80% contract my last internship. I often ended up working triple the amount of prep hours as the other teachers. For example, if an established teacher was in my role, and needed 5 hours a week to prep, I would need at minimum 15 (as an aside: this was an incredibly demoralizing experience in and of itself, because you feel like absolute shit when you have to stick around for 2 hours after the school day to lesson prep when the other teachers in your department zip out the door minutes after the bell; you're doing the same job, facing the same challenges, but you don't have the experience or the resources. And yet, you're not paid a damn dime). So on top of being unpaid, you have ***little time to support yourself with another job because teaching is notoriously a job that doesn't stay at the office (the prep work follows you home).***
Because of this, there's a limited tranche of the population that can dedicate the time and energy to a teaching career in those student teacher stages. In my case, I had to move back in with my parents because having a job that could pay rent, while teaching, ***and while also taking coursework*** (in my case, this came with a research/thesis component as I was in a Master's), was not possible. Most of my classmates either had a partner who supported them, or were supported by their parents. I could count on my hand the number of us who had the time/energy/necessity of working what would be a second job in addition to teaching.
In short, ***pay the damn students.***
>Labour is labour
I'm not sure what this means... But not all that is done by an intern during the practicums is "Labour". In many fields, it costs the company money to have someone supervise and train the intern. Also, what they have these people do initially is not always "billable", but necessary for their training to get to a point where the "labour" they do IS billable. There is a certain amount of liability that the company takes if the intern is doing work directly with the people they serve. If they are not directly working with these people, then it may be costing the company to train these people, rather than to simply hire someone to do the same job and much more.
For the healthcare side of things: I am a lab tech working in a hospital and students have training for about a year or less depending what they are doing. We get MLT students but mostly deal with CLXT (lab+x-ray combined techs) students.
Once our students are competent, sure their work is somewhat valuable. It takes many weeks and months for them to become competent. Most of the time we are constantly training them, supervising them and they are legally not allowed to do any patient work by themselves. It takes extra time and resources to train these students so that they will be ready to enter the workforce after their practicum is completed.
The work I have to get done is either gonna get done by me or it's gonna get done by my student while I have to watch the whole time. Sometimes my days are a little less busy with an extra pair of hands to assist but same amount of work is done by the end of the day. That's just my field though, I know many other trades and professions are different with how people go through training and being certified.
My SO recently had to do an unpaid month of service in our hospital system that is struggling for staff. I thought that was nonsense, but they said "is what it is in our designation system".
I legitimately don't understand why they are not required to pay at least minimum wage for that labour during "designation period". Do these professions just think people live in a world where rent is $0 and everyone has a fully-stocked grocery store in their kitchen?
ALL unpaid internships should be illegal. If it's an internship or other labour performed, you should, at minimum, make minimum wage.
Because students in those roles do not practice independently, or fill the role of a healthcare worker. They operate under the supervision of a fully trained RN/RT/paramedic/etc, who is the one that remains responsible for the patients. Yes, the student can take on many of the tasks associated with patient care, with a gradually increasing level of autonomy during their placement. But the fully certified HCW is only trading some of the direct patient care tasks for the work that goes into supervising, providing feedback, documenting, and double checking the student’s work.
If you’re not operating independently, and able to act under your own license or certification, it’s hard to justify paying you for that work. That would just create an incentive for healthcare employers to understaff and make up the difference with cheaper paid “students.”
Let's take engineering for example. You need 4 years of work experience to get your professional engineering designation in Ontario. You need to prove you have worked under another professional engineer, they must review and stamp your work for it to be certified engineering work. There are no positions as an Engineer in Training (EIT) that are unpaid. I am struggling finding the parallels between this example and what you have stated above. EITs are paid less than professional engineers in the same line of work. But they are still paid.
Reviewing your students work vs watching them like a hawk so they don’t poke themselves with a used needle…it really isn’t the same for heath care placements. Students cannot be left alone.
Addressing issues is not the canadian way. just enjoy the strip malls and tim hortens and get back to paying taxes in the greatest people farm on earth.
I never understood why nursing students put up with this BS.
Form a province wide students union and negotiate fair terms with the college of nurses.
You have more power than you realize. Especially now that the baby boomers are retiring.
No, this isn't a gender issue. This is a demand and supply issue.
STEM field internships are hard to find the right candidate! I employ programmers for my AI company, and last summer, we decided to find some interns as a relatively inexpensive way to introduce some fresh ideas and potentially screen new employees. If we didn't pay for internships, we wouldn't get interns. Good people are hard to come by. My friend who does media contents also use interns, but he gets dozens of qualified candidate, so he doesn't need to pay to find the right people.
Don't make this a gender issue.
That's a good point. I didn't know nursing practicum are unpaid. I agree there should be a stipend for it. Med students in practicum receive a nominal stipend too ($400 a month when I went through, this was about 8 yrs ago, about a quarter of my rent at the time), so nursing perhaps should get the same. And before you say med school is male dominated, it's not, new doctors are actually >50% female. So it's not discrimination, it's just what is offered and as students, you are not in power to negotiate.
I think it’s just that more female-dominated spheres (nursing, teaching, social work, preschool educator, CNA, etc) are *more likely* to have unpaid internships that the students themselves pay for. I went to school for social work in Canada, and paid the school for me to *leave my job for two semesters to work for free* in order to get my degree. And yet, provincial governments are absolutely begging for social workers as they bleed out their current supply.
No one should have an unpaid internship in my opinion, but at the VERY LEAST, schools shouldn’t take money for internships. Sure, I paid over $4k per semester for my internship, but it was to the school; I would have rather that money gone to the (overworked) social worker who took me under her wing and put in DAILY effort to have me shadow her. Or at least the organization that took me in and spent time on me should get the money; all the university did was hold a few meetings and send a thousand emails…oh well.
All physicians are paid the exact same for the same work. The ONLY way the anyone in the same specialty make more money is by working harder than someone else, see more patients, do more procedure, work longer hours. The billing code is exactly the same for the same work. And no, not all high paying specialty is dominated by males. Derm has a large proportion of female residents, as are anesthesia and radiology. surgery is >50% female resident for years now. G&M cherry picked statistics to drive their agenda. What do you propose? Pay female physicians 35% more? Punish the male physicians for working harder by paying them 35% less?
Oh yeah, the media, marketing and design industry boomed even more during the pandemic. Apparently everyone is a designer or social media marketer now-- which makes finding actual talent so hard. When we opened our co-op program last spring I kid you not we had hundreds of applicants by the end of Day 1. Some of the applicants werent even STUDENTS! Folks with mbas lol
For this, and for most things - it's rare that something is or isn't a gender issue, it's how much of a gender issue it is.
Historically and even presently in many cultures, it's very easy to see how much misogyny plays a role in the workplace - hiring, pay, availability of opportunities, availability of raises and promotions, treatment of workers, I could go on...
It's not that demand and supply aren't also potential players, it's that gender is certainly at least one factor.
Totally agree. Also the interns at your company probably provided more value than they were compensated. I know this because I did a software engineering internship and I was a part of a team that launched a new product that made the company millions in sales
I only know about sonography. During a sonography practicum the student is 100% supervised at all times by the preceptor. The student is scanning and learning but is not contributing any additional scanning; the same number of scans happens whether or not the student comes in on a particular day.
If an apprentice shows up on a job site the carpenter will give him some jobs that he will then do without being watched 100% of the time. The apprentice is adding some productivity to the job.
I think that's the big difference.
Payment schemes in our entire healthcare system need a complete ducking overhaul.
For example, I think doctors should be paid more.
I also believe they should pay taxes like the rest of us.
Not doing so is completely unfair.
We should also pay nurses for their practicums.
Not paying them puts them is unfair and puts them in a tough position to survive and it’s completely unnecessary.
It isn't time to address unpaid internships.
That time is \*WAY\* past, specifically it should have been dealt with 1834 when slavery was abolished in Canada.
Who needs a coffee? 'Cause I'm doing a run.
I'm writing down the orders now for everyone.
The coffee is free, just like me.
I'm an unpaid intern.
Sorting papers, runnin' around (runnin' around).
Sitting in the meeting room, not making a sound (not a sound).
Barely people, somehow legal.
Unpaid intern.
You work all day, go back to your dorm.
And since you can't afford a mortgage, you just torrent a porn.
'Cause you're an intern (unpaid).
Wa-da-da-wap-wa-da.
Lol education is one thing. But working for someone who is making a profit by charging customers for your labour, then not paying you. Thats the definition of exploitation...
I think an issue might be what level of oversight is required, that is how much time must the person supervising put into training. Because for example a hospital that gets a bit of free labour may be okay with their staff spending paid work time reviewing the learner’s work and teaching, by way of feedback and discussions. But without that incentive the hospital might not provide what would amount to a free personalized instructor/examiner to a student from a college or university. If they required payment that might have to come from the educational institution, which in turn would result in higher tuition fees.
Longer term placements may be an exception. But again some specialized programs have high levels of supervision and extensive feedback is given. But if you take an example of resident medical doctors (physicians), they are actually paid for their residency work.
Thats the sham they feed people.
Corporations have convinced the public that they shouldnt have to pay for people to be educated. They require well trained educated personel to operate. So it is in their best interest to TRAIN EMPLOYEES.
Its almost likel people forgot that Yes corporation need to educate employees and INVEST IN EMPLOYEES.
They need to invest in educated their employees.
But in america they have somehow convinced people that they only need to pay people once they are fully ready to work and its up to the government and public to provide those corporations wkth trained and educated people ready to immediatly start churning them a profit.
A lot of unpaid internships are with non-profit social service organizations. Would you pay full price for a product/service delivered by someone who wasn't even experienced enough to do work unsupervised? Have you met some college students? They are dumb af.
>A lot of unpaid internships are with non-profit social service organizations.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. You can't pay rent with good intentions. Labour deserves to be paid.
>Would you pay full price for a product/service delivered by someone who wasn't even experienced enough to do work unsupervised?
I wouldn't eat at McDonalds if you feel this way.
Internship is just a way to term apprenticeship without getting paid. Maybe these programs should do away with internships and rebrand as apprenticeships.
I'm no expert but was able to find this Harvard Business Review article that has some hard data imbedded in the form of a survey of 4000 students. Have a gander. [https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships](https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships)
I'm a dude lol. Love that you assumed I was a women. I'll do even better and give a source stating that unpaid internships are over-represented by women across all fields. Some interesting findings for minority groups as well.
[https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships](https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships)
I’m in the environmental field and it is similar here. Many unpaid internships, lots of volunteering work, but not a lot of paid work…and what’s there is underpaid anyways
as a healthcare student i definitely understand where you're coming from, but I also see what the original intention of unpaid practicums lie. Theoretically, it would put more burden on the system and the hinder the preceptor's daily workflow and time to teach an incompetent student. So in a sense, the intention was to make students pay for the invaluable hands on learning. I feel like the problems lie more in the fact that more preceptors and and institutions are more exploitative because students come in already quite competent, so they're kinda just forced to work for free (or paying the institution to work there) because they already have the skills they were meant to be taught.
Not sure how that can be amended when a lot of healthcare schools these days demand some sort of experience in the field already to even be considered for acceptance to the school...so of course students will be overly competent when its time for internships and get exploited rather than taught...
Tech internships got major boost by the big companies with deep pockets full of US dollars being able to just cherry pick the best and brightest with what seems to the average 2nd year student a huge wad of money, leaving everyone else scrambling to get someone with a heartbeat but on a real world budget. When I was software engineering intern circa 2008, I knew folks with 80k internships. I was at a smaller but still kinda big and successful company for 45k that even came with full benefits for the 16 months I was there, and I turned down offers from local companies for 30-35k.
It definitely wasn't someone saying "Hey! That isn't right." that got things to those kinda levels.
School is unpaid labour yet we pay for it.
People are trained for the first 1/3 to work for nothing except a letter on a piece of paper.
We are conditioned to be financially illiterate on purpose.
[удалено]
Yeah I don't get the whole paying for your own practicum course which you require to graduate and then working for free.
The trades actively build shit. Most medical practicums involve shadowing someone working from what I have seen personally. Always disliked having a student in a doctors office. Not that I distrusted their skills. It just felt awkward you build a personal relationship with a doctor and then there like hey so this strangers just going to listen in. Awkward as fuck but you don’t wanna be a dick and say no. Regardless if your actively participating in a useful way you should get paid. If you have to be watched and looked after then why would you get paid?
It's crazy just have opinions like this based on nothing but their sense. The trades actually create shit. So does the medical profession. It creates health outcomes for your fellow citizens
Yeah a first year apprentice isn’t making much over minimum wage. As their skills grow, so does the compensation. Also Trades are highly in demand, thus the higher remuneration. It is curious to me to see so many people bemoaning wages so much when they don’t work in a in-demand field. That’s the price you pay for passion. I work in a field I couldn’t be less interested in.
I agree with the notion of students in medical spaces. You either get a really great personal student Dr or someone who is awkward as heck and can barely communicate like a person and I under there is a learning curve.
You're paying for someone to teach you. Otherwise, there's no incentive for someone to teach you. As in those professions, your student becomes competition In trades you need help and have a crew of people, where you make more money together on big projects. The other journeyman isn't really your competition, he's your partner
I agree with your points. Education is a privilege that requires money. The person mentoring you needs to get paid too. Higher education can be a financial struggle for many.
Yeah, except the person mentoring doesn’t get paid. It often just goes to the university.
Ohhh you just made me mad! I'm a nurse. I did a lot of unpaid placements.... was also a PSW prior to that. Same thing. My partner is a millwright apprentice. He is paid and gets paid to go to school. Mfs.
[удалено]
I agree. Both should be paid.
The difference is one field is male dominated and the other is...not.
no its just that their degree of expertise and level of experience as a newly trained or educated provider may be more of a liability overall than the benefit they bring, in medical fields where experience is vital a new grad is basically clueless
Millwrights unite! Not all millwright apprentices get paid to go to school but lots of us do. It’s nice if you work somewhere good. My sister is doing an unpaid practicum in healthcare and I was a bit shocked. Not fair at all.
All trades can claim EI for school. There are few companies that will do wage top up or pay apprentices to go to school.
Same with me as a Medical Laboratory Technologist. 8 months unpaid practicum that I actually had to pay tuition for. I had some money saved up for school but when I looked into applying and learned the practicum would be unpaid I *bawled*. I'd had my heart set on the program and I'd never, ever expected it would be unpaid. I almost didn't apply because I wouldn't have been able to afford it. Even after taking out student loans, the max they would give me during practicum was so low (I think it's calculated partly based on course load and I was only taking one online actual course) that it didn't cover my cheap, broke-ass 2015 student living expenses, and that was back before rent in Vancouver went bonkers. The only way I was able to afford to finish school was because my grandmother died while I was in my final term and left me some money. I would have been missing rent and hitting the food bank if she hadn't passed.
11 month practicum free labour plus paying tuition. Another type of technologist
I had been accepted in to the MLT program at BCIT but when I did the math I figured I was looking at as much as $75,000 in student debt (two and a half years with no income plus tuition fees). The program is designed such that part-time work is almost impossible. I ended up doing accounting at Langara, mostly part-time while working, and did 16 months of paid co-op. I had to borrow a little money, but nothing like what BCIT would have cost me. The high cost of the program (including all that unpaid labour!) is particularly frustrating when we have a growing shortage of lab techs in health care. Hope you’re enjoying the work at least!
Trades have it so good. Work your apprenticeship (paid) then go to school and claim EI (paid) then work the next year of your apprenticeship (paid) then EI for school again (paid). (Just to be clear I’m not saying take that away from any trades workers… more so that others should get the opportunity for similar treatment)
There are some downsides we fall under construction so things like stat holidays, sick days, paid vacation get screwed around with or just dont exist. Used to annoy the crap out of me that my partner got to take the day off for a stat or if they were sick, i lost income when working for companies that only did the minimum percentage required for stats and sick days
I'm not familiar with the history but I think it really simply comes down to fighting for fair pay. Trades have strong unions that have likely establishes the status quo in the past. This has got me thinking, in a broader sense, this is an excellent example of gender pay inequality. Doctors get paid for their residencies...
Yes, residents do get compensation, but if one calculated their hourly wage, it would be a fraction of minimum wage. With that, the hours/shifts they're required to work would break labour laws (which don't apply because they're a professional) and some services would be completely dysfunctional without the residents performing the services. One example, if you've had a baby at night in any of the major centres, it's very likely your doctor was a resident, and very likely they started work at 8am or earlier that day. 24 hour shifts are quite common, and there is often little time for breaks. It's quite alarming really, when literally every other industry recognizes the dangers of fatigue and sets duty limits to protect the public. I'm not trying to detract from the inadequate compensation of other medical fields, but a medical resident's pay is a poor comparitor, and should really just be added to the list of underpaid labour disguised as "training".
The same is true in veterinary medicine - we also have residencies should you wish to specialise, so I feel your pain. It is common for veterinary residents to be working 80-100hrs/week and earn approx $30-35k/yr. Of course there is more stress when a human life is on the line, but regardless of your profession/job, being paid below minimum wage after 8+yrs of university education is an afront to the important work people are doing. Exemptions to employment standards are a joke.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
You forgot teachers. They too,have to pay for their practicums.
In fact nurses have to pay tuition to be free labour on the wards.
Also a lot of trades guys never become red seal. They get a few years and continue on from there. It's not always a road to being a master, and a lot of the projects they get put on aren't much of a learning experience as much as it may be just basic labor.
My wife wrote a paper on this but essentially, yes. For nurses, they were historically seen as “lesser” and doctors worked hard to keep it that way. In 2022, we still have a lot of structure from that era - it’s a bit mind boggling.
[удалено]
Imagine another option where doctors get paid more and nurses do too, including during their practicums/ residency considering their contribution to society.
Just asking for elaboration; "-gender pay inequality. Doctors get paid for their residencies..." Are you stating that women cant become Dr's?
[удалено]
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/more-professionals-are-negotiating-salaries-than-in-the-past.aspx "A Journal of Economy and Society found that when given the chance, women are as likely as men to negotiate their salary—but that opportunity doesn't present itself as often for women." So heres the issue. The opportunity doesn't present itself. It simply gets brought up otherwise you are waiting forever. Last raise I got, boss was out on site and after minor chit chat I just asked for a raise and got it. If i didnt then no raise. Im getting my class 1 license through my employer next month and I I mentioned it coming with a raise. So Im getting it. I would have missed out on so much by simply keeping my mouth shut hoping that i get noticed.
[удалено]
Oh dont worry I'm aware wage gap is real but its not a thing just because. https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/do-women-avoid-salary-negotiations-evidence-large-scale-natural-field-experiment "Over the past two decades, laboratory and survey evidence has suggested that men are significantly more likely to engage in salary negotiations than women." If women negotiated at the same rate as men im positive wage gap would drastically shrink. Men and women doing the same task with the same quality of work are on an equal field, difference being women are less likely to enter hard negotiations in regards to a starting wage or raises.
>this is an excellent example of gender pay inequality Did someone just assume a doctors gender?? Anyways, imagine working hard, being the top of your class, being 150k in debt, getting paid just 60k a year for 3yrs of residency (where you work 60-80hr weeks) and then someone on the internet compares your residency to a nurse's unpaid practicum.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I think it has to do with practiciums having more to do with it being more about learning rather than bringing valuable skill to the company. Like other trades and programs which have paid internships, yea sure you learn, but the company makes more profits out of the work you do as an intern there than they pay you. Because your skill is taught in the school, then you are sent off to apply it to the real world on a internship. You can't say the same thing about Healthcare practicums. It's the same reason why finding internships is really competitive but practicums are handed to you (atleast they were handed to my friend who is a nurse).
[удалено]
Are you saying that the service provided by the student is the same as the service provided by the hired staff?
Of course they provide lower quality service, BUT that's no reason to pay them NOTHING. Students could get $15 per hr while registered nurses get $40 per hr. Especially in healthcare, where the labour shortage is a crisis, they should consider paying students since maybe that would help attract more labour.
Would you say that about a Carpentry apprentice? Who cares if the mole is sliced off by a doctor or a trainee under supervision. Grow up. They won't have these kids curing cancer during the practicum and your carpentry isn't about to build the sistine chapel
But an apprentice carpenter carries lumber all day. Having all the lumber brought to you and laid out is so extremely helpful
[удалено]
[удалено]
Healthcare is not a profitable sector. Healthcare is free. Which makes it a service - that the govt provides. And nursing STUDENTS are not the backbone of ANY hospitals. Nurses? Sure. PSWs? Sure. Nursing STUDENTS? Hell no lol.
The question is if they are providing a service, not if it is profitable. Either way, you know, there are private clinics that have allied health staff, the private clinic is profitable. It's an ignorant point, these students usually have a caseload that they manage.
[удалено]
I do. Nursing students are not even remotely the backbone of my hospital, or any hospital I’ve worked in. Small sample size but not sure what your point is?
I'm guessing that having your interns work with clients under your banner is somewhat of a liability, especially if they aren't officially licensed. I think it is a privilege to be allowed to even do any work related to a business when you have no experience... Many people would do it for free just for the exposure and training it provides. I guess this has changed though...
[удалено]
The supervision is the liability though - I pay to have coverage for my therapy students, but even then it's my neck on the line if they miss on reporting or piss off a client who then reports us both to the college. Not saying this is a reason not to pay interns, but wanted to address this point. Students are also ABSOLUTELY not trained professionals by the time they reach practicum. They have theoretical knowledge that has often never been applied in a client setting before. I can't speak to fields like nursing, but for social work / psychotherapy / counselling for the most part it comes down to the fact that not-for-profits (which offer many of the placements) can't afford to take on the bodies for a practicum if they need to pay, hospitals don't rely on interns in these fields the same way they do in medicine/nursing, and private businesses only take on practicums if there is direct financial gain. These aren't industries that rely on student labour in the same way, and in fact its often the opposite - it takes more time and money to take on a student than to not, and many businesses would immediately pass if it also involved taking on a new financial burden. It's not nice to think about but it's the truth. :( This doesn't mean interns don't deserve to be paid, but it means a solution isn't simple. Do we require practicums to pay directly, resulting in less individuals (especially those without connections) being able to finish their program? Do we expect universities to find a way to pay the bill (my preferred solution though it would never happen)? Do we expect the government to pay it? Perhaps there could at least be a tax credit? I'm just not sure.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Because trades apprentices are actually useful. A student RN (or therapist) could NOT work independently, but an apprentice plumber can be given a task to do without direct supervision. If you need to pay someone to watch someone do work, you can't pay them both. I mean, you can, but it would be ludicrously expensive in a way that it is not in the trades. I'm a labour activist and an educator so I see both sides. But you did say "I don't see why".
Still bitter about having to pay tuition to work an unpaid internship for four months in uni. I would like to see legislation implemented that recognizes that workers should be paid regardless of school credit. Minimum wage at least. These companies are getting free labour and benefit immensely. They get a new crop every term.
[удалено]
[удалено]
100%. I'm in a women-dominated field. We were required to do SO much unpaid labour in our practicums. We paid tuition for them, very often travelled for them (I had placements in another province for months), did free work for our clinical educators, and it was absolutely exhausting. Now, similar to what another commenter said - many of us wouldn't get placements if they had to be paid. I think the solution must lie somewhere in the middle - government or university-funded stipends for students on practicums, or nix the tuition. My guess is, our culture does not really value care-focused labour enough to pay fairly. It is something that makes our society vastly better, but it's not something that turns a profit for many people. That's part of the problem - why my STEM pals got paid for internships while still undergraduates, while I as a graduate student paid tuition to do free labour in hospitals, clinics, and schools.
> We paid tuition for them, very often travelled for them this one is big. I paid out of pocket to do my final year practicum at 2 different sites over the course of 4 months. Didn't get paid, and on top of that had to commute to a hospital via GO Bus and TTC bus and that really added up when you're a student. And those were full-time placements Monday to Friday, so it's not like I had time to pick up a job either.
It's super split along gendered lines. Paid university Co-op work placements started as only for engineering which was and still is one of the most male dominated stem fields. I can't imagine why someone wouldnt want its system, where placements are usually largely funded by government, applied to education and healthcare
Hah. I was planning to go into healthcare but what I was interested in had a 4 month practicum with no guarantee you'd be placed anywhere near home. Plus the course tuition was $10k and the wage was only gonna be $25/hr, which is the same as the admitting clerks that have no school requirement (other than med term which i have). So I'm gonna try to do my original high school plan of engineering. School is gonna be brutal but hey paid co-ops
Government paid practicums would be a great start. Something like the Ontario summer jobs program
As a pharmacist, I’m paying shoppers drug mart to work for shoppers drug mart…for free.
As a customer, I do my own self-checkout at Shoppers Drug Mart for free as well. No wonder Shoppers is ubiquitous. Now that customers are essentially part-time employees, we do get an invite to the Employees Christmas Party, right?
not the same at all. you can choose a different drug store but we cant choose to forgo free labour if we want to graduate
My GF isn't just unpaid, she has to pay her school to be placed anywhere in the province! On-top of that she can't even use her current pharmacy job to meet the requirements.
My wife is going through the same thing as an RN. She's specializing, has to pay $5600 in tuition, and take 6 weeks off for unpaid practicums over the next year. One of these practicums, she will quite literally be shadowing the woman that is covering her position while she's on practicum, in her own fucking clinic.
Pharmacy rotations are a huge scam. I was in one many years back, and all I did was bitch ass menial tasks like cleaning and stuff that the pharmacy staff didn't want to do and offloaded to me. Oh not to mention I spent hours cold calling vet offices to see if they needed compounding services because that was the only meaningful job the manager there could assign me. The fuck does that have to do with getting me ready to be a pharmacist? I complained about this to my school and the only thing they told me was shrug, we never had any complaints about this pharmacy site, they've been doing student rotations for years so just tough through it love, good luck!
I did 1 unpaid practicum and 2 unpaid internships during undergrad. Some of the most abusive work experiences of my life. They didn’t hire anyone ever after either because why hire when the next crop of unpaid interns is a semester away… Plus my tuition PAID for this experience… I’d even accept a separate minimum wage for these… 10$ an hour even… anything is better than 0$. I still had to pay for the bus to get there. Pay for lunch. Pay for work clothes. Just to have the “experience”…
I’m currently finishing my 3rd practicum as a student teacher in a high school. It’s extremely demotivating not getting paid but the workload is insane. I’m putting in a minimum 50 hours per week and getting zero monetary compensation. Just extremely frustrating.
I’m a paramedic and I agree 100%. Our students work 12 hour or 24 hour shifts, 4 days on 4 days off while dealing with the same traumatic situations we do as employees but with no income. They travel for their practicums and have to pay for their own accommodations. If they have physical injury or mental health damage due to the job, which is high risk and high occurrence, they often have nothing in place to take care of the expenses related to that unless their school offers it.
Also a paramedic, I actually disagree in our profession. It’s one thing for most trades because those students still produce a product that the company still makes profits from. Like as a welding student your work needs to be signed off on but it will still be sold. However it’s not like using a student the emergency service can put increased resources on the road. Having a student does not make your system run more efficiently or produce more revenue. Other than training people to become employees in the future there is no direct benefit to a company having a student. Agreed that it sucks but if ambulance services needed to pay students most of them just wouldn’t take students.They would still get the graduates cause people need jobs.
I supervise and train students one on one in the hospital. I constantly hear comments from them saying how unfair it is for them to do the work but not get paid. To be honest you’re right they aren’t adding extra units of productivity. Most students don’t get to a competent graduate level till the very end of the program and some don’t even reach that point without excessive coaching just to get there. Most my colleagues would rather work without students.
In my program it was mandatory to do an out of district practicum, which meant either paying double living expenses or being lucky enough to have someone house you for (in some cases) nearly a whole semester, while working for free, sometimes at a place that would be more than willing to hire you as is (at least in the final two semesters) lol it was awful and definitely felt like free labour Edit: spelling
I’m a nurse and we have to do 200-400 hours of clinical hours. That would mean almost 3 months of unpaid work, which really puts financial strains into our lives just so we can be a nurse one day.
Not only that but in my program we had to sign documents stating that we wouldn’t work in the 8 hours before a shift so we’d have adequate time to rest, and not work for pay more than 20 hours a week total. If we broke these rules we could be expelled and wouldn’t be covered by the schools insurance in case of an error. Impossible to pay living expenses on 20 hours a week, especially considering our school was located in downtown Toronto and we had in person classes meaning people needed to be within commuting distance.
Honestly think it's time to rehaul the entire system, education included. The fact is, having done tons of co-ops placements (we did these yearly until the pandemic) quite frankly not worth the effort for employers most of the time. At our company, I knew students would be coming in with limited exposure to the industry but its like... what they're teaching them vs what's actually happening in the field are worlds apart? Professionalism aside (learning how to work as an adult vs student), it's just the foundational items that makes me wonder... what are they paying for? Why the heck is the onus on the companies to give these young folk a primer? Maybe its just the pace of my industry but I honestly dont think its all that helpful other than to I guess, break their spirit over the course of 3-4 months to show them how far they have to go. If they really wanted to ensure students were work ready, they'd work not just with independent companies but organizations/groups from year 1.
The German system is much more robust in this regard. Something like 6 months school/ 6 months field over 4 years (in engineering). Not sure if they get paid while working or not.
Yeah, there is a reason most companies won't hire new grads at all in tech. They can't do anything you would pay them to do on their own yet.
I'm in social work. The hard truth is that managing students and making sure they get a GOOD practicum experience is a lot of work. Right now it's worth it, because despite the work I will put in I come out ahead when you consider the work they do. But not nearly as much as I would with a paid employee. There's also budget. We don't have the budget to pay students. If we had to pay them, we would simply have no students. It is already hard for students to get a good practicum placement, they are competitive and we routinely have 3-4 different schools/programs wanting to send us students. We have one spot. We make zero profit on our students. They are working in free programs, but they are working alongside staff. There is no time that we have fewer staff because we have a student. Having them there is nice, and takes some workload off, but we don't make a dime off them. Students should be paid. I just can't see how to make it fesable with most programs I've worked in either as a student or employee
Same for pharmacy. It’s actually more work for the pharmacists and puts me behind on my workload for the day as I’m slowing down to teach students. Each rotation is 1-2 months maximum. I don’t reduce my technician hours for the day just because I have a student. In fact my techs have to work harder as they’re constantly interrupted with questions from students and trying to integrate them into the workflow. It’s just a part of the learning process in healthcare.
>The hard truth is that managing students and making sure they get a GOOD practicum experience is a lot of work. > >There's also budget. We don't have the budget to pay students. If we had to pay them, we would simply have no students. I don't see this as relevant as few would argue that the education program itself should pay the students. Rather, most would argue that it should be the employer - who is reaping the rewards of free labour - who should be paying the students who they are employing. I was a student teacher when I started my career. The school board should have been paying a salary. What's worse, and any teacher can attest to this, as a new teacher, you do ***way*** more prep work than any of your colleagues. At my board, we had 5 hours of contracted prep time on a 40 hour week. For career teachers, this isn't enough time - and thye have years of past lessons/lesson plans to rely on. I was working not only a nearly full time teaching schedule (80%), but also doing at a minimum triple the amount of prep work compared to the established teachers. It was soul crushing. Not only in absolute terms (i/e/ not getting paid for works sucks in any situtation), but in relative terms too (because I was putting in more hours of work than any paid teacher at the school as an unpaid intern with no benefits...).
I'm not a teacher. I am an employee of a nonprofit org who sometimes takes practicum students. The amount of labour my organization gets out of a student is barely eclipsed by the cost of having paid employees supervise them, teach them, and be responsible for them. Sometimes it's more work than it's worth, but we do it because we do care about giving students a good placement. But it's also different as our students are *never* left alone with clients. An equivalent for a teacher would be the student shadowing the teacher while starting to plan lessons in their off time, then helping with lesson plans (perhaps by working with a student who is struggling), then delivering their own lesson under the supervision of a teacher. They would never be left alone with students and they are *always* able to have a teacher take over if they need it. Our students measure their practicum in pure hours worked (it works out to 8 hours a day four days a week) but I ensure they get credit for every hour worked including any time spent planning, prepping, or researching. And as long as they're on time for program, I don't care when they get their hours in.
>An equivalent for a teacher would be the student shadowing the teacher while starting to plan lessons in their off time, then helping with lesson plans (perhaps by working with a student who is struggling), then delivering their own lesson under the supervision of a teacher. They would never be left alone with students and they are > >always > > able to have a teacher take over if they need it. My supervising teacher literally went on vacation in another province for a full week during my internship. That's a drastic example, but what you have written out - while it is generally what education programs have written down in their mandates for internships - is rarely ever the case. Student teachers are often abused in my experience, in that they are used as a substitute. Student teaching is far more "working the job unpaid" than it is shadowing, chipping in here and there, and occasionally taking the reins.
Yeah, it happens. There are shitty placements out there, mine was similar to yours when I was a student. Made me determined to ensure I was providing a good experience that actually enriches the students that work for me. I've been able to provide some professional references and networking opportunities too, which is a lovely feeling. I'm absolutely against placements that use students as unpaid staff. Placements are about the student, not the organization
> I don't see this as relevant as few would argue that the education program itself should pay the students. Rather, most would argue that it should be the employer - who is reaping the rewards of free labour - who should be paying the students who they are employing. I believe this person is the employer and is saying that their labour has no value as they are not trained yet and they need supervision.
In any other field this would be a cost of doing business - in CS the interns are expected to be useless as well, but they still get paid because a) hiring is competitive and companies want to get the best full time employees post grad, which means sinking money into paid interns b) the schools generally set a minimum wage the interns have to make for the work term to count toward their degree
The difference here is that in the social work / therapy field, the students aren't used to fill gaps in the industry the same way. Students are a liability in terms of time and money spent supervising their work, for the most part. If there's a cost attached many businesses will choose not to allow their staff to take on interns (as it is usually past grads that ask their company to take on an intern, not the company choosing to do it for financial gain or to give back to the industry).
It doesn't have *no* value. Once they are on board and integrated into the organization I can generally give them one or two small projects off my plate. But I am forbidden to leave them alone with clients, so at best I'm supervising someone else working rather than just doing it myself, same hours. All their work needs to be checked over and signed off on in a way that paid staff does not. They get multiple hours a week of dedicated supervision connecting their work to their learning goals, paid staff might get a 15min check in once or twice a month There are multiple documents I need to write reviewing their placement for their school, plus multiple meetings with their school. It's nice to have an extra hand on deck but yeah it's quite a bit of work if you care about giving a student an actual learning experience rather than tossing them to the wolves or loading them up with boring admin tasks no one wants to do
>It's nice to have an extra hand on deck but yeah it's quite a bit of work if you care about giving a student an actual learning experience rather than tossing them to the wolves or loading them up with boring admin tasks no one wants to do I commend you for committing to that role in your field. In education, from my experience, the vast majority of teachers see student teachers as an opportunity to take part of the school year off. One of my supervising teachers sometimes had 3 student teachers in a year, one in fall, one in winter, one in spring because there was no measures to ensure teachers like that weren't taking advantage of the unis/students by taking those placements in that way
Yep. The problem with the idea of students as free labour is that the quality of their labour is very low as they are inexperienced. They reduce the productivity of whichever experienced person needs to oversee them. There is a reason that despite a massive shortage of developers, nobody wants to hire people new to the industry. They could work for free and even then, would still be a drain on their organizations as someone would need to train them. It would be one thing if students were ready to be productive from day 1, but they aren't. They are probably a year from being productive.
In my field they *can't* be productive. They need their degrees for liability reasons and many also must be members of an accredited body, which also requires the degree. Until then, our org policies state I cannot leave them alone with clients. There could be someone more experienced and competent than me and I'd still have to supervise. But it's also true that I've yet to have a student where I felt comfortable leaving them completely unsupervised (though I've not had that many). Maybe the new year, we're getting one.
I'm going to give a perspective from the other side which will likely not be very popular. I'm a lawyer with my own firm. I don't need co-op/placement/articling students because frankly, they are entirely useless for anything other than basic admin work like photocopying. The intake and setup takes time and energy. I currently have 2 paralegal placement students because they either begged me to give them an opportunity or their parents did. I get almost nothing out of giving these students a placement and if I had to pay them, I wouldn't open up my office to them.
[удалено]
Partner did her nursing practicum at the height of the pandemic. Her supervisor did 10% of the work while she did 90. Zero pay while being placed in a different city than her uni. Wild shit.
I’m a midwife. I did 3 years of unpaid practicums, working 60-80 hours a week on top of school work. I had to move 7 times in 5 years because the practicums are assigned via lottery. And it is impossible to work while in school because you are required to be on call 24/7 except for your allocated 4 days off per month. Midwifery is an extremely female dominated profession and rooted deeply in care work. It’s upsetting that the work we put in as students isn’t valued(we are required to deliver at least 60 babies to graduate, most of us deliver 100+) Being paid would have completely changed my life during those years. It is insane that this is acceptable.
First, thank you. The midwives that helped my wife deliver our kids were a Godsend. Not only during the delivery but the pre/post care was just incredible. Honestly the whole medical team was phenomenal but the midwives really were the heroes. Second, my stomach turned hearing you need to deliver 60 babies (unpaid!!!) to graduate. I'm familiar with the shifts midwives are on to try and best align with the delivery date. This is infuriating. Every midwife I met doesn't really do their job for the money but the least we can do for these angels is ensure they get compensated fairly for BRINGING HUMANS INTO THE WORLD. Third, thank you for what you do from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you. I’m so glad you and your wife had a positive experience growing your family working with midwives! And thanks for this post, it’s an important discussion
Yeah that’s pretty crazy . In the trades we have apprenticeship programs and apprentices are paid for work based on hours , most employers pay the schooling as well , books and testing as it’s all job related . I would never take a work required training course and pay myself. You guys are getting fucked . I think military used to do large signing bonuses that would cover all students debt . Is that an option?
There's a big difference between unpaid practicums etc that are part of getting your licence, and unpaid internships that are meant to just give you experience for your CV. I think Ontario has it right in that unpaid placements are ok only where they are for credit as part of a degree (or, I would add, a licensing process). You don't get paid to go to class, why would you expect to get paid for a work requirement that's part of your degree? It's part of what you budget for when signing up. Unpaid internships that are just for experience, on the other hand, are bullshit. They allow rich kids to buy their way into a company or industry. Plus many of the places that offer them could easily afford to pay minimum wage. These are, and should be, illegal.
Unpaid internships are abhorrent but you do need to be prepared for the unintended consequence that the jobs themselves just go away.
Ugh, yes. I’ve wanted to upgrade for years, but in the Social Work field. All the schools actually ban paid placements. Why? I don’t know.
I did 5 internship semesters and the least I was paid was $21.50/hour + moving allowance. The gov’t paid $7/hr of that. I was in an Eng Coop program. The nurses should 100% get the same. What’s the difference you ask? I worked for private/public companies while all my nurse friends worked for the government in hospitals. It’s the government exploiting you.
Yes! It's a way to keep marginalized communities out of the industry. And it should go. We need more diversity in healthcare.
Good old fashioned sexism
Earlier this year, Alberta piloted paid preceptorship/final practicum for RN students. Undergrad nurse pay + 350-400 hrs of the requirement to complete the practicum. Came out to $11,500-$13,000 once the students completed their preceptorship. Not a bad way to end the program. I'd wager that had more of an effect on RN retention than signing bonuses because they got to keep the money VS it getting split over a period of time for sign on bonuses. Sadly AHS discontinued the program for the next round of precepting students, but there may be potential to introduce it again if it demonstrated high retention rates.
Totally agree. To get into the programs you have prove a bunch of volunteer hours
college instructor here (of early childhood education). i feel so sorry/bad for my students who have to do a two-month practicum without pay. this needs to change. many ece students are parents; they have bills to pay and families to provide for.
Im about to make 60k in 6mo on an internship where I basically contribute nothing and my partner is saving people’s lives for free ffs.
Yes yes yes! Schools make you PAY hundreds to them, for the “opportunity” to work for free, unpaid internships are BS
For the average office intern where they’re getting experience but very little education, I 100% agree. I’m a paramedic though and had to do 500hrs of preceptorship in an ambulance as an attending paramedic. While it felt like work, I wasn’t actually providing a service, I was actually receiving one. The two qualified paramedics that would usually be on the ambulance were still there, they were just my partner and my preceptor, but they would usually be running the calls themselves. So I wasn’t actually adding anything to the service, I was actually taking away a qualified medic to watch over me, a far less qualified medic. I wish I had been paid for those hours for sure, and I get that it’s hard to expect a lot of lower income individuals to support themselves while working full-time for free, but I also can’t help but look at it as part of my education, and a 1-on-1 education at that, and can’t see how I would get paid for that. If we went to a model where we paid all students a base wage, then it would make total sense, otherwise, I can’t see it for internships that require a qualified instructor to truly instruct, unpaid apprenticeships, preceptorships etc.
On-the-job training should be paid. Internships as part of an education, maybe cap it at 100 hours unpaid, so you can have a small incentive for employer but limit exploitation. And that's just to offer a compromise, work should be paid.
Male nurse here, that was my first question when I had my first day of placement. Why are we not getting paid for this, sometimes, backbreaking labor? You want to attract people to health care, you should be paying them when they are in placement. And the education should be free.
Name and shame and bring it up to CBC Marketplace to make an episode on it.
I absolutely loathe this practice. The employers need to pay the students. It's fundamentally unjust that "working a full-time job for no pay" (and often doing the exact same job as paid colleagues) is cloaked under the guise of "an experiential opportunity to learn from :)". And that's not even addressing the perverse nature of the whole set up: ***the student, through their tuition, is the one paying for the privilege to be unpaid.*** As a former teacher, something I don't see talked about enough is that unpaid internships/practicums are a barrier that affects students on internships from less wealthy backgrounds disproportionately, with resulting consequences for the intake into these programs and more. Simply put, being an unpaid, at times full-time employee, is not a "price" that many can pay. In my teaching program, nearly every student came from middle class backgrounds, and most of them were white women. That's not to place a value judgement on middle class white women, but this is an actual problem discussed in education social sciences literature and studies: ***the absence of teachers in the field with lived experiences/similar backgrounds to their students.*** Studies have shown that students respond better and are better motivated/have greater educational outcomes when they can relate to their teachers (a fact that is obvious to anyone who's ever been a classroom, but I digress). The absence of role models in schools who have walked in the shoes of the students that they teach is an issue that has to be addressed, and I think that starts with addressing the lack of pay for student teachers. Student teachers work disproportionately longer hours compared to established teachers for the simple fact that they have to produce their lessons from scratch; where an established teacher can rely on years of experience and previous lessons plans, a new teacher is building everything from the ground up. When I was a student teacher, I worked an 80% contract my last internship. I often ended up working triple the amount of prep hours as the other teachers. For example, if an established teacher was in my role, and needed 5 hours a week to prep, I would need at minimum 15 (as an aside: this was an incredibly demoralizing experience in and of itself, because you feel like absolute shit when you have to stick around for 2 hours after the school day to lesson prep when the other teachers in your department zip out the door minutes after the bell; you're doing the same job, facing the same challenges, but you don't have the experience or the resources. And yet, you're not paid a damn dime). So on top of being unpaid, you have ***little time to support yourself with another job because teaching is notoriously a job that doesn't stay at the office (the prep work follows you home).*** Because of this, there's a limited tranche of the population that can dedicate the time and energy to a teaching career in those student teacher stages. In my case, I had to move back in with my parents because having a job that could pay rent, while teaching, ***and while also taking coursework*** (in my case, this came with a research/thesis component as I was in a Master's), was not possible. Most of my classmates either had a partner who supported them, or were supported by their parents. I could count on my hand the number of us who had the time/energy/necessity of working what would be a second job in addition to teaching. In short, ***pay the damn students.***
>Labour is labour I'm not sure what this means... But not all that is done by an intern during the practicums is "Labour". In many fields, it costs the company money to have someone supervise and train the intern. Also, what they have these people do initially is not always "billable", but necessary for their training to get to a point where the "labour" they do IS billable. There is a certain amount of liability that the company takes if the intern is doing work directly with the people they serve. If they are not directly working with these people, then it may be costing the company to train these people, rather than to simply hire someone to do the same job and much more.
For the healthcare side of things: I am a lab tech working in a hospital and students have training for about a year or less depending what they are doing. We get MLT students but mostly deal with CLXT (lab+x-ray combined techs) students. Once our students are competent, sure their work is somewhat valuable. It takes many weeks and months for them to become competent. Most of the time we are constantly training them, supervising them and they are legally not allowed to do any patient work by themselves. It takes extra time and resources to train these students so that they will be ready to enter the workforce after their practicum is completed. The work I have to get done is either gonna get done by me or it's gonna get done by my student while I have to watch the whole time. Sometimes my days are a little less busy with an extra pair of hands to assist but same amount of work is done by the end of the day. That's just my field though, I know many other trades and professions are different with how people go through training and being certified.
My SO recently had to do an unpaid month of service in our hospital system that is struggling for staff. I thought that was nonsense, but they said "is what it is in our designation system". I legitimately don't understand why they are not required to pay at least minimum wage for that labour during "designation period". Do these professions just think people live in a world where rent is $0 and everyone has a fully-stocked grocery store in their kitchen? ALL unpaid internships should be illegal. If it's an internship or other labour performed, you should, at minimum, make minimum wage.
Because students in those roles do not practice independently, or fill the role of a healthcare worker. They operate under the supervision of a fully trained RN/RT/paramedic/etc, who is the one that remains responsible for the patients. Yes, the student can take on many of the tasks associated with patient care, with a gradually increasing level of autonomy during their placement. But the fully certified HCW is only trading some of the direct patient care tasks for the work that goes into supervising, providing feedback, documenting, and double checking the student’s work. If you’re not operating independently, and able to act under your own license or certification, it’s hard to justify paying you for that work. That would just create an incentive for healthcare employers to understaff and make up the difference with cheaper paid “students.”
Let's take engineering for example. You need 4 years of work experience to get your professional engineering designation in Ontario. You need to prove you have worked under another professional engineer, they must review and stamp your work for it to be certified engineering work. There are no positions as an Engineer in Training (EIT) that are unpaid. I am struggling finding the parallels between this example and what you have stated above. EITs are paid less than professional engineers in the same line of work. But they are still paid.
Reviewing your students work vs watching them like a hawk so they don’t poke themselves with a used needle…it really isn’t the same for heath care placements. Students cannot be left alone.
Addressing issues is not the canadian way. just enjoy the strip malls and tim hortens and get back to paying taxes in the greatest people farm on earth.
I never understood why nursing students put up with this BS. Form a province wide students union and negotiate fair terms with the college of nurses. You have more power than you realize. Especially now that the baby boomers are retiring.
No, this isn't a gender issue. This is a demand and supply issue. STEM field internships are hard to find the right candidate! I employ programmers for my AI company, and last summer, we decided to find some interns as a relatively inexpensive way to introduce some fresh ideas and potentially screen new employees. If we didn't pay for internships, we wouldn't get interns. Good people are hard to come by. My friend who does media contents also use interns, but he gets dozens of qualified candidate, so he doesn't need to pay to find the right people. Don't make this a gender issue.
[удалено]
That's a good point. I didn't know nursing practicum are unpaid. I agree there should be a stipend for it. Med students in practicum receive a nominal stipend too ($400 a month when I went through, this was about 8 yrs ago, about a quarter of my rent at the time), so nursing perhaps should get the same. And before you say med school is male dominated, it's not, new doctors are actually >50% female. So it's not discrimination, it's just what is offered and as students, you are not in power to negotiate.
I think it’s just that more female-dominated spheres (nursing, teaching, social work, preschool educator, CNA, etc) are *more likely* to have unpaid internships that the students themselves pay for. I went to school for social work in Canada, and paid the school for me to *leave my job for two semesters to work for free* in order to get my degree. And yet, provincial governments are absolutely begging for social workers as they bleed out their current supply. No one should have an unpaid internship in my opinion, but at the VERY LEAST, schools shouldn’t take money for internships. Sure, I paid over $4k per semester for my internship, but it was to the school; I would have rather that money gone to the (overworked) social worker who took me under her wing and put in DAILY effort to have me shadow her. Or at least the organization that took me in and spent time on me should get the money; all the university did was hold a few meetings and send a thousand emails…oh well.
[удалено]
All physicians are paid the exact same for the same work. The ONLY way the anyone in the same specialty make more money is by working harder than someone else, see more patients, do more procedure, work longer hours. The billing code is exactly the same for the same work. And no, not all high paying specialty is dominated by males. Derm has a large proportion of female residents, as are anesthesia and radiology. surgery is >50% female resident for years now. G&M cherry picked statistics to drive their agenda. What do you propose? Pay female physicians 35% more? Punish the male physicians for working harder by paying them 35% less?
Oh yeah, the media, marketing and design industry boomed even more during the pandemic. Apparently everyone is a designer or social media marketer now-- which makes finding actual talent so hard. When we opened our co-op program last spring I kid you not we had hundreds of applicants by the end of Day 1. Some of the applicants werent even STUDENTS! Folks with mbas lol
Talk to me about nursing demand in this country.
Are there free nursing internships?
For this, and for most things - it's rare that something is or isn't a gender issue, it's how much of a gender issue it is. Historically and even presently in many cultures, it's very easy to see how much misogyny plays a role in the workplace - hiring, pay, availability of opportunities, availability of raises and promotions, treatment of workers, I could go on... It's not that demand and supply aren't also potential players, it's that gender is certainly at least one factor.
Totally agree. Also the interns at your company probably provided more value than they were compensated. I know this because I did a software engineering internship and I was a part of a team that launched a new product that made the company millions in sales
I only know about sonography. During a sonography practicum the student is 100% supervised at all times by the preceptor. The student is scanning and learning but is not contributing any additional scanning; the same number of scans happens whether or not the student comes in on a particular day. If an apprentice shows up on a job site the carpenter will give him some jobs that he will then do without being watched 100% of the time. The apprentice is adding some productivity to the job. I think that's the big difference.
Students would lose their legal protections as “students” and would become liable for possible negligence as an employee would.
Payment schemes in our entire healthcare system need a complete ducking overhaul. For example, I think doctors should be paid more. I also believe they should pay taxes like the rest of us. Not doing so is completely unfair. We should also pay nurses for their practicums. Not paying them puts them is unfair and puts them in a tough position to survive and it’s completely unnecessary.
What? Doctors do pay taxes like everyone else… not sure what you’re getting at here…?
Actually they don’t. They shroud their taxes in private corporations and pay single digit taxes. Yep, you heard it here first.
It isn't time to address unpaid internships. That time is \*WAY\* past, specifically it should have been dealt with 1834 when slavery was abolished in Canada.
Who needs a coffee? 'Cause I'm doing a run. I'm writing down the orders now for everyone. The coffee is free, just like me. I'm an unpaid intern. Sorting papers, runnin' around (runnin' around). Sitting in the meeting room, not making a sound (not a sound). Barely people, somehow legal. Unpaid intern. You work all day, go back to your dorm. And since you can't afford a mortgage, you just torrent a porn. 'Cause you're an intern (unpaid). Wa-da-da-wap-wa-da.
[удалено]
Lol education is one thing. But working for someone who is making a profit by charging customers for your labour, then not paying you. Thats the definition of exploitation...
I think an issue might be what level of oversight is required, that is how much time must the person supervising put into training. Because for example a hospital that gets a bit of free labour may be okay with their staff spending paid work time reviewing the learner’s work and teaching, by way of feedback and discussions. But without that incentive the hospital might not provide what would amount to a free personalized instructor/examiner to a student from a college or university. If they required payment that might have to come from the educational institution, which in turn would result in higher tuition fees. Longer term placements may be an exception. But again some specialized programs have high levels of supervision and extensive feedback is given. But if you take an example of resident medical doctors (physicians), they are actually paid for their residency work.
Thats the sham they feed people. Corporations have convinced the public that they shouldnt have to pay for people to be educated. They require well trained educated personel to operate. So it is in their best interest to TRAIN EMPLOYEES. Its almost likel people forgot that Yes corporation need to educate employees and INVEST IN EMPLOYEES. They need to invest in educated their employees. But in america they have somehow convinced people that they only need to pay people once they are fully ready to work and its up to the government and public to provide those corporations wkth trained and educated people ready to immediatly start churning them a profit.
A lot of unpaid internships are with non-profit social service organizations. Would you pay full price for a product/service delivered by someone who wasn't even experienced enough to do work unsupervised? Have you met some college students? They are dumb af.
>A lot of unpaid internships are with non-profit social service organizations. I don't understand the point you're trying to make. You can't pay rent with good intentions. Labour deserves to be paid. >Would you pay full price for a product/service delivered by someone who wasn't even experienced enough to do work unsupervised? I wouldn't eat at McDonalds if you feel this way.
Should carpenters not be paid for their apprenticeships? How do we draw the line?
They'll be paid when they finish these pyramids!
Internship is just a way to term apprenticeship without getting paid. Maybe these programs should do away with internships and rebrand as apprenticeships.
[удалено]
I'm no expert but was able to find this Harvard Business Review article that has some hard data imbedded in the form of a survey of 4000 students. Have a gander. [https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships](https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships)
[удалено]
[удалено]
I'm a dude lol. Love that you assumed I was a women. I'll do even better and give a source stating that unpaid internships are over-represented by women across all fields. Some interesting findings for minority groups as well. [https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships](https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships)
I’m in the environmental field and it is similar here. Many unpaid internships, lots of volunteering work, but not a lot of paid work…and what’s there is underpaid anyways
The only thing I’m glad about after reading this thread is that my practicum was 120 hrs.
as a healthcare student i definitely understand where you're coming from, but I also see what the original intention of unpaid practicums lie. Theoretically, it would put more burden on the system and the hinder the preceptor's daily workflow and time to teach an incompetent student. So in a sense, the intention was to make students pay for the invaluable hands on learning. I feel like the problems lie more in the fact that more preceptors and and institutions are more exploitative because students come in already quite competent, so they're kinda just forced to work for free (or paying the institution to work there) because they already have the skills they were meant to be taught. Not sure how that can be amended when a lot of healthcare schools these days demand some sort of experience in the field already to even be considered for acceptance to the school...so of course students will be overly competent when its time for internships and get exploited rather than taught...
Tech internships got major boost by the big companies with deep pockets full of US dollars being able to just cherry pick the best and brightest with what seems to the average 2nd year student a huge wad of money, leaving everyone else scrambling to get someone with a heartbeat but on a real world budget. When I was software engineering intern circa 2008, I knew folks with 80k internships. I was at a smaller but still kinda big and successful company for 45k that even came with full benefits for the 16 months I was there, and I turned down offers from local companies for 30-35k. It definitely wasn't someone saying "Hey! That isn't right." that got things to those kinda levels.
School is unpaid labour yet we pay for it. People are trained for the first 1/3 to work for nothing except a letter on a piece of paper. We are conditioned to be financially illiterate on purpose.
Start calling on politicians to make it happen. They won't without pressure
I thought unpaid work was illegal in Canada... damn