Contradictions on Unpaid Internships

I came across a very interesting articles that spoke my thoughts and from now on, I will look at unpaid internships from a different perspective.

UNPAID INTERNSHIPS.

What comes to your mind when you see these two words?

There are many contradictions on the topic of unpaid internships. I often think that companies are just trying to exploit students by using them as temporary labour. I assume that $$$$ is the biggest motivation for most people. Some interns work extremely hard for their companies yet they do not receive any monetary reward, which is quite sad. Some of my friends that have previously taken on unpaid internships told me that it sucks that they didn’t get paid but the experience was very valuable. One of them worked for an environmental NGO / non-profit organization for 4 months. Because the office was very small , she was given many tasks which sometimes involved long hours of physical labor. I was told that it was very tough at first as she spent most of her working hours tidying up and sorting things in the warehouse, but in the end, she was very grateful about this the experience as she gained a lot of valuable experiences that private companies will not be able to provide her with.

The author of the article reminded me to look at unpaid internships in a new perspective. Although we may think that companies are trying to exploit us, remember that there are people who are far worse than us.  

 “…there are far more exploited classes of workers in Canada—temporary migrant workers, domestic workers, sex workers, to name a few.”