A demonstration was organized Thursday by the General Association of Students in Psychoeducation of the University of Montreal (AGÉPEUM) to denounce the fact that their internships are still not paid. The fact that the problem essentially affects programs very popular with women was denounced.
To have the title of psychoeducator and be able to work in their field, students must volunteer for two seven-month internships totaling 920 hours, at the same time as taking their university courses.
According to the Association, this puts students in a precarious situation both financially and in terms of their mental health.
“What do psychoeducators, nurses, social workers, speech therapists and teachers have in common? These are professions where women are in the majority and where the internships are not paid, ”denounces Marguerite Sabourin who is in her first year of the baccalaureate in psychoeducation.
Women who work in helping relationships are overworked and underpaid. They have been asking for better terms for years, but the government is turning a deaf ear. Why are women ignored when they have perfectly legitimate requests?
Marguerite Sabourin, psychoeducation student
Naïmé Daoust-Zidane, who is in her second year of master’s degree, spoke of the recent creation by the Ministry of Higher Education of the Observatory on student well-being and mental health in higher education. However, she says, “the same ministry refused us the Perspective scholarship for the master’s in psychoeducation. We’re allowed to do 560 compulsory hours of volunteering at the master’s degree at our own expense and told that we’re worried about our mental health? »
“At a time when no service is free and increasingly expensive, it is unthinkable for interns to provide a service without a salary to meet their basic needs,” adds Virginie Goyer, who is in her second year of bachelor’s degree in psychoeducation.
Annabelle Berthiaume, professor in the Department of Psychoeducation at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières and author of Internship strike, women’s strike: an anthology of a feminist struggle for student wageshas extensively documented the issue of unpaid internships which, in fact, she notes, mainly penalizes women.
In psychoeducation, nursing, social work, etc., students often do their internship in the public sector, while in engineering or law – fields that attract more men – internships are often in the private sector.
However, she said in a telephone interview, the Quebec government “offers funding and tax credits to encourage private companies to take on paid interns. It therefore reproduces gender inequalities by applying this double standard in the recognition of internship work. »
Students doing their internship in the public sector will therefore at best have a scholarship that will only cover a small part of the actual hours worked, underlines Ms.me Berthiaume. They will not be protected for their health and safety at work, while private interns will have real wages, protections provided by labor standards and levers to have their overtime hours recognized, among other things.