This story is part of the 2013 Atkinson Series : Me, You, Us. Journalist and author Michael Valpy has done an investigation into social cohesion in Canada — what binds us together, what draws us apart.

Krista Brown, 23, who won double scholarships through college and is now finishing off a Ryerson University degree in graphics communications management, knows workplace exploitation.

She has steamed clothes as an unpaid student intern. She has done hefty amounts of low-grade office work such as assembling lists of business contacts and manually sending out emails that could have been done by app software. She has been asked by a well-known Canadian clothing designer (whom she won’t name) to skip classes to sew and been told to clean up dead animal parts used as props for a jewellery exhibit.

She was going to sue one company where she interned for violating provincial labour law — she was assigned full-time work planning a major company event without being paid — but decided at the last moment to let it pass.

She’s put up with the grunge work because “you can’t really say no. But it’s stressful.”

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She drew the line at cleaning up dead animal parts. She quit. Her two-week internship was in New York during the city’s Fashion Week. The prospect had excited her. She’d paid her own accommodation and travel costs from Toronto.

Student internships are supposed to be educational, experiential training points for entry into well-paid occupations. Instead they’re mainly a scam on students to get their free labour, supported by academic institutions. Brown is expected to put in 420 hours interning before she graduates. She will be fortunate if she gets paid for any of it.

She says: “Why is my degree not valuable enough for a minimum wage? I think that’s crap, to be honest.”

The Ontario government promised this week not only to include interns under the province’s workplace safety regulations but to compel employers to meet the legal criteria for educational internships if they wish to be exempt from paying employees. The province has promised an educational blitz of students, educational employers and businesses and surprise enforcement inspections.

Brown now does volunteer work with the Canadian Intern Association , which identifies exploitative companies, lobbies governments for protection of young workers and educates interns, both students and non-students, on their legal rights.

The association posts a regular “Name and Shame” list of companies — such as Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront hotel, which advertised in September for an unpaid bus-person intern to clear tables.

The advertisement read: “As a Busperson, you will take pride in the integral role you play in supporting your Food and Beverage Colleagues and ‘setting the stage’ for a truly memorable meal.”

The internship was supported by Vancouver Community College. “'Even dishwashing, it's education,” the CBC quoted VCC culinary arts head John-Carlo Felicella as saying. “It's a lower-end job, but from there it stems to many other things.”

Toronto lawyer Andrew Langille who has made a cause out of internships and, more broadly, precarious employment, estimates there are between 100,000 and 300,00 illegal unpaid internships in Canada. “If you include unpaid student labour,” he adds, “you’d easily top 500,000, if not approaching 750,000.”

The global youth unemployment pandemic — labelled by the Pope as the world’s biggest problem side by side with the solitude of the old — has hit Canada. The jobless rate for young Canadians hasn’t budged since 2008. It’s double the national average, triple the Rate in Toronto. The unemployment rate is nearly 30 per cent for newcomer young people who have been in Canada less than five years (a youth unemployment rate higher than Europe’s).

Statistics Canada doesn’t track unpaid internships; Langille arrives at his numbers by anecdotal information and simple economic modelling. There are five million Canadians in their 20s. If only 2 per cent are doing unpaid illegal internships, that’s 100,000. Ten per cent is 500,000. “I can find a couple of thousand in one company alone,” Langille says. Although the free ride may be coming to an end: employment experts are predicting that Canadian companies are about to be hit by a torrent of lawsuits for violations of labour law.

Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, who gave the world the protest mantra of the One Per Cent, said recently: “We could have recognized that when young people are jobless, their skills atrophy. We could have made sure that every young person was either in school, in a training program or on a job.

“Instead, we let youth unemployment rise to twice the national average. The children of the rich can stay in college or attend graduate school, without accumulating enormous debt, or take unpaid internships to beef up their resumés. Not so for those in the middle and bottom. We are sowing the seeds of ever more inequality in the coming years.”

He was speaking of the United States. He could have been speaking of Canada.

Internships are actually a Canadian invention. Renowned 19th-century Canadian medical educator William Osler came up with the idea as a means of bringing medical students out of the classroom for bedside clinical training, especially those intending to practice internal medicine. Hence the name.

How 21st-century youth unemployment links to social cohesion becomes apparent when you analyze the young through the lenses of the workplace, social mobility, conflict between generations and (what used to be so unCanadian) class struggle.

What’s clear is that the young are becoming collectively unglued.

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For more than two decades they have been withdrawing in overwhelming numbers from participation in formal democracy. University of Toronto professor emerita Ursula Franklin asked Grade 11 students at the Toronto school named for her what they hoped to be doing five years after graduation and was astonished to discover that not one intended going into politics or public service.

Governments, with the possible exception of Quebec’s, substantially have succeeded over the past two decades in erasing the state’s presence in their lives, and social researchers such as University of Calgary’s Yvonne Hébert, who studies youth identity, report that, in tandem with the shrinking state, their sense of community is diminishing along with their attachment to Canada.

Canada offers its young no state-sponsored form of service — compulsory military service, for example (not to suggest that as a solution), or service with domestic and international volunteer agencies like the Company of Young Canadians of the 1960S and ’70s — and increasingly has allowed the workplace, the only formal communal space for them outside of educational institutions, to be debased or beyond reach.

Do unpaid internships lead to good full-time jobs?

There’s no Canadian data, but U.S. data is clear: the conclusion after three years of research by the U.S. National Association of Colleges and Employers is no. Unpaid internships are a rip-off.

Not surprisingly, research into how Canadians feel about their collective future shows that an overwhelming majority — about 85 per cent — believe the next adult generation, the so-called millennials, will do worse economically than preceding generations, an indication of the dying of the dream of continuing progress.

University of Ottawa labour economist Miles Corak, who has spent the past 15 years studying economic mobility across generations, finds clear evidence that higher inequality is associated with less generational mobility.

His U of O colleague, political scientist Martin Papillon, says barriers to economic participation in society are far more significant than differences in values and personal attitudes in fostering fragmentation and social exclusion.

So, yes, unpaid internships and other employment discriminations against the young undermine social cohesion, along with the skewed generational influence on government and public policy that has taken shape in the country because the young shoot themselves in the foot: they don’t vote and their elders do.

But pushback is out there.

Generation Squeeze, the grassroots organization launched by a young University B.C. professor, Paul Kershaw, is making waves on the West Coast with its campaign against low wages, high living costs, blatant young voter suppression by political parties and generationally unbalanced public policies.

The cover of Gen Squeeze’s website declares in bold black type that Canadian governments spend $45,000 per citizen over 65 and only $12,000 per citizen under 45. That’s intergenerational conflict.

The Canadian Intern Association has its Name and Shame list of unpaid internship exploiters.

“How can this be right?” asks Krista Brown.

It’s a question going around.