Greig de Peuter

The Urban Worker Strategy proposes a sweeping suite of overdue federal policies that respond to the plight of temps, freelancers, interns, part-timers and other flexworkers who flit from gig to gig, shift to shift, contract to contract, with no guarantee of income or future work, let alone access to benefits or pensions.

If decent, full-time work is getting harder to come by, the same can’t be said for internships, whether unpaid or barely paid. From street protests to online campaigns, the emerging intern activism is one part of the wider effort by fresh actors to reformat labour politics for precarious times.