Are “Volunteers” the New Unpaid Interns? : How Ontario’s Employment Standards Act Treats “Volunteer” Misclassification
In this guest blog for The Law of Work, Josh Mandryk examines the ways in which employers attempt to avoid employment standards legislation and obtain free labour by calling their employees “interns” or “volunteers”.
After the Ministry of Labour cracked down on the use of “unpaid interns”, employers began to characterize unpaid workers as “volunteers” or “volunteer interns”. Josh discusses how this development poses new challenges for the fight against wage theft and employee misclassification.