At an academically rigorous institution like McGill, schoolwork is just one of many intersecting obstacles to success, especially for students in financially precarious situations. According to recent National College Health Assessment (NCHA) surveys, 26 per cent* of McGill students reported that their finances had been traumatic or difficult to handle in the past 12 months. For those students, finding a job outside of class time is imperative in assuaging these concerns. Yet, working while studying at university acts as a catch-22 of sorts: In the same NCHA surveys, 13.5 per cent* of McGill students reported that work had negatively impacted their academic performance. Even if having a job is necessary to sustain personal finances, it can come at a significant cost to one’s overall well-being.

For Ava**, having to financially support herself while in school came as a sudden surprise. Ava’s father, who had handled family finances all her life, lost his job and filed for bankruptcy shortly before her arrival at McGill. By Ava’s second year, her father could no longer help pay for rent and tuition.

“I was like, ‘Okay, I need to make money right now,’” Ava said in an interview with The McGill Tribune. “I found [steady employment on campus], and then I got obsessed with [it] and I worked there way too much. But I was really worried about having enough money [to pay for living expenses].”

The demand to make ends meet led Ava to work as many hours as possible at the expense of focussing on academics.

“[Working] made me put schoolwork on the backburner [for] a bit. I was very focussed on just having enough money to live,” Ava said. “The fact of the matter is that if I don’t make money, I can’t be here. If I can’t pay rent, I can’t be here. And that [pressure] seemed more immediate to me than ‘Oh, if I don’t study this much time today I’m going to do poorly in my classes.’ It’s not as tangible.”

Because many student workers rely on their jobs to pay for basic needs, they often worry that asking for better conditions, advocating for their rights, or being a less-than-perfect employee would impact their employment. As a result, these student employees find themselves in vulnerable positions where their hours, remuneration, and long-term job security are at risk. Delali Egyima is President of the Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE)—the union representing McGill’s non-academic temporary workers. According to Egyima, the fact that many students are hired as contract workers only adds to their precarity.

“These contracts are really short because students are seen as replaceable,” Egyima said. “There [are] thousands of students on campus who need jobs, and if you can’t do it, then there’ll just be somebody else who can.”

Without structured protections, students trying to meet their basic needs often acquiesce to exploitative workplace conditions. Despite McGill’s substantially higher international tuition, Canadian study permits mandate that someone like Ava, who is an international student, cannot legally work more than 20 hours per week. Working beyond this limit is grounds for deportation, yet when one of Ava’s coworkers took several weeks off and another was himself deported, she made an arrangement with her boss to be paid under the table so that she could work more hours without fear of alerting immigration officials.

“I was [working] 40-hour weeks,” Ava said. “I needed as much money as possible.”

The insecurity of student labour is exacerbated for students in the School of Social Work. To receive a Bachelor’s of Social Work, McGill requires students to complete at least 800 hours of labour in field placements in government and community organizations. Though last year’s student strikes saw some progress in mitigating the effects of this requirement (U3 students can now apply to receive $2700 compensation for their final-year stage), the vast majority of this work remains either unpaid or undercompensated. According to Kayla Bakos, the Social Work Student Association (SWSA) equity coordinator, the double burden of schoolwork and 16 hours of unpaid stage—another commonly used term for field placement—per week can often lead to student burnout.

“Stage can be heavy sometimes,” Bakos said. “[In] a lot of these organizations you deal with heavy things that you end up taking home with you. But you have to come to school the next day and reset that [...] you have to deal with it or else your grades slip [or] you don’t pass your stage.”

Bakos noted that the lack of remuneration for social work internships reflects a broader undervaluing of feminized and care-centred jobs. For other professions, notably those in engineering—which are primarily male-dominated fields—internships are more likely to be compensated with stipends.

“How do you come to school every day and go to stage knowing that essentially your time is being taken advantage of for free labour?” Bakos said. “What we’re doing is we’re paying our tuition to have our time and labour exploited for free [...] All [McGill] is doing is teaching us that our time and labour isn’t worth as much as an engineering student’s.”

For context, the McGill Department of Social Work website lists over $100,000 in donated awards, bursaries, and scholarships. Meanwhile, several multi-million dollar initiatives from alumni are available for Engineering students.

A lack of formal protections for unpaid internships like those required by the School of Social Work puts students further at risk of workplace abuse. Quebec’s Act Respecting Labour Standards, which establishes basic rights to adequate working conditions, a workplace free of harassment, and a minimum wage, only applies to employees in contracted or otherwise remunerated positions. While Bakos notes that the School of Social Work has some policies in place, such as providing an avenue for students to leave their placement within the first four weeks, not finding a new placement to switch into could delay their graduation. As a result of the long process of finding a new placement, students might have reservations about advocating for their needs.

“There have been instances of stages going wrong in whichever way, but it ends up being a burden on the student,” Bakos said. “[Then, the students have] to deal with the consequences, even though it’s not really their fault.”

Maeve Bothman, AMUSE’s vice president floor fellow, acts as a liaison between the floor fellow community and the union. According to Bothman, the lack of formal recognition for student labour represents a broader ‘casualization’ of the workforce. Since many student workers work part-time, they do not receive benefits from their employer or have guaranteed paid sick leave.

“[The lack of benefits] puts people in more precarious positions, because they’re [only] getting their wages and they’re often working multiple part-time jobs,” Bothman said. “It might seem weird for McGill to be giving benefits to [its] student workers, but it’s not really that [far-fetched]. They’re doing a job and benefits are a normal thing.”

Bothman noted that the lack of broader support for many student workers comes in part from harmful generalizations about who they are and why they choose to work in the first place.

“[When] talking to people in administrative positions at McGill, I [have found that] there’s this underlying expectation where [many of them think] ‘Yeah, students are working, but they don’t really need the money. They’re doing it for experience and because they like it,’” Bothman said. “We think about student workers as people who are maybe working 12 hours [per] week and have financial support from their families and are able to keep up with their classes, but that’s not the case [for a lot of people].”

While McGill’s Scholarship and Student Aid Office supports students in financial need, offering need-based bursaries and managing the Work Study Program, gaining access to those resources comes with its own barriers. Only the highest-achieving students—who are already more likely to come from privileged backgrounds—qualify for merit-based scholarships, and applying for need-based bursaries and the work study program require extensive applications and an in-person appointment with a financial aid counsellor. During these appointments, many students feel that they have to go above and beyond to justify their situation.

“You have to pour your whole heart out in order to be considered [for need-based programs],” Egyima said. “Why [does McGill] need to know my whole life story in order to think that I need this work? Why can’t I just say that I need work?”

Ava’s experience applying for in-course aid reflected a similar process of recounting details of her personal life to McGill administrators. While her financial statements adequately documented her situation, having to verify the details in-person made her feel that she had to perform to fit someone else’s definition of need.

“[Getting help from the Student Aid Office relies in part] on how sad of a story you can spin [for the financial aid counselors],” Ava said. “I don’t really understand why that’s such an important part of it, but if you can hit their sympathies, you can really get money.”

Bothman believes part of this phenomenon stems from a degree of elitism in McGill. While it may provide vital resources for students from the lowest income brackets, the financial aid process does not offer the same degree of respite to middle-income students, who also experience financial precarity. Outside of the administration, conversations about finances that occur between students can minimize the issues at hand.

“There’s such a weird campus culture where people don’t talk about money [or] a lot of people say things really trivially, [like] talking about being broke when they’re not [actually] broke,” Bothman said. “I think [that makes it] hard to have conversations [about financial precarity] and that can be isolating for people.”

McGill’s elitist culture directly inhibits workers on campus who try to advocate for better conditions. Because many people in positions of power hold assumptions that student poverty is not a significant issue or that students find jobs simply to earn some spending money, they may be less willing to engage in productive conversations around these issues.

“How are we supposed to advocate for better pay or better conditions when there’s this expectation [among McGill administrators] that it’s not that important?” Egyima said.

Supporting student workers, and students from low-income backgrounds in general, does not have to be a complicated process. Employers can start by paying their workers and interns a living wage. Nobody deserves to live in impoverished conditions; inadequate compensation with a lack of workplace benefits only makes employees in already precarious situations more vulnerable. In a broader context, Canadian immigration regulations need to better consider foreign students’ situations—threatening to deport students for working too much only forces them to seek out unprotected, under-the-table arrangements. Further, McGill can invest more money in its need-based bursary programs and work to reduce the cost of education. When students do not have to stress over paying tuition fees, they may feel less of a need to move their focus away from school to feed themselves.

“If McGill wanted people to not be in precarious positions, they could just do it,” Bothman said.

*Averaged from 2013 and 2016 surveys.

**Name has been changed to protect the privacy of the sources.