More employers are walking away from unpaid internships. Some jurisdictions have banned the practice outright. Ontario hasn’t: unpaid placements remain legal here if a list of conditions get met, but legal isn’t the same as smart. Most companies still offering unpaid work haven’t done the math on what that decision actually costs them.
The cost isn’t on the books. It shows up in who walks through the door.
What unpaid internships actually filter for
We’ve been building out the Trade Smart certified employer network for a while now, and we’ve talked to plenty of shops that prefer unpaid placements. The reason is almost always the same. They want free labour for casual or occasional work. A few have told us flat out they won’t keep our student past the placement window. We appreciate the bluntness: it makes the decision to walk away easy.
The well-known problem with unpaid internships is that when nobody’s paying wages, nobody’s planning the learning either. The intern gets stuck on the most menial work with no context for why any of it matters. They leave frustrated. They leave the industry. The shop runs the revolving door again. When we’re this short on people in the trades, that pattern is doing real damage.
Unpaid placements don’t filter by ability. They filter by whose parents can cover rent.
The hidden filter
A typical placement runs four to eight months and sits inside a college or university program. If it’s unpaid, the student has to cover living costs plus everything the placement itself demands: commute, tools, boots, uniforms. The math lands somewhere north of $10,000 for a six-month run.
Most students cannot cover that on their own. They lean on family: living at home, getting a transfer for groceries, a parent paying the phone bill. Some families step up regardless of what they earn. Others, even wealthy ones, won’t put a dollar in.
So when a company offers only an unpaid placement, the pool they’re drawing from has already been sorted. Not by skill. Not by drive. By the financial choices of someone else’s family. That’s who they get to pick from.
Family wealth is a poor predictor of work ethic
Some employers know exactly what they’re doing. They want a certain kind of kid and the unpaid placement is how they sort for it. Intentional or not, that filter also shrinks the candidate pool by gender, by ethnicity, by a stack of other factors that have nothing to do with whether the person can swing a hammer or read a print.
The point of our placements is the opposite. Anyone who’s willing to work and wants to learn should get a shot at the trade. The good news is most of our partner employers feel the same way.
For an entry-level trades job, work ethic sits near the top of the must-have list. Probably the most basic requirement there is.
When you actually look at the evidence, work ethic shows up everywhere. Across class, gender, ethnicity. The small differences researchers do find tend to favour the people unpaid placements quietly screen out: women, racial and ethnic minorities, students from lower-income households.[1]
Praise for the hardworking poor. Derogation of the lazy rich.
The knock-on benefits of paying
When you draw from a pool defined by ability instead of family support, the work gets better. Even at entry level, the strongest workers run three to five times more productive than the weakest. That gap compounds.
It also stretches out the employment relationship. Turnover in the trades currently runs around $10,000 per lost employee. Reducing that does two things at once. First, productivity holds because experienced people stay long enough to actually learn the company’s systems and the rhythms of the crew. Yes, good people get poached, but familiarity with a shop and the people in it tends to push back against that.
The second benefit is industry-wide. The two highest-attrition moments in the trades are landing the first job and getting signed as an apprentice. A paid placement bridges both. When a capable person gets a real shot to prove themselves, more good people stay. If the labour shortage is ever going to crack, paid placements have to be part of the answer.
What we’re asking for
Pay your interns. Start there. Better candidates show up. They produce more. They stay longer. The crew gets stronger. Turnover costs drop. More good people stick in the trades, and the labour shortage starts to ease, one shop at a time.
Trade Smart College is always looking for trades employers who want better entry-level hires. If that’s you, reach out about our 8 to Great program. We’ll help you build a crew that shows up prepared, focused, and ready to stay.
