Across Quebec this week, 35,000 students enrolled in social work, education, nursing, and psychology programs are striking in protest of the critical — but unpaid — labor they provide through their internship training programs. Social-work interns manage caseloads. Education interns write and deliver lesson plans. Nursing interns see patients and complete charting. Yet none are paid for this work.

They are students, the argument goes, and therefore they should pay, not be paid, for these experiences. Yet students in male-dominated fields — engineering, for example — aren’t subject to the same logic; internships in male-dominated fields in the province are paid. This is a strike, thus, for students, for workers, and for women’s work.

The movement is quick to reject an official leader or spokesperson, but Eleni Schirmer, an educational policy studies graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison caught up with a few organizers — Isabelle Cheng, student in psychology and member of CUTE-UQAM, and Paolo Miriello-Lapointe, member of the Montreal Coalition for Paid Internships — to learn more.