The last time they went on strike, they were interns. Now they're back picketing as teachers

When Chloé Cabral-Châtelier was doing her education internships without pay, she felt so squeezed she joined the 54,000 university and CEGEP students across Quebec who walked out for a week to protest against unpaid internships in November 2018.

Now she finds herself back on the picket line with the Fédération autonome de l'enseignement (FAE), which represents 65,000 teachers across the province. Cabral-Châtelier says a lot of the demands are the same as when she was interning.

Many who graduated with Cabral-Châtelier left the profession entirely, and those who stayed are on strike once again.

"It's frustrating that things didn't change. We're four years later but we're in the same boat. It's the same issues — we're still talking about workloads and pay. The examples are different but the principle is the same," she said.

At the time, Cabral-Châtelier said she felt slighted when her male friends in engineering were getting well-paid internships while she had to work for free. She felt the sector she chose to work in was undervalued.

"When you do an internship in education or other similar fields, it's a huge weight mentally, physically and financially on the students," she said.

"So it brought out that anger and sense of injustice."

She says her colleagues who have been picketing for over 15 days are echoing what she and her university cohort were saying back in 2018 and 2019.

"We were being told in university to 'figure it out on your own with your internship, money and workload,' and now as a teacher, again it's 'figure it out!'" she said.

Rosaline Meunier, a special education teacher in preschool who was part of the student mobilization during the internship strikes, points out that the vast majority of those currently on strike are women — just like during the intern strikes.

"Back then, we were hearing that we needed to recognize the value of people working in the public sector, so teachers needed to be recognized," she said.

"We can see that the government doesn't value care workers as much as other workers, and most of those workers are women. So we can say that maybe they don't value women as much as they value men."

Barry Eidlin, a labour expert and sociology professor at McGill University, says Meunier is hitting the nail on the head.

He says the devaluation of care work — which includes nursing, teaching, personal care, early childhood education and social workers — is a recurring theme in labour struggles.