By Gabrielle Liu — Junior Copy Editor

Many valuable student positions offer meager honorariums given their time commitment, thereby posing a barrier to people who want to get involved in campus leadership. Students may forgo applying to honorarium-based internships, assistantships, and extracurricular roles in favor of steady income. Often, honorarium-paying positions are part-time work, offering 5-15 hours weekly. This is not necessarily a huge addition to a student’s workload unless they are working significant hours elsewhere to pay the bills. In addition, an end-of-semester lump sum cannot realistically cover your monthly rent except for the months of January or May.

My position on The Campus newspaper team pays a generous $500 honorarium per semester for an average of ten hours of work per bi-weekly issue. The writing, interviewing, and editing process takes five hours per week. Over the 13 weeks of the team’s work in Fall 2022, that amounts to $38.46/week, an hourly wage of $7.69. This less-than-minimum wage is acceptable because I am privileged to have a family supporting my tuition, and I work a combination of jobs that pay the rest of the bills. Writing for The Campus is simply a welcomed add-on that I can wrap around my existing work-school schedule. We can not assume that is the case for everyone. 

Take for example the recent opening for General Councillor on the SRC Board of Representatives. This position serves the student body by liaising, advocating for, and making recommendations to the Board and SRC Executives. From Feb. 13 – April 30, 2023, serving 5-10 hours a week, the honorarium was listed to be $185. Over 10 weeks of work, working 7.5 hours a week, that would be an hourly wage of $2.47. Aspects of volunteering and community service are perhaps integral to the position. But, even if honorariums are meant to be “gifts” or “bonuses” for volunteer service, not compensation, that does not change the fact that certain students cannot afford to take on this service when that means losing a day shift at Provigo or BMO on Mondays. Or, they could choose to serve on the Board or take on an internship without reducing working hours and commitments elsewhere, hoping not to burn out. 

Honorarium positions often equip students with skills they can use in their future careers and make their CVs stand out. The Layout Editor position on The Campus involves learning Adobe InDesign, the industry standard program for print publishing. SRC Representatives are apt communicators, mediators, and listeners with experience in governmental procedures. Teaching assistantships look excellent on resumes and allow you to work closely with Bishop’s professors, a relationship that can grant letters of recommendation and research assistantships. We create feedback loops in campus leadership when impressive titles and competitive skills are withheld from students who can not take on those extra hours as they juggle more viable ways to make tuition, car, insurance, and rent payments. For the many who manage to do it all regardless, it is a feat I am sure comes with incredible fatigue.

Asking all student positions to pay an hourly wage bi-weekly may be too much of an accounting headache for now. We should consider how having students wait four months to be compensated, at less than minimum wage, assumes a certain level of financial health among the student population, and how that impacts the equity in opportunities on campus.