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Online community volunteers under investigation?
Posted by
Hemos
on Wed Apr 14, 1999 07:43 AM
from the you-must-keep-your-own-time dept.
from the you-must-keep-your-own-time dept.
NeoTron writes "An interesting story about AOL's "volunteers", and
how some people are getting the Labor Department to investigate whether using volunteer labor by AOL is violating the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
With
coverage like this I'm just wondering if/how this could affect Slashdot and other online communities that use volunteers... "
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Online community volunteers under investigation?
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Are these people sick? (Score:3)
I love the line:
When asked for compensation, AOL rejected, and removed the free account.
NO KIDDING They noticed someone who volunteered for a job, then said "Hey, why don't you pay me for all the time I spent on this".
You know what, I think I'm going back to my 4H leader and insist he pay me for the time I spent cleaning up the show rooms and barns. Not to mention the Red Cross for the times I donated time to a phone marathon.
And no, there IS NO Difference, if You volunteer for something, you are makeing a verbal contract that you are not going to ask for compensation. You want to ask them to HIRE YOU, that's different.
-- Keith Moore
Things that make you go hmmmm... (Score:5)
Think about it: If the Labour department says that AOL must compensate volunteers for work that Aids their business, or performs some business function, what does that do for the non Netscape/AOL Mozilla developers? I don't think that projects like Linux would be affected in any significant way, because there is no company, but any project that has corporate sponsorship and support might be impacted by a negative verdict in this case.
It is sad to see that people are always out to ruin something that I think that we all treasure here... The online community, doing things for "The big picture", and helping to improve and extend the technology that makes the Internet work. I, for one, hope that the Labour department decides to keep out of this, and decide that Internet related volunteering is "out of scope".
Just my $0.02
McAlister