According to a fascinating story last week in the New York Times, the Labor Department "will neither confirm nor deny" that it is investigating the use of volunteer labor by America Online, the nation's leading online service and portal to the World Wide Web. For years, it turns out, AOL has given free access to its services to people who log on to the service from home and do useful things like rate on other users who use profanity in AOL chat rooms.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the notoriously fractious nature of online "communities," a number of disgruntled volunteers have parted company with AOL on unfriendly terms. And now they've gone running to the feds. Not for back pay, they say, but to draw attention to their grievances: AOL didn't appreciate their efforts; they got kicked off AOL for life because of badmouthing; they did more for the company than paid employees; the "free service" they got for their efforts used to be worth more because AOL used to be more expensive than it is now; yadda, yadda, yadda.
If the Labor Department doesn't just laugh at this, it means some federal bureaucrats don't have much real work to do. After all, why do something as grubby as protecting immigrant Chinese girls working in a sweatshop in Los Angeles, when you can make a name for yourself by going after AOL on behalf of middle-class folk who once had a hobby, but then got bored with it?