Serfing the Web

AOL's treatment of its volunteer workers should give pause to those arguing for less regulation of business

A A A Comments By Matt Smith Wednesday, Jan 9 2002

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Fred Harper

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Technology Age companies, just like their automobile- and bluejeans-manufacturing brethren, must be subject to scrupulous government regulation or they will abuse people. The Securities and Exhange Commission should have scrutinized America Online's system of volunteer serfdom before approving the company's purchase of Time Warner. The Labor Department should sift through the operations of other tech-industry enterprises to see if they are illegally using volunteers in the way AOL Time Warner appears to have.

Unfortunately, the Silicon Valley anti-regulatory bias continues to this day, despite the fact that the current recession's high unemployment levels are sure to result in corner-cutting by unscrupulous employers. When it becomes increasingly clear that retaining employees doesn't require nurturing them, or even treating them fairly, corporations are going to look less and less like churches, and more like AOL.

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