Two former America Online Inc. volunteers have filed a class action lawsuit
against the company in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The suit alleges that Brian
Williams and Kelly Hallisey, along with an estimated 10,000 AOL volunteers,
should have been paid for their work in AOL’s forums, chat rooms, and
bulletin boards.
Damages have not yet be set, but Leon Greenberg, attorney for the
volunteers, estimates that AOL could owe as much as $20 million in back
wages. While his clients and other members of the class voluntarily gave
their time to AOL, Greenberg says federal labor law doesn’t allow such
generosity to a for-profit business.
“AOL isn’t a charity. If it were, these people would have no claim. But AOL
does business to make money and therefore they’re covered by law.”
Williams said the commercialization of AOL was in part what drove him and
Hallisey to file the suit. According to Williams, he became disillusioned when AOL started turning its community forums into revenue generators.
“It increasing became like AOL was just trying to make a dollar off the
back of free slave labor. Before, you didn’t have advertising everywhere,
and it was a much richer community where people got together to get
together, and now it’s not like that.”
After putting in several thousand hours as a volunteer, Williams says AOL
relieved him of his role after he organized a strike of AOL community
leaders in the fall of 1996. The strike was in protest of AOL’s
announcement that it would charge guides $5 per month for AOL access —
taking away the free accounts which were the only compensation they
received for their work. Since the strike, he says he and Hallisey have
been marked as troublemakers.
“They fired me to shut me up. We’ve been labeled security risks due to the strike. We can’t go into chat rooms now without four or five names popping
in that are internal AOL folk just watching us, not saying a word.”
The lawsuit comes 6 weeks after reports that the US Labor Department, in
response to complaints from volunteers, is investigating AOL for its use of unpaid labor.
AOL officials today didn’t return phone calls seeking a response.
Williams and Hallisey have set up a Web site to distribute information about the suit and invite other AOL volunteers to
join.
