My Yahoo!In 1993, he filed suit against AOL for failure to pay back wages, asking for a little less than $600. Trobee says he would have settled for that amount, but the acrimony between the litigants became so extreme that he expanded his suit to include charges of failure to pay overtime, vindictive termination, and breach of contract. Trobee felt he had been doing the work of an AOL employee, and he set out to prove it.
"They didn't want to admit to anything,'' he says. "They wouldn't even admit to it in negotiations, verbally. I kept saying, 'Look, if this goes to court, you know what your liability is,' and they would kind of nod their heads and change the subject."
In a hearing held in the Dauphin County (Pennsylvania) Court of Common Pleas during April 1995, Trobee, acting as his own counsel, asked for a crucial piece of evidence, a copy of AOL's employee manual. This would show, he believed, that he fell within the guidelines of what an AOL employee was. But company lawyers testified they had no employee manual. "We're professionals. We have no written guidelines....It just comes naturally," quipped one AOL attorney to the judge.
"I tracked down a copy of the employee manual through alt.aol-sucks," Trobee laughs, referring to a Usenet newsgroup. "An ex-employee in Florida still had his."
The next hearing took place on Valentine's Day of 1996. At that hearing, AOL claimed the document was not an employee manual but rather a Market Support Technical Representative Information Manual, an instructional guide for service representatives. But the document included sections on AOL's mission statement, employee conduct, time sheets, paychecks, jury duty, sick leave, vacation, and holiday policies. This prompted an irritated Judge Joseph Kleinfelter, who was trying the case, to remark: "If that's not a personnel manual, I don't know what is."
The judge considered sanctions, civil and criminal, against both the company and the testifying attorney. Eventually, he fined AOL a contempt sum of $1,000 for failure to produce documents during discovery and ordered AOL to reimburse Trobee for his time and efforts. In the end, AOL settled with Trobee out of court. The settlement is rumored to be in the six-figure range.
In 1995, at the same time it was battling Errol Trobee in court, AOL's legal department was trying to figure out how to restructure the company's relationship with its volunteers, whom it called "remote staff," in a way that gained a maximum economic payoff while trying to avoid running afoul of labor laws. At the time, the company still had no idea how many total volunteers it had, how many were underage, and who was overseeing them. It set up a Remote Staff Task Force to answer those questions.
Throughout the company, says Teri Myers, a former community leader operations manager, "There was this sudden lightbulb moment where they said, 'Oh, my God, we have thousands of people out there acting as our representatives, and we don't even know who they are.'''
Ann Reed was hired in 1996 to get a handle on the situation. "There was no consistency to it," she says. "A lot of people were working a lot of hours, and AOL realized they were not paying them anywhere near minimum wage."
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