Female online employees suing for overtime
Life inside a house filled with video cameras for the benefit of online viewers can be taxing. So a dozen ex-employees are taking Voyeur Dorm to court for uncollected overtime pay.Leah Thomas spends her days playing topless Twister and strip pool with other young women inside a suburban Tampa home. Fifty-five video cameras capture their frolicking for a daily Internet audience of 46,000. Thomas is seldom off camera, even when she is off the clock.
Some former residents of the Internet Voyeur Dorm are making legal history of sorts by applying New Deal-era labor concepts to the burgeoning field of webcasts and reality television. They have sued the operator of the website, www.VoyeurDorm.com, in federal court, alleging that the daily regimen of semi-nude sunbathing, housekeeping, swimming, showering and chat-room correspondence in the fishbowl of the World Wide Web went well beyond the limited hours they were told they would have to work.
They seek compensation for uncollected overtime pay.
The Tampa company has fired back with a lawsuit of its own, alleging two of the women violated a ''noncompete'' agreement by taking their talents, training and trade secrets to a rival business called Voyeur Cam Friends.
Although cavorting in a dorm may sound like easy labor, the plaintiffs say nitpicky rules often stipulated how they slept (with one leg dangling outside the sheets), brushed their teeth or watched TV (topless, or while painting one's toenails).
''It's not taxing work,'' scoffed Tony Griffin, a labor law attorney representing Voyeur Dorm.
He said the list of required tasks assigned to employees seldom even approached 40 hours a week and that the women could log those work hours sunbathing topless or even sleeping in a provocative nightgown. When not performing the assigned tasks ''on the clock,'' the women were on camera but free to do pretty much as they pleased, the company says.
The company contends the women weren't entitled to overtime anyway, because they worked for a fixed weekly salary.
But the litigants, none of whom still work for the company, say the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 entitles them to overtime pay. They claim a certain number of them had to be in the house at any one time, making them virtual prisoners -- and that anyone who left the premises could not leave for long.
''It kind of drives you crazy to be stuck in a house seven days a week,'' said one plaintiff, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Three women -- Laura Spell, Stephanie Piccolo and Arline Lindsey -- filed the original legal complaint. Nine others have since joined the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Tampa.
Founded in the late 1990s, Voyeur Dorm calls itself a pioneer in the expanding industry of voyeuristic Internet reality sites. Eight or nine college-age women earn $400 to $800 a week living rent-free in a house on a gated compound. Subscribers pay $39.95 a month or more to watch them.
Sociologists say such Internet sites have the same appeal as voyeuristic reality television shows such as Big Brother. There are other places to find far more explicit sexuality. But the reality broadcasts give viewers the sensation of catching the performers in a semiprivate moment, only dimly aware they are being watched.
''It's like you're seeing the hidden world of these women,'' said Beth Montemurro, an assistant professor of sociology at Penn State University who studies reality television and gender issues. ``It's a performance on both sides, I think, in sustaining that fantasy.''
Thomas, 22, a current employee who is not a party to the lawsuit, told her mother the job was ``just like The Real World on MTV.''
But she doesn't tell her everything she does inside the dorm, and Mom's visits have occasioned awkward moments.
''She came to Thanksgiving dinner one time,'' Thomas said, ``and one of the girls was baking a turkey naked.''
