News magnate William Randolph Hearst lost a case in 1944 before the Supreme Court when he failed to convince the court that paperboys were the equivalent of their own bosses, operating as contract workers, exempt from employment labor protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It's worth noting that paperboys didn't just deliver the news. They served as the primary sales force for papers, and their jobs often put them in physical danger as they made their way through the thick of bustling street traffic. The Supreme Court read the spirit of the FLSA as applying to any worker economically dependent on and producing for another entity. The Heart Corporation, bruised from the Supreme Court's verdict recognizing street corner paperboys as workers deserving of workplace protections under FLSA, lobbied to narrow the definition of "employee" under the Taft-Hartley amendment to WAgner's National Labor Relations Act. Hearst pushed to explicitly exempt independent contractors, working off-site or considered peripheral to business operations. Congress's revisions to the original Wagner Act would instead require courts to use strict tests to classify "common law" employment status rather than assume that businesses hiring people to carry out work counted as workers deserving of fair labor practices and employment benefits.