The erosion of labor protections for workers seen as "unskilled" but working outside of unionized manual jobs moved like water through cracks, exploiting and capitalizing on society's assumptions about whose work needed protection and who was worth protecting. Buried within the exemptions of the FLSA and the Taft-Hartley Act are clues about mid-20th-century assumptions about which workforces neede dprotection from unemployment and what - or who - seemed safe from automation [...] the FLSA excluded volunteering, what we might think of today as the ubiquituous unpaid college internship. Volunteering was considered apprenticing, core to building one's professional identity. Since medieval times, divinity, medicine, and law, teh so-called "learned professions," were seen as the exclusive paths of the educated classes. These skilled vocations needed no workplace protections. Their advanced degrees insulated them from economic insecurity. That is how a college education came to be seen as a gateway to the middle class for anyone who wanted to leave behind the mines or factories.

[...] The work conditions of the professions, at least in the early days of moder industrial capitalism, did not seem relevant to the debates over FLSA. And so, the Fair Labor Standards Act appied to "any individual employed by an employer" but not to independent contractors or volunteers training to enter the professional class. Both types of workers were considered liminal characters. The contractor was treated like a hammer or mechanical pencil, there only to do an immediate task. Interns, by contrast, were being groomed to step into the corner office someday.