Guy signs up to volunteer with Super Bowl pre-game production company and quickly figures out they are being used as unpaid stagehand: ‘It would have been nothing to slap people with $100 for 5 hours’ – FAIL Blog

Big events love to dress up exploitation in a slightly shiny costume and call it an opportunity. The Super Bowl is the king of this game. It is a giant money machine built on ads sponsorships and hype that can afford to pay people but still likes to round the labor cost down to zero whenever it can. The trick is very simple. You take hard boring work like moving heavy stages and then you sprinkle it with words like access field experience and behind the scenes. Suddenly free labor feels like a backstage pass instead of a low wage job.