In his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain tells the story of Tom tricking his friends into whitewashing a fence, a chore assigned to him by his Aunt Polly, by portraying the task as play rather than work. Later he reflects “that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

This tale illustrates an often overlooked phenomenon of our economic life—that the same activity can be regarded as leisure or work, consumption or production. Businesses, like Tom, understand that certain types of labor often go unrecognized or uncompensated as a result of cultural understandings that frame them as something other than “Work”—and exploit this confusion.

Take the nonprofit National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), which organizes and regulates university athletics in the United States. NCAA athletes, particularly in high-revenue sports like men’s football and basketball, produce enormous value for universities. They train intensively, often more than 40 hours per week, and their performances generate millions of dollars in ticket sales, TV rights, and merchandise revenue. Yet, until recently, they were never paid. The NCAA resisted antitrust and employment law litigation by portraying their Work as Play, or as education that students are lucky to receive for free. Only recently have courts begun to see through this pretense and recognized that college athletes, like professional athletes, “play” for a living.

Read more at ProMarket