I think you hit the nail on the head; it's a mess.
As I mentioned a bit earlier, there are older cases involving volunteer misclassification. I'm aware of some arbitration cases from maybe 10 years back where a company tried to get its employees or outside individuals to volunteer and it was found to be bargaining unit work. I'm not aware of a case like this where there's this large-scale, highly structured program where we're talking about millions and millions of potential hours of work at $10 an hour, or even less. I don't think this sort of program is contemplated by past cases dealing with volunteering, because this to me seems very clearly to be a problematic arrangement.