The Baldy Center Blog Post 44. 
Blog Author: Erin Hatton PhD, Professor

Blog Title: Is Unpaid Labor Exploitation or “Therapy”? The Answer Depends on Stigma*

Is Unpaid Labor Exploitation or “Therapy”? This question was on my mind when I interviewed 40 people who had been required to work, without pay, for the Salvation Army’s Adult Rehabilitation Centers (ARCs), which are no-cost residential programs for people with addiction. There are approximately 126 ARCs across the country and, often, they are among the few—if not the only—long-term treatment options available for people with addiction who do not have insurance or the resources to pay thousands of dollars a month for in-patient addiction treatment.

Yet, these programs are not exactly free of charge. All ARC residents must work without pay at least 40 hours a week for the duration of their six-month (or more) stay in the program. The Salvation Army calls it “work therapy” and, along with evangelical Christian programming, this unpaid labor is the primary form of addiction “treatment” dispensed at ARCs.

Even as the rehab workers’ unpaid labor is framed as their “therapy,” it is economically valuable to the Salvation Army. Indeed, it fuels the Salvation Army’s thrift store enterprise: rehab workers retrieve donations from private households, they unload, sort, and fix donations in large warehouses located near every ARC, and they dispatch donations to nearly 1,000 Salvation Army thrift stores in the U.S. This work generates over $500 million a year for the Salvation Army.

In his time at the ARC, “Jack” (a pseudonym) sorted donated clothes in the warehouse and then he worked as a truck dispatcher, taking calls from potential donors and organizing trucks to pick up donations. I interviewed Jack and, when asked how he viewed his work at the ARC, he echoed the Salvation Army in describing it as “therapeutic.” “You remember The Karate Kid, right, the whole wax-on, wax-off thing?” Jack asked, by way of explanation.

"What they’re doing is giving you the skills to get out there and do it. [They’re saying,] “Listen man, you’re going to have to listen to an authority figure. You’re going to have to let things go. You’re going to have to develop a work ethic. You’re going to have to get up and be at work by 8 o’clock.” So, there is a therapeutic element to it… So, I think the work therapy is giving you the tools to do what you don’t want [to do]. You know, nobody becomes a criminal to work 9:00 to 5:00. A lot of us have to learn that."

Jack thus believes that rehab workers’ unpaid labor is a form of “therapy” because it teaches and enforces their labor compliance and capitalist discipline: they must learn “to listen to an authority figure,” “develop a work ethic,” and “get up and be at work by 8 o’clock.” Such lessons are necessary, Jack’s words suggest, because people with addiction are not already adequately submissive to capitalists and capitalism. “The work therapy is giving you the tools to do what you don’t want,” Jack said. “Nobody becomes a criminal to work 9:00 to 5:00. A lot of us have to learn that,” he explained, distinguishing people with addiction—whom he described as “criminals”—from their implicit moral counterpart: mainstream workers who do not have to learn such lessons.

Like many people in America, Jack views people with addiction through the lens of stigma. In fact, most of my informants did as well, and they used a variety of stigmatizing tropes to describe people with addiction. “Addicts” are “lying” and “manipulative,” my informants often said. “Addicts” are “thieves” and “conmen”; they are “lazy,” “selfish,” unproductive, and “entitled.”

It is this stigma of people with addiction, I find, that is used to justify their exploitation. Like three-fourths of my informants (n = 30), Jack’s stigmatization of people with addiction means that he construes his unpaid labor as a form of “therapy,” not exploitation. Because they are “criminals” who do not have a “work ethic,” they need this labor discipline. By contrast, 10 of the rehab workers I interviewed viewed their unpaid labor at the ARC as unjustly exploitative, not “therapy,” and none of them espoused stigmatizing tropes of addiction.

Thus, I find that Jack and other unpaid rehab workers offer new answers to longstanding sociological questions. For more than a century, scholars of labor, capitalism, and power have contemplated how and why workers ideologically consent to, and therefore sustain, their own exploitation. In response, scholars have identified mechanisms that either justify such exploitation, so that workers deem it to be legitimate, or hide it, so that workers don’t recognize it as exploitation at all. Scholars such as Michael Burawoy have argued that the latter are particularly important. Without the obfuscation of exploitation, Burawoy writes, “hegemony is fragile.” **

Yet, in this study I find that there are also mechanisms of legitimation powerful enough to legitimize exploitation even when such exploitation is entirely unhidden. For these stigmatized workers, their exploitation does not need to be hidden. It becomes a justified form of “therapy” to correct their stigmatized status.

Blog Post Notes
* Hatton, Erin. 2024. “Nobody Becomes a Criminal to Work 9 to 5’: Unpaid Labor, Stigma, and Hegemony in Addiction Treatment.” Social Problems: doi.
** Burawoy, Michael. 2012. “The Roots of Domination: Beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci.” Sociology 46(2): 198.  

Related link:
UB Research News Stigma legitimizes unpaid labor as therapy — even for those doing the work