The Shadow Workforce

New subscribers: We’re on our eighth and final episode of our first-ever podcast series, American Rehab. If you haven’t listened yet, catch up here.

For nearly two months on our radio show and podcast, we’ve been tracing the history of a uniquely American phenomenon: people struggling with addiction who are sent to work without pay in exchange for treatment.

We’ve explained how this model has roots in a violent cult, how its charismatic leaders repeatedly left the program on the edge of financial ruin, how major corporations benefited along the way, and how many of those caught up in the rehab machine’s grinding gears were spat out on the other side, injured and exploited.

This week, we’re concluding the series by answering two major questions: How many of these rehabs are out there? And is what they’re doing even legal?

Let’s tackle the legal question first. To do that, you’ve got to learn about a group called the Alamo Christian Foundation. Its leaders, Tony and Susan Alamo, recruited members – many of them young people with drug addictions – and provided counseling, as well as a place to stay.

Also part of the deal: unpaid work. Alamo participants went to work at a variety of businesses, including trucking and record production. They even made bedazzled jean jackets that were popular among celebrities at the time. All the free work was OK, Alamo argued, because it was done in the name of God; Alamo was a religious institution, first and foremost.

But in 1985, the foundation was forced to defend its practices in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. A key question: Could all these workers truly be considered “pastors and evangelists”?

The short answer: No. The court said workers are entitled to be paid for their labor – at least minimum wage plus overtime.

That might have put an end to work-based rehab in the U.S. Instead, federal regulators failed to act, and the model expanded across the country unchecked.

Which led us to the second question: How many of these places are out there?

No federal or state agency tracks this, so we did it ourselves. Over more than three years of reporting, we identified at least 300 drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities in 44 states that required participants to work long hours without pay, in likely violation of labor law. Some work for rehab-run businesses; others for outside companies such as Walmart, Exxon and Shell. The participants receive room and board and in some cases a small stipend or allowance, typically amounting to less than $20 per week – well below the minimum wage.

“I knew of programs that look a lot like this,” one former federal regulator told us. “But I had no clue that it was so extensive and so widespread until you started doing your reporting.”

This reporting continues. Do you have experience with a work-based rehab? We want to collect it and share it with our Reveal Reporting Networks, a coalition of more than 1,000 local journalists across the U.S.

'I feel like the building should be shutting down.'

When the coronavirus pandemic began to rampage across the country, B., an Amazon warehouse worker whose name we’re withholding to guard against retaliation, didn’t have the luxury of staying home. Instead, she watched the tech giant attempt to install a series of on-site safeguards, even as a growing number of her co-workers fell ill.

Like many American workers navigating the pandemic, she found herself face to face with an impossible decision: Head to work and risk getting sick or lose out on crucial income.

Her bosses, meanwhile, appear to be in a different situation. “I don’t see upper management,” she told us, “so they must be staying home.”

This story is the latest in our In/Vulnerable series, a multipart collaboration with The Nib investigating inequity during the pandemic. Read all the installments here.

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