The Baldy Center Blog

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*

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

The Baldy Center Blog Post 43. 
Blog Authors: Alexandra Oprea (UB Philosophy) and Daniel J. Stephens  (UB Philosophy)
Blog Title: How to Vote Competently

In the year 2024, there are national elections across 73 different democracies with different electoral systems. Over 1.5 billion voters (of an eligible 2.4 billion) have already cast a ballot in 56 of these elections and at least another billion are expected to do so by the end of the year*. We presume that these voters want to discharge their duty competently, but what would it mean for them to do so? 

In a recent paper, entitled “A minimal standard of democratic competence,” published in the journal, Politics, Philosophy & Economics**, we argue that democratic citizens ought to vote in ways that help to preserve the continuation of their democracy. At a minimum, this involves considering the democratic credentials of various candidates and refusing to vote for candidates or policies that, if chosen, would predictably lead to the end of their democracy. 

The standard we propose is minimal in two senses. First, it describes a floor that we should expect every democratic citizen to rise above in order to be considered competent as a voter. Second, it relies on minimally controversial assumptions about what democracy is and should be. Our highest aspirations for democratic politics may include reasonable deliberation, economically sound policies, a just distribution of benefits and burdens, and/or high levels of political participation. But the democratic floor that all these aspirations build upon is a system of free and fair elections together with the suite of civil and political liberties that enable those elections. For example, free and fair elections require candidates who are not afraid to challenge the incumbent, voters who can expect their electoral choices to be protected from interference or intimidation, and journalists who do not fear censorship or persecution for their work. 

One can think of this model of democratic competence as analogous to competence in other domains. For instance, if you want to be even a minimally competent chess player, you need to be able to make legal chess moves and refrain from flipping the board over. Similarly, if you want to be a competent democratic citizen, you need to know how to vote for candidates that will keep the democracy going and commit to doing so without flipping the board over, metaphorically speaking.

Out of the nearly 4 billion voters across the world with the right to cast a ballot in 2024, many will confront relatively “easy” choices where neither of the major candidates constitutes a predictable threat to their democracy. But a growing proportion of voters are living in democracies at high risk of backsliding into authoritarianism, where one or more of the major candidates or parties have systematically indicated their lack of commitment to free and fair elections by intimidating the opposition, persecuting journalists, advocating political violence, or otherwise seeking to remove existing guardrails to an authoritarian takeover. It is for this reason that a clear standard of democratic competence can be practically valuable. We see at least three ways in which this would be so. 

First and foremost, we hope that voters themselves will strive to be competent in the way we suggest by prioritizing information about candidates’ democratic credentials. This may require difficult decisions to vote for candidates with less appealing policy proposals for the sake of keeping the democracy going. In addition to adopting the standard for themselves, voters can aim to convince others to do the same through conversation, social media posts, and canvassing. Because preserving democracy should be a shared priority across the political spectrum, one can expect these social norms around voting competently to be more widely acceptable than norms about choosing economic, immigration, or other kinds of policies.

Second, we intend the standard to be used in crafting priorities for civic education, particularly at the K-12 level. Civic education has lagged behind as a policy priority in a number of democracies as achievement in core academic subjects that are measured on international tests have garnered disproportionate attention and resources. Our standard suggests that democracies ought to prioritize civic education, particularly when high numbers of their citizens appear to fall below the relevant standard. This supports both traditional programs of civics and course content that teaches students how to spot a would-be authoritarian, including the history of authoritarian transitions and common demagogic techniques.

Finally, we believe that understanding democratic competence in this way can provide democratic citizens with reasons to support various reforms to their electoral systems. There are as many combinations of electoral rules as there are democracies, and some of these electoral systems make it easier for voters to be competent by making it harder for anti-democratic candidates to make it either onto the ballot or to the final round of the election. Although more research is needed to rank such electoral systems on this measure, we believe that the proposed standard can guide the conversation in the right direction.