Study: Stigma legitimizes unpaid labor as therapy, even for those doing the work

BUFFALO, N.Y. – A Seventh Circuit panel ruled over the summer that the Salvation Army’s addiction treatment program, which mandates compulsory unpaid work from its participants, did not violate a federal law prohibiting forced labor.

The judges, however, were not all in agreement, dismissing the class action lawsuit, 2-1.

There’s also a split among the program’s participants responding to similar questions of exploitation versus therapy surrounding the program, known as the Adult Rehabilitation Center (ARC), according to a study by a University at Buffalo researcher who has also published pioneering work on pay for college athletes.

The Salvation Army operates 126 ARC programs across the U.S. They are often the only addiction treatment programs available to people without the resources to pay for in-patient programs, which can cost thousands of dollars a month.

But the ARC programs aren’t free. Participants receive evangelical Christian programming, but their primary treatment is an unpaid, 40-hour work week in a Salvation Army thrift store. Participation can be voluntary, but a significant portion of people, which varies by locality, have been mandated by the courts to complete a drug rehab program or else return to prison.

Erin Hatton, PhD, a professor of sociology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, spoke with 40 ARC participants. The Salvation Army uses the term “beneficiaries,” but Hatton refers to the program participants as “rehab workers.”

Her findings are published in the journal “Social Problems.”

Most of the rehab workers she interviewed said that their unpaid labor at one of these multimillion-dollar businesses was not unjustly exploitative.

But why would anyone feel that way? How can such overt exploitation be justified – and by its participants?

The answer is stigma.

“Because people with addiction are stigmatized as being prone to criminality, or characterized as unproductive and immoral, even by people who have themselves struggled with addiction, their exploitation is deemed legitimate,” says Hatton.

Rehab workers in Hatton’s study who engaged in broad stigmatizing tropes about addiction were more likely to believe the “work therapy” — as it’s called by the Salvation Army — was beneficial. And this was the case with 27 of her study’s participants. Those who resisted the idea of compulsory labor were more likely to reject stigmatizing beliefs about addiction.

“At the most basic level, and given the pervasiveness of addiction, these results suggest that we have to start strongly questioning stigma and move away from thinking about addicts as criminals,” says Hatton. “While it’s true that criminal behavior is sometimes associated with addiction – drug possession or theft, for instance – a key reason for this is the criminalization of addiction itself, which prevents people from getting the support they need.”

But questioning stigmatizing tropes about addiction is just the beginning. Hatton’s findings suggest that those tropes are as pervasive as addiction, even in a community of people in recovery.

“Stigma can effectively veil exploitation,” she says. “When we believe that some people are fundamentally flawed, when we reduce people to only one stigmatized trait, which is the case not only for people with addiction, then that stigma can easily be used to justify things like compulsory labor and other unacceptable behaviors.”