Working for Rehab: Labor Expropriation as Treatment for Addiction

Abstract

This article draws on in-depth interviews with 40 people who attended Salvation Army addiction programs, which deploy “work therapy” as their primary form of addiction treatment. For this “therapy,” rehab residents must work at least 40 h a week without pay. Their labor fuels the Salvation Army's multimillion-dollar thrift store enterprise, while the workers themselves are construed as unproductive objects of charity. Yet most of the informants in this study embrace the Salvation Army's program and its expropriation of their unpaid labor. Through analysis of the four ideological tenets they use to do so, this article develops a typology of ideological justifications for labor expropriation. This is of crucial importance because if, as Nancy Fraser argues, labor expropriation—in addition to exploitation—is central to capitalist accumulation, we need to understand this realm of work and the ideologies that uphold it.