Reveal 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.
Look up the work-based programs in your state below. You can search by state or program name, or you can check for a company name to see if it has benefited from rehab labor.
This is not a comprehensive directory. No federal or state agency collects this data, and most of these programs are unlicensed, making information about them difficult to obtain. To measure the scope of this problem, Reveal attempted to survey several hundred programs that we learned might require unpaid work. Only a fraction agreed to answer questions. To fill in the gaps, Reveal interviewed hundreds of current and former employees, rehab participants and state regulators and reviewed thousands of pages of tax records, financial documents, and wage and injury reports. We also documented companies that use these unpaid rehab workers. Some companies said they were unaware of their connection to the unpaid work, thanks to layers of subcontractors, or denied it altogether; other companies that used rehab labor at one point have since severed ties.
This listing was compiled over the course of the past year; to report recent program status changes or information about a work-based rehab you don’t see here, send Reveal a tip to rehabtips@revealnews.org.
Will Carless, Amy Julia Harris, Sohyeon Hwang, Quinn Lewis and Heidi Swillinger contributed to this directory.
Shoshana Walter can be reached at swalter@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @shoeshine.