Lawsuit Accuses Recovery Connections of Exploiting Treatment Program Participants for Cheap Labor

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A proposed class action lawsuit out of North Carolina claims Recovery Connections Community, Journey to Recovery LLC and nine third-party contractors, including local restaurants and adult care homes, have required individuals to work up to 16 hours per day for no wages under the guise of a residential treatment program.

Recovery Connections represents to applicants that its recovery program will foster “healthy relationships,” “productive habits,” and a “foundation of life skills” through education, substance addiction assessments, training, support groups, and therapy, the case says. Despite these promises, however, the defendants’ program provides none of the promised benefits, the suit claims.

“Instead, Recovery Connections requires residents to perform arduous labor for long hours without pay,” the complaint reads. “Recovery Connections claims that this practice benefits residents and trains them in ‘vocational skills,’ but Recovery Connections provides no bona fide training, and the manual labor that residents are required to perform has no therapeutic value.”

Also named as defendants in the lawsuit are a group of local businesses with whom Recovery Connections and Journey to Recovery contract. According to the suit, the businesses pay the program operators sub-market rates that they know will never be passed on to laborers in exchange for a pool of laborers provided by the recovery program. The two named plaintiffs allege they received neither minimum nor overtime wages in accordance with state and federal labor laws despite working between 80 and 119 hours per week.

Adding to those allegations, the 88-page lawsuit claims program residents have been subjected to “unsafe, unsanitary, and inadequate” living conditions that endanger their health and fall vastly short of the defendants’ representations of the program’s benefits. The plaintiffs claim that while living in Recovery Connections' homes, they were subjected to “extreme temperature, mold, bedbug infestations, dangerous and/or damaged fixtures, overcrowding, and other intolerable living conditions.” Further, the case alleges the defendants went so far as to confiscate the individuals’ food stamps and deprived them of “adequate food and nutrition.”

Moreover, the case claims Recovery Connections is not licensed to provide substance abuse rehabilitation “or any other form of social services under any federal, state, or municipal law.”

In sum, the complaint states:

“The RCC Defendants engaged in deception and an inequitable assertion of power over Plaintiffs and Class Members, individuals recovering from substance abuse, by telling these individuals that, in order to recover from substance use, they needed to work long hours of uncompensated labor without adequate housing, sleep or nutrition, participate in abusive group ‘therapy,’ be isolated from family and friends, and be subjected to draconian discipline practices for non-compliance.”