A well-known addiction rehab nonprofit made money by using its patients as unpaid laborers for companies, including Walmart, Shell and Exxon, an investigation by Reveal claims.
Former patients 'treated' at Cenikor's 12 Texas and Louisiana locations described working 80-hour weeks, or for over 40 days straight, without pay and with little time to eat or sleep - much less to have counseling or therapy.
Cenikor operates on the model that working helps people recover from addiction and sets them up with employment opportunities after completing the program.
Patients pay Cenikor for its services, and Cenikor maintains contracts with companies that need unskilled labor. The rehab in turn puts its patients to work at those companies, unpaid.
Some experts say the arrangement may break federal laws regulating labor practices.
Cenikor is a nonprofit, but its patients are essentially living in 'work camps for private industry,' Reveal asserts, and doing on sweltering oil fields, in grueling warehouses and in unsafe conditions that have left one dead and several badly injured.
In Louisiana and Texas, the drug rehab nonprofit Cenikor sends clients to 'work therapy' at over 300 companies, including Walmart, Shell and Exxon. Patients do hard, unpaid labor in grueling conditions and have been injured and even killed, a Reveal investigation found
On the rehab's website, Cenikor president Bill Bailey calls 'work therapy' a 'critical therapeutic and educational activity.'
But patients that did that work described horrible and unhealthy conditions to Reveal.
Logan Tullier worked 10 hours a day of hard manual labor in 115 degree heat for oil refineries.
At Cenikor by court order, Ethan Ewers said he worked for 43 days
