Work Therapy: Extractive Labour as Therapeutic Intervention

This article examines ‘work therapy’ in the US, a sprawling but overlooked realm of work in which people are put to work—usually without pay and employment rights—in the name of ‘therapy’. For whom is work constructed as ‘therapy’, this article asks, what is deemed therapeutic about labour, and what are its consequences? Through content analysis of organisational documents, this article finds ‘work therapy’ to be a mechanism for disciplining and extracting labour from already-marginalised populations. Yet not all ‘work therapy’ programmes are equally disciplinary and extractive, and so this article distinguishes between those of extractive exclusion and extractive inclusion. Despite such variation, however, the commonalities between these programmes overshadow their differences. For, when organisations discursively frame work as ‘therapy’, their goal is to put marginalised groups to work in underpaid or unpaid jobs, while justifying workers’ low or non-existent wages with unfounded claims of medical treatment.