What It Cost Them That No Court Can Quantify

You’re at one of the lowest points of your life. Addiction has taken things from you that you cannot name, and the law has its hand on your shoulder. You need help, and someone offers it. The Salvation Army says: come in, get clean, we have beds and meals and counseling. You say yes. Of course you say yes.

What they do not tell you clearly enough, in that moment, is that the price of that help is your labor. Not symbolic labor. Not an hour or two of folding clothes as part of a structured routine. Full-time work. Forty hours a week, and sometimes more. The same work the person next to you gets paid at least California minimum wage to do.

Teresa Chase sorted and cleaned donated items, ran errands, took inventory, assisted customers on the floor, operated warehouse machinery, and worked the front desk. Jacob Tyler unloaded trucks, organized clothing racks, built store displays, cleaned bathrooms, helped shoppers, and staffed the residence desk. Justin Spilman loaded and unloaded trucks, sorted donations, and moved carts of goods. None of them received a paycheck. They received a canteen card that only worked inside the facility, a small amount of cash described by the Salvation Army as a “gift,” a bunk, and three meals.

You cannot spend a canteen card at the grocery store. You cannot send it home to your kids. You cannot use it to pay the first month’s rent when you leave the program and try to start over.

The Salvation Army prohibited participants from working outside the program. You could not pick up a weekend shift somewhere to build savings for your exit. You were inside their system, entirely dependent on their food, their roof, and their version of your schedule, while your labor generated revenue for their thrift store network. The court records show the Salvation Army used that revenue to fund its charitable activities, including the rehabilitation program itself. You were, in other words, partially funding your own treatment with your own uncompensated labor.

If you got sick and missed a scheduled work shift, you had to make it up later. That detail is in the court record. There is no elaborate legal analysis required to understand what it means: your recovery was subject to a make-up policy. Your illness was a debt to the operation.

Some of the people who entered these programs did so because a judge gave them a choice between this and prison. That is the context in which they signed forms acknowledging they were not employees. Not in a job interview. Not after consulting a lawyer. After a criminal proceeding, facing incarceration, with limited options and no leverage. The Salvation Army drafted those forms. The Salvation Army controlled every aspect of the program. The Salvation Army decided when you worked, what you did, and what happened if you didn’t perform.

The court system took until 2026 to decide that maybe, just maybe, the legal standard used to dismiss this case was wrong. The people who lived it already knew that.

What the Court Documents Actually Say

The following quotes come directly from the January 6, 2026, published opinion of the California Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, Division Five, in Spilman et al. v. The Salvation Army (Case No. A169279). Each quote is followed by a plain-language breakdown of what it establishes.

“Participants are required to work in various functions that support the Salvation Army warehouse and thrift store, which the Salvation Army terms ‘work therapy.’ Persons unable or unwilling to perform work therapy (or to participate in any other aspect of the program) are ineligible for the rehabilitation programs.”

• Participation in unpaid labor was not optional. You could not accept the housing, meals, and rehabilitation services while declining the warehouse and thrift store work. The labor was a condition of receiving treatment.
• This structure is legally significant because it blurs the line between voluntary service and coerced labor. The court would later flag this as a key question for the trial court to re-examine.

“The Salvation Army prohibits participants from obtaining outside employment during the program.”

• Participants were locked out of earning any external income while contributing full-time labor to the Salvation Army’s commercial operations. This is an employer-level restriction on a worker’s labor market participation, imposed without providing minimum wage in return.
• In employment law, controlling whether a worker can take other jobs is one indicator of an employment relationship, not a volunteer arrangement.

“Spilman asserts, and the Salvation Army disputes, that participants performed the same tasks as workers whom the Salvation Army classified as employees and paid at least the minimum wage. The parties further dispute whether the Salvation Army used volunteer workers to replace paid workers, reduce costs, and maximize revenue.”

• This is the displacement question. If unpaid participants were doing identical work to paid employees, the Salvation Army was effectively substituting free labor for labor it would otherwise have to pay for. That is the textbook definition of wage evasion.
• The court identified this as a triable issue of material fact, meaning it must be resolved with evidence at trial, not dismissed on a legal technicality.

“Participants who miss scheduled work due to illness are required to make up missed work and programming.”

• A volunteer who skips their shift at a charity bake sale does not owe the charity a make-up shift. This rule treats missed labor as a debt, which is a feature of an employment relationship.
• The court’s opinion on the Alamo Foundation case specifically highlighted that conditioning benefits on labor performance suggests “wages in another form.” This make-up requirement points in the same direction.

“Requiring an agreement for compensation in all circumstances could undermine those [wage law] purposes by allowing the most vulnerable of workers to persist in positions of unpaid servitude.”

• The court explicitly named what this arrangement looks like when the legal abstraction is stripped away: unpaid servitude. This is the appeals court’s own language, in a published, certified opinion.
• This statement directly repudiates the trial court’s reasoning. The trial court said no agreement to pay wages means no employee status. The appeals court said that standard would permit exploitation of the most vulnerable workers and is therefore wrong.

“Even when a person is willing to volunteer their labor, the worker may not properly be deemed a volunteer if the nonprofit is exploiting the situation to evade the wage laws.”

• Consent alone is not a defense. The court is saying that a person’s willingness to work without pay does not automatically make the arrangement legal. The organization using that labor still has to demonstrate it is not running a wage-evasion scheme.
• This shifts the burden. Under the new test, the Salvation Army must affirmatively prove its use of unpaid labor is legitimate, not just point to signed forms where participants acknowledged they were not employees.

Who Gets Hurt When This Is Allowed to Continue

Public Health

When addiction recovery is structured around labor extraction rather than evidence-based treatment, the people most in need of care are the ones who suffer.

• Participants in these programs are by definition in a medically vulnerable state. Imposing full-time physical labor, including truck unloading, warehouse machinery operation, and extended customer service shifts, during active addiction recovery carries genuine risk of physical harm, exhaustion, and relapse.
• The court documents note that rehabilitation services consisted of classes, church services, Bible study, AA meetings, and biweekly one-on-one counseling sessions. This is a sparse clinical offering for people managing substance use disorders. When the bulk of a participant’s time is consumed by warehouse and retail labor, the rehabilitation component becomes secondary.
• The companion federal case Alvear v. Salvation Army (N.D. Ga. 2023) found plaintiffs had stated a cognizable claim that “the volume of work leaves little time for rehabilitation” and that the rehabilitation services were described as “rudimentary.” If that characterization applies to any Salvation Army program location, participants were being denied meaningful treatment while their labor was being used commercially.
• People who are in these programs as an alternative to incarceration have even less ability to leave if the program is causing harm. Their health risks are compounded by the legal threat holding them in place.

Economic Inequality

The wage theft embedded in this arrangement does not just harm the individuals inside the programs. It distorts labor markets and undercuts workers who are supposed to be protected by the same laws being bypassed.

• California’s minimum wage exists to set a floor. Every hour of free labor the Salvation Army extracts from recovery participants is an hour that does not put downward pressure on wages only in theory; the California Court of Appeal stated explicitly that using unpaid volunteers to replace paid employees creates “downward pressure on wages in competing businesses,” affecting all workers in the sector.
• Thrift store competitors who pay their workers minimum wage and overtime are competing against a Salvation Army operation partially staffed by free labor. That is not a charitable advantage; it is a market distortion that punishes law-abiding employers and their paid employees.
• The participants themselves exit a six-month program with no savings, no employment history they can put on a resume, no wages earned, and in some cases the same criminal record they entered with. The economic outcome for them is zero financial gain from months of full-time work.
• The canteen cards issued as gratuities could only be redeemed at the rehabilitation center. This is a company scrip system. It is the same mechanism that 19th-century coal companies used to ensure workers could not accumulate outside wealth or leave. The technology is different. The function is the same.
• Workers from communities disproportionately harmed by the criminal legal system, including people of color and low-income individuals, are the primary population funneled into these programs as an alternative to incarceration. The free-labor extraction is therefore concentrated among the most economically marginalized people in California.
• The Salvation Army operates this program structure across multiple states. The legal battles in Georgia, Illinois, Florida, and California all involve the same model. The scale of unpaid labor across the national network, multiplied by months of full-time work per participant, represents an enormous aggregate transfer of value from economically vulnerable workers to a nonprofit with substantial commercial operations.

Putting a Number on the Extraction

The court record does not provide a single dollar figure for total unpaid wages across the class. What it does provide are the structural facts needed to understand the scale.

The People Who Need to Answer for This, and What You Can Do

The California Court of Appeal has sent this case back to the trial court with a new legal standard. That is a procedural win, not a final victory. The Salvation Army has not paid wages. No court has ordered it to. The fight continues.

Who Is Accountable

The source documents identify The Salvation Army as the defendant and respondent. The court records were filed in San Francisco City and County Superior Court. Salvation Army operations in California and nationwide operate this rehabilitation-through-labor model.

• The Salvation Army (defendant and respondent in Spilman et al. v. The Salvation Army, Case No. A169279 / CGC-21-591364)
• Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Program facilities in San Francisco, Stockton, and Chico, California
• [REDACTED – Not in Source]: specific national leadership names responsible for the Adult Rehabilitation Program policy structure are not identified in this court document
• The Hon. Ethan P. Schulman, San Francisco Superior Court Judge who granted original summary judgment in favor of the Salvation Army; that ruling has now been reversed

Regulatory Watchlist

• California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE): The state agency responsible for enforcing California’s wage orders, including Wage Order No. 7 (Mercantile Industry). File a wage complaint at dir.ca.gov/dlse/.
• California Labor Commissioner’s Office: Accepts complaints from workers who believe they have been denied minimum wage or overtime. This office can investigate and order restitution.
• U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division: Enforces the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The same “suffer or permit to work” standard at issue in this California case also applies federally. File at dol.gov/agencies/whd.
• California Attorney General’s Office: Has authority to investigate nonprofits operating in California, including whether charitable organizations are misusing their tax-exempt status to extract uncompensated labor at commercial scale.
• IRS Exempt Organizations Division: The Salvation Army’s nonprofit status is predicated on operating for charitable purposes. If its commercial thrift store operations are structured to extract free labor from vulnerable people, that raises questions about whether its activities match its exempt purpose.

What You Can Actually Do

• If you or someone you know participated in a Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Program and performed unpaid labor in their warehouse or thrift store operations in California between 2015 and the present, contact the plaintiffs’ legal team. The case was filed by Rose Bien Galvan and Grunfeld LLP, Rukin Hyland and Riggin LLP; their contact information is publicly available through the State Bar of California.
• Do not donate goods to Salvation Army thrift stores until this case is resolved. Your donated items generate revenue that has been partially produced by uncompensated labor from people in addiction recovery. Redirect donations to organizations with transparent labor practices.
• Support the Impact Fund, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Legal Aid at Work, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and The Wage Justice Center: all filed amicus briefs supporting the plaintiffs in this case and work on these issues year-round.
• Organize locally. Many cities and counties have labor councils, tenant unions, and mutual aid networks that do case intake for wage theft. If you are in the Sacramento Valley or Bay Area, connect with those networks to build collective pressure.
• Follow the case. The remand means this goes back to San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. CGC-21-591364. Court filings are public record. Track the docket and share updates when the Salvation Army files its next round of arguments.
• Pressure your city council and county supervisors to prohibit county contracts with organizations under active wage theft litigation. Public money should not flow to entities that are currently fighting in court to deny wages to addiction recovery participants.