A homeless ministry in Tampa is getting unwanted attention after word got out that it uses many of its residents as an unpaid labor force for various businesses–most notably at sporting events.
Tom Atchison is the pastor of New Life Pentecostal Church of God in North Tampa. It’s aligned with the Pentecostal Church of God (no relation to the big Church of God), a traditional Pentecostal denomination. He also operates New Beginnings, a homeless ministry with branches in Tampa and Largo. The Tampa Bay Times decided to put Atchison under the microscope after he joined the competition to run the new homeless shelter in Hillsborough County, home to Tampa–a contract that could potentially bring in $1.6 million a year to the successful bidder New Beginnings sends residents who can’t afford to pay $150 a week for room and board out to work at various jobs on both sides of Tampa Bay. Most notably, however, it sends out many of its residents to work concessions at Tampa Bay Rays, Tampa Bay Lightning, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers games, as well as the Florida State Fair and the Daytona 500. They don’t get a single penny for this work, however. All of the money goes straight to New Beginnings.
Atchison says that this program, which he calls “work therapy,” brings in enough money to allow him to take in people other groups turn down. But to homeless advocates and labor lawyers, it’s unethical at best and illegal at worst. Nan Roman of the National Alliance to End Homelessness points out that such programs are highly problematic because the residents of Atchison’s program are “desperate” and aren’t in “an equal, typical relationship between landlord and tenant.” Any residency program that claims to help the homeless, Roman says, needs to err on the side of protecting the residents. While Atchison says that labor crews at sporting events bring in “a substantial portion” of New Beginnings’ budget, he admitted that he doesn’t keep track of how many hours they work. According to labor lawyers, while workers can be compensated with shelter and food, their employers must keep track of both the hours worked and the amount of housing and meals in order to ensure the workers are earning the minimum wage. And even if Atchison’s program does pay his workers the equivalent of the minimum wage, it may still be illegal. Atchison says he models his program on the Salvation Army’s Adult Rehabilitation Centers, whose participants work in the charity’s thrift stores in return for room and board. However, labor law experts say that since participants in the Salvation Army’s program work only for the Salvation Army, that program is legal. In contrast, by farming out his residents to for-profit companies, Atchison may be violating the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
Those concerns have at least one team’s concessions operator rethinking its relationship with New Beginnings. Keith King, the chief legal officer at Center Plate, which runs the concessions for Rays games at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, says his company didn’t know homeless men were working there in return for room and meals. King says that Center Plate’s contracts with charities explicitly forbid the use of volunteers “dependent upon the charity for food, clothing, shelter…or any other necessities of life.” I haven’t been able to track down any other known instances of this happening in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS or Major League Baseball. But it seems to be a no-brainer for the five major leagues to ban their concessions contractors from engaging in such practices. It says something, though, that such a policy would even have to be necessary today.
At least one program that appears to be modeled on Atchison’s program has been ruled illegal. In 1993, almost 200 people sued two Manhattan business improvement districts, claiming that a program they ran called “Pathways to Empowerment” paid them as little as $1 per hour to work in various jobs, such as clearing out homeless people sleeping in the aisles of banks. In 1998, then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor ruled this program broke labor law because the participants were legally employees, not trainees as the districts claimed. After two years of appeals, the plaintiffs got over $800,000 in back pay.
Atchison’s background appears to be as sketchy as his “work therapy” program. He claims to have a doctoral degree in theology from Berean Bible College. But at various points in interviews with the Times, Atchison said Berean was located in Missouri, then Colorado, then California. The National Student Clearinghouse has no record of a Berean Bible College. The closest match is to a Berean Christian College that existed in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It closed, resurfaced in Colorado, then closed again.
So we have a guy who seems to find nothing wrong with having people work without being paid, and who appears to have a degree from a degree mill. Not exactly someone I’d want running a homeless shelter.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
