The wages of peer recovery workers: underpaid, undervalued, and unjust

ABSTRACT

Peer-based recovery support services are evidence-based practices used to achieve long-term recovery. Fundamental to these services are peer recovery workers, who use their lived experience of long-term recovery to form trusting, supportive relationships with individuals initiating self-directed journeys to mental health or substance use recovery. However, peer recovery workers report low salaries and workplace environments that cause unnecessary stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, and suboptimal service provision. We compare mean state peer recovery worker wages with prevailing state living wages by utilizing a living wage calculator and assembling data on wage offers from a national job-posting platform in the US. Our results suggest significant wage insufficiency. Among single-worker households with children, the living wage exceeds mean peer wages in every state. We conclude with guidance to public health researchers and practitioners to address the social justice implications of wage insufficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Substance use
• mental health
• peer recovery
• workforce
• just wages

Acknowledgements

Sam McIntyre and Jennifer Hinson provided research assistance in finalizing the revised manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

The author was entirely responsible for this manuscript’s data collection, analysis, and drafting.

Data availability statement

The author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2024.2332796.

Notes

1. We compared the salary distributions of Peer Recovery Specialists with Peer Recovery Coaches in the ZipRecruiter database. We chose the latter for analysis since it was closer to Cronise and colleague’s (2016) estimate, was less skewed, and approximated a normal distribution. The comparison of distributions is with the supplementary materials.

2. The Nevada living wage for households with 0 children and one non-working adult is $27.59. Inflated to 2023 dollars at 3.18% inflation, this yields $28.47.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.