Northern Michigan fights drugs with jobs. Can it work statewide?

• A fledgling program connects employee-short businesses with people in recovery 
• Finding employment is a major stumbling block to recovery
• The state is starting to invest in the effort, which is too new to show results 

PETOSKEY — Jolene Fassett has failed more times than she can count, but one thing she’s good at is job interviews. Through the years, the 37-year-old has received many offers, only to later lose those positions when background checks came back.

Those checks showed run-ins with the law connected to stretches of opioid addiction, culminating in a felony in 2020 when she turned to meth.

The Mount Pleasant native emerged from her third round of substance use disorder treatment two years ago and has been sober since. 

Still, few businesses in this northern Michigan tourist town wanted to take a chance on a former addict.

Related:

• In Michigan’s vast UP, finding help for drugs is hard. So is finding solutions
• After years of opioids agony, rural Michigan finds reason for hope
• Before it even opens, a U.P. addiction clinic has 225 patients

On a recent Friday afternoon, Fassett sat in a break room of a Petoskey plywood and veneer plant. Wearing safety glasses and a Pink Floyd T-shirt, she spoke with pride that she is now a shift leader at the factory, where she has worked full-time since January 2023.

“I have not ever felt any judgment here,” Fassett said. “There are a lot of people who have been through recovery here.”

What’s going on inside this green corrugated steel building near Little Traverse Bay could become a model that helps address two of the state’s crippling crises — worker shortages and the opioid epidemic. Of the 150 people who work here, at least 1 in 5 are in substance use disorder recovery. On some shifts, it's closed to 4 in 5. 

That’s by design. 

Manthei Wood Products, which owns the facility and is part of Manthei Group that operates material and construction businesses in the region, has made a conscious effort to hire people who have struggled with addiction. It recently converted a 10-unit motel into in-recovery worker housing.

And while Abe Manthei, director of missional development for Manthei Group, says the family-owned company prides itself on “helping the community,” the effort also keeps the business humming in an era of increasingly desperate “Help Wanted” signs.

“We're just a little business up here in northern Michigan,” Manthei said, “but we believe we can actually make a difference in our employees’ lives.”

 The company is among the first in the state to become certified as a “recovery-friendly workplace” a designation that means management is trained in the impact of addiction and open to offering jobs to those in recovery.

If the fledgling, statewide program operated through the Michigan Public Health Institute works, it’s likely to be expanded. 

The state is already dipping its toe into supporting the effort — funding $473,000 in grants for the program this year, with slightly more money expected in the next two years.

Critical to measuring success is what happens at Manthei, which was experimenting with an in-recovery workforce before the statewide program launched in April. If efforts at this Petoskey factory prove to be both cost-effective for the business and lower relapse rates, Abe Manthei said he will lobby state leaders in Lansing to vastly expand support for the program, including potential financial incentives. 

With enough state funding, Manthei predicted, the effort could be a game-changer for businesses and for thousands of in-recovery residents.

Jobs as drug treatment

Opioids and other drugs kill close to 3,000 Michiganders a year, more than guns and car crashes combined.

It’s an epidemic that advocates hope can be curbed by a once-in-a-lifetime inflow of cash from national lawsuit settlements with pharmacies, opioid manufacturers and distributors deemed to be partly responsible for the explosion in opioid use disorder.  

Over 18 years, Michigan will receive about $1.6 billion from the settlements. The money began arriving in January 2023 and is split between the state and local governments across Michigan.

The most money of any single year, $186 million, is coming this year, adding to the imperative that advocates and community leaders quickly find solutions that put a dent in the crisis.

So far, settlement fund spending has focused on treatment and recovery. But those struggling with substance use disorder seldom stay in supervised recovery homes for more than six months. Many stay far less.

“If we just help somebody for 30 or 90 days and then send them on their way, from a very controlled environment to the real world, they don’t have the tools” to succeed,  said Caitlin Koucky, executive director of Petoskey-based Community Recovery Alliance, the agency promoting the recovery-friendly workplace initiative in five northern Michigan counties.

A job is a linchpin to creating the kind of stable environment that lowers the odds of relapse, said Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical executive.

“Housing and transportation come up in every conversation about needs,” Bagdasarian told Bridge Michigan, and both are dependent on income from a job.   

“There is such stigma associated with substance use disorder,” Bagdasarian said, with employers assuming those in recovery will be unreliable workers. “People who have not only a history of substance use disorder, but maybe also a criminal record, have a particularly hard time finding employment.”

Few places in the state illustrate that tension like northwest Michigan, where Petoskey is home to several large treatment facilities and multiple recovery homes.

“We have this pool of employees coming into this town and then as a resort town, we have all of these businesses that are desperately looking for employees,” Koucky said. “So it's a no-brainer for us to try and connect those two and to help employers understand why people in recovery make great employees.”

Workforce problem

Michigan Recovery Friendly Workplace began offering training sessions to businesses in April. 

So far, four Michigan companies have completed the process, but more are involved in training, according to program manager Nicki Gabel. Once more companies come on board, the organization will launch a jobs board.

As part of that effort, Koucky’s group pitches the idea of hiring those in recovery to Petoskey businesses and provides several hours of training on how to support in-recovery workers. The organization fields calls from those in recovery looking for jobs, as well as businesses looking for employees. The group is informally working with about 10 companies so far.

“People in recovery stay in their jobs longer because they feel a sense of loyalty to the person that hired them and gave them that chance,” Koucky said. “They are better employees, they use less sick days than the average employee.

 “Once they're gainfully employed, they can build the other parts of their lives required to help them return to their communities,” she said. “It’s helping both sectors .”

Once people in recovery are hired, peer coaches from Community Recovery Alliance visit the workplace weekly to check in with workers, who also attend group meetings.

RJ Jones, who is a recovering substance user, is the peer coach who works with employees at Manthei.

Once he began making regular visits to the plant, workers who hadn’t been through recovery began approaching him for help.

“You see people who do not look like that typical person everybody thinks of when they think of somebody with substance use disorder, living on the streets of Detroit, that's where our brains naturally go,” Jones said. “That is not who 70% of people in recovery are.

“Addiction is not discriminating,” said Jones, who slid from prescription Adderall as a teen to meth at age 30. “It's an overall workplace problem, and it's more cost effective to retain employees rather than hire new employees and go through the process of interviewing and retraining them.”

A business investment

When Manthei looks across the factory floor, he said he sees people, not former users. 

“The people that I know that are in recovery are not scary people who are abusing children or anything like that. They are people that have had some trauma in their life, and they've made some poor choices and they're trying to not repeat those poor choices,” he said.

“Substance abuse is a disease, right? Not everyone in recovery is going to make good choices, but not every diabetic makes good choices either.”

Last year, those in recovery had a turnover rate twice that of non-recovery employees, Manthei said. Some of that turnover rate is from those in recovery leaving the area, where they came for treatment, and returning home, he said.

The cost of housing in northwest Michigan does not help. Employees at the plant where Fassett works start at $19 an hour. The median rent in the community is $2,400 a month, according to Zillow, with only nine units vacant.

“We had workers sleeping in cars,” Manthei said, because they couldn’t find affordable housing in the resort town, where many homes have been converted to short-term rentals for tourists. 

“They leave to go home to Flint, and the next thing you know they’re back up here in treatment. It wasn’t working.”

The company considered dropping the recovery worker experiment. Instead, it doubled down.

The company purchased the former Maple Leaf Motel in Charlevoix in 2021 and converted the 10-until motel to in-recovery employee housing.

Employees pay enough to cover the operating costs of the housing. They get van rides to the factory and attend individual and group meetings. 

The company puts $100 into an account every month for every month workers successfully stay in the program. After nine or 12 months, that is enough for a downpayment on their own apartment.

“I don't know how this is going to work. I don't think we're going to bat 1000,” Manthei said. “But I'm guessing at the end of the day we’ll break even and the lower employee turnover will be good enough that even an employer with no conscience about it will agree” that it’s worth considering.

Manthei’s has a history of giving to charitable causes than many other businesses, but he maintains the efforts are good for business, and for the state economy in general.

“I don't know a single business owner who doesn’t say labor is their biggest issue,” Manthei said. “And you have this ready source of labor looking to go to work.”

‘They make it comfortable’

Fassett, the Manthei employee, said her addiction issues started when she visited a doctor complaining of pain, and was prescribed an opioid. “It was the time when they were pushing them (opioids),” she said.

Eventually, she said she would take “any opioid I could find.”

She likes the Petoskey area, and, like many of the in-recovery workers at Mathei, is loyal to her employer.

“They make it comfortable” to be in recovery, Fassett said. “I feel like anyone who’s lived with addiction that’s given a chance, has an incentive to show loyalty to the employer giving them that chance.”

The state plans to increase spending on the recovery-friendly workplace initiative from the current $473,000 to $686,000 in both of the next two years. It’s unclear how those funds will be used.

So far, there are no incentives to encourage businesses to participate.

“We can run this on a really small scale ourselves. (but) I have a vision to get something bigger,” Manthei said. He envisions state investment in housing for in-recovery workers, and financial incentives for companies to hire those trying to stay sober.

If helping former addicts get jobs to get them on their feet lowers relapse rates (which can be as high as 90 percent in the first year, advocates say), then state investment of opioid settlement dollars in the workplace could pay off, he said.

Fassett hopes others get the opportunity she’s had. “I mean, if they're willing to do what Manthei has done, it could help, right?” she said. “They have really put forth that effort. And I appreciate it.”