The chapter “To Employers” is the only part of the Big Book not written by Bill Wilson. Its author, Hank Parkhurst, was Bill’s right-hand man in the late 1930s—a relentless salesman who had run divisions at Standard Oil, fired men for drinking, and then found himself on the other side of the desk when his own drinking caught up with him. By the time he drafted this chapter, Hank’s mission was to persuade employers that alcoholism wasn’t just a personal failure but a business problem worth solving. His pitch is clear: the person you think of as weak-willed is actually sick. Treat him like he’s sick, and you might recover not only a life but a valuable asset for your company.
Parkhurst makes his case with the tools he knew best: numbers, loss, and authority. He opens by recounting suicides of men he had fired—grim illustrations of how ignorance and disdain could kill. He frames alcoholism as wasted investment: you spend thousands training an executive, then lose it all when he drinks himself out of a job. He urges bosses to be firm but not moralizing, to fund medical treatment and recoup the cost later, to forgive past misconduct if the man is willing, and to put recovered workers to use helping others. The message is practical: don’t throw away talent if there’s a way to salvage it.
Some of this holds up. Parkhurst was ahead of his time in calling alcoholism an illness, not a weakness. He understood that turnover is expensive and that recovery, when it works, can return an employee who is loyal, capable, and productive. He saw the value of peer support long before “EAP” or “recovery-friendly workplaces” existed. He warned that gossip and casual cruelty at work could undo fragile early sobriety faster than any relapse. And he acknowledged that hope alone is not a management strategy—if someone will not stop, a company cannot carry them forever.
But the chapter also shows its age. It is paternal and gendered, written in the voice of men talking to other men about their male employees. It assumes the benevolence of bosses and the gratitude of workers, often leaning toward coercion: deducting treatment from wages, probing a man’s sincerity, demanding complete submission to recovery. It imagines treatment as a quick detox and a moral overhaul, with a return to work as if nothing had happened. There is no language for trauma, mental health, medication, or the reality that change is often uneven. And it carries a sharp manipulative edge: stories of suicide, appeals to lost revenue, and the claim that honesty at work must include confessions of padded accounts or betrayals of trust. In today’s world, those disclosures would be liabilities, not redemptions.
It also reveals a deeper agenda. In 1939, Bill and Hank were floating ideas about franchising recovery centers, leveraging A.A.’s intellectual property, and courting employers as investors. You can hear that business plan echoing in the chapter’s tone: this isn’t just a plea for understanding, it’s a pitch for corporate buy-in. That model never survived. A.A.’s later Traditions explicitly rejected outside contributions, affiliations, or use of the A.A. name in enterprises. The chapter, stripped of that context, sits awkwardly in the book. Without the underlying sales strategy, the relevance of a direct appeal to employers is questionable.
What remains valuable today are a few human truths: treat people with dignity, guard their privacy, replace suspicion with clear agreements, and don’t let recovery become either a scarlet letter or a pedestal. Early sobriety at work is fragile, and workplaces that handle it with steadiness—not gossip, not heroics—can make survival more likely. But the rest of Parkhurst’s pitch is tethered to a world that no longer exists. Modern workplaces have HR, employment law, confidentiality standards, and structures like EAPs and disability protections. The advice that an executive should hand a book to a junior manager and send him off to confront a colleague borders on reckless.
If there is still a place for “To Employers,” it would be as a compact appendix reframed for today’s realities—addressed to HR professionals and to workers returning after treatment. It would stress confidentiality, clear return-to-work agreements, and respect for agency. It would recognize relapse as part of the illness without turning it into immediate termination or indulgence. And it would make room for the complexity Hank could not see: co-occurring conditions, trauma, and the long, non-linear arc of change.
As it stands, “To Employers” is both fascinating and flawed—a time capsule of A.A. before it found its footing. It shows how close early members came to entangling sobriety with business models and corporate sponsorships, and how much was learned by walking away from that. What still shines is the instinct to replace disgust with understanding. What fails is everything built on top of that instinct: the control, the coercion, and the sales pitch. For anyone reading the Big Book today, the chapter is worth studying as history. As guidance, it needs rewriting—or letting go.
Next: The Workplace ⇢
This post is part of a larger project, A Fearless Inventory, where I walk through AA’s Big Book chapter by chapter. Along the way, I try to honor the spirit of the original while also offering critique, context, and a re-framing that speaks to our time. My hope is to open a conversation — not just about how recovery looked in 1938, but how it can be lived today.