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When Lucas Wong and his 50 co-workers at the Belltown, Seattle location of Have A Heart \u2014 one of the busiest recreational cannabis dispensary chains in Washington state \u2014 voted in the summer of 2018 to join a union and extract concessions from management, they had help from an unlikely source: management themselves.<\/p>\n
In fact, organizing and empowering the workforce with better bargaining leverage, typically the last item on any profit-seeking entrepreneur\u2019s to-do list, was management\u2019s idea.<\/p>\n
Ryan\u00a0Kunkel<\/a>, Have A Heart\u2019s CEO, welcomed organizers from\u00a0United Food and Commercial Workers<\/a>\u00a0(UFCW) to meet with his employees. And when it came time to negotiate a contract, Kunkel was the one who put forth worker-friendly suggestions like increased break times, Wong recently told Cannabis Now.<\/p>\n \u201cRyan brought that to the table,\u201d Wong said.<\/p>\n In the long and almost always highly fraught history of labor organizing in the United States, the\u00a0legal cannabis industry<\/a>\u00a0is both an outlier and a possibly once-in-forever opportunity. However, with few exceptions \u2014 such as the management-assisted victory at Have A Heart \u2014 organized labor has yet to figure out how to capitalize.<\/p>\n The cannabis industry is one of the fastest-growing employers in the United States. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track cannabis-specific employment as cannabis is still illegal at the federal level, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Americans earn wages from some form of cannabis-related work: cultivation, processing, manufacturing or retail sales, as\u00a0reported by the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to think of a better opportunity for labor unions, and UFCW is one of several unions attempting to organize those workers. Though the union has been organizing cannabis workers since 2010 and currently claims to represent \u201ctens of thousands of workers,\u201d progress has been limited.<\/p>\n Have A Heart\u2019s six Washington locations were\u00a0the first retail dispensary<\/a>\u00a0locations in the state to unionize, and so far, they\u2019re the only ones. There are more than 500 dispensaries across the state,\u00a0according to most recent state data<\/a>, meaning union penetration in Washington is barely 1%.<\/p>\n Such tiny percentages are seen elsewhere in the country. While UFCW national did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Cannabis Now, previous media reports document only a \u201chandful<\/a>\u201d of union shops in California. In Colorado, home to one of the oldest and largest cannabis marketplaces in America, efforts to organize a dispensary in 2015\u00a0failed badly<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the organizing drive fizzled and the employee who was the main organizer was fired \u2014 and efforts in that state have been limited ever since.<\/p>\n A patchwork of both state and federal laws govern workplace conditions and workplace organizing. Only a select few states have mandated \u201clabor peace agreements,\u201d where cannabis businesses must by law allow union organizers to at least speak to their workers without fear of reprisal, and Colorado is not one of them.<\/p>\n But California is. Last summer, UFCW Local 770, based in Los Angeles, added two unionized dispensaries to make a total of 10 \u2014 but did so only with similar top-down assistance from management at\u00a0MedMen<\/a>, a national chain that was suffering a backlash after management faced a class action lawsuit for alleged labor law violations.<\/p>\n In February,\u00a0the company announced<\/a>\u00a0that all workers at MedMen\u2019s locations in California and New York were union. These workers make nearly $3 more than minimum wage and enjoy medical and vacation benefits, but as with Have a Heart in Seattle, these were concessions brought by management.<\/p>\n Such \u201ctop-down\u201d organizing is not how the labor movement started. It also is not how workers in other modern industries, such as rideshare drivers and software developers, are fighting for better pay, benefits and working conditions.<\/p>\n There is also reason to fear that the current glut of cannabis jobs could be temporary, given that the artificial market control of federal prohibition is at least partially responsible for the furious job creation.<\/p>\n Unlike other agriculture-first industries, cannabis businesses cannot legally transport product across state lines. If cannabis oil is sold in Florida, the cannabis must be grown in Florida, no matter how attractive moving the cultivation operation to a state with lower wages and cheaper real estate might be.<\/p>\n However, because federal prohibition forces cannabis businesses to remain somewhat small, this size constraint could also be stifling unionization efforts.<\/p>\n Wong offered one theory: In Washington, many retail shops are small, single-location affairs with small workforces who have direct contact with management and ownership, which may make it easier for workers to raise a grievance and for management to solve it.<\/p>\n Plus, unlike other industries where work is increasingly atomized and done remotely, cannabis workers at least have direct influence over the means of production and thus have the ability to bring management to the bargaining table by stopping the flow of product at various choke points: where the product originates, the product\u2019s path from origin to market, the retail contact between merchant and customer.<\/p>\n So, why aren\u2019t they? Why don\u2019t they? And why do the large dispensaries who record tens of millions of dollars in annual sales in other states have non-union workforces?<\/p>\n In states with legal cannabis, the industry has seen worker abuses ranging from overbearing management and low pay to withholding of wages and outright physical or sexual assault. Whether this was a function of the off-books, underground, \u201cgig-style\u201d nature of work in semi-illegal cannabis outlets remains to be seen.<\/p>\n A newly legalized, highly successful, labor-intensive industry is probably organized labor\u2019s best chance in a generation to grow union membership \u2013 but so far, cannabis has just been a wasted opportunity.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, is your workplace unionized?<\/p>\n Originally published in Issue 38 of Cannabis Now.\u00a0LEARN MORE<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n The post Green Collar Blues for Cannabis Unions<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
When Lucas Wong and his 50 co-workers at the Belltown, Seattle location of Have A Heart \u2014 one of the busiest recreational cannabis dispensary chains in Washington state \u2014 voted in the summer of 2018 to join a union and extract concessions from management, they had help from an unlikelyContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":38745,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,6272,170,702,5887,85,12526,1675,6688],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38746,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38744\/revisions\/38746"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/figure>\n
Pot\u2019s Very Short Picket Line<\/h4>\n
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The Feds\u2019 Place at the Bargaining Table<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Green Collar Blues for Cannabis Unions<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"