Multibillion- Dollar Cannabis Industry Gets High on Union-Busting
Cannabis has become a multibillion dollar industry — but workers are still being exploited and fired for unionizing.
By Steve Wishnia
The union campaign at the Bloom Medicinals medical-marijuana dispensary in Akron, Ohio began in the break room early last year. Dispensary agents Krispin Horner and Ev Lindrose were both angry that a coworker had just been fired, Lindrose recalls.
Horner “made a joke about starting a union,” she says.
“Actually…” she interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s fuckin’ do it,” she told him.
They contacted a United Food and Commercial Workers [UFCW] organizer for help. This March, a bit more than a year later, workers voted 11-4 to be represented by UFCW Local 880. That made the dispensary the first unionized cannabis business in Northeast Ohio.
“The only reasonable way to ensure job security was to start a union,” Horner says.
But on April 15, the week before negotiations for their first contract began, he was fired for lateness. He says it was because he came in eight minutes late on a day when there was a power outage.
Wages aren’t the main issue in the contract talks, the two say. The $17 an hour that dispensary agents start at is more than the $13 others in the area pay.
What Horner calls the company’s “extremely punitive disciplinary policy” is a major issue. One worker, he says, was fired after a customer told her she’d look a lot prettier if she smiled, and she said she didn’t feel like it.
Another, says Lindrose, had asked to leave early because he was having chest pains, and his boss told him, “not today, bud.” He walked out and went to see a doctor—who told him he’d had a minor heart attack. The next day, he was terminated for abandoning his post.
“There’s a lot of cold and callousness about workers’ health,” she says.
They also want to be able to spend more time with patients. Horner describes the job as being “underpaid, undertrained pharmacists.”
Most of the customers are over 50, with some as old as 80, he explains. As there is little scientific research about which varieties of cannabis work best for different ailments, it takes a lot of trial and error to find what helps, and the patients need a lot of advice. Those who did not already use marijuana also need to learn the basics, such as how to avoid eating an excessive dose. “You can’t uneat an edible,” Horner says.
But management, he adds, has emphasized “getting people in and out as quickly as possible.”
Bloom Medicinals did not respond to questions it suggested that Work-Bites send.
A multibillion-dollar industry
The Akron dispensary is planning to begin selling cannabis for recreational use. Ohio voters legalized that in a ballot initiative last November, and the state is scheduled to begin taking applications for retail licenses June 7. The state legislature’s Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review approved basic regulations on May 13, after public pressure deflated efforts by Republicans in the state Senate to weaken the law (such as by earmarking tax revenue for building county jails).
Established medical dispensaries will get the first applications for recreational licenses. Lindrose says Bloom Medicinals is trying to expand the dispensary’s staff to 40 or 45 workers.
Bloom Medicinals workers in Akron, Ohio organized with UFCW Local 880 back in March. Photo courtesy of UFCW.
With 24 states having legalized sales to adults, cannabis has become a multibillion-dollar industry. According to an analysis of financial filings published by Green Market Report earlier this month, the 20 largest publicly traded companies reaped more than $8.7 billion in revenues last year. Top-ranked Curaleaf took in $1.35 billion, with two others over $1 billion and four more topping $500 million.
Those companies aren’t profitable, though. According to Green Market Report, the only one of the top 20 that turned a profit last year was Green Thumb Industries, the third-largest by revenue. One problem, it said, is that because marijuana remains illegal under federal law, retailers can’t deduct the amount they pay to buy it from their taxes as a business expense.
Bloom Medicinals, privately owned and based in Boca Raton, Florida, is a medium-size chain. It owns five medical dispensaries in Ohio and one in Maryland, a medical cultivation facilities in Missouri, and has its own brand of gummies and vape cartridges. It sold its four medical dispensaries in Missouri last winter, and plans to open medical dispensaries in Illinois and a medical cultivation facility in New Jersey. Its 2023 revenues were about $25 million, according to the small-to-medium business data site Growjo.
Unions—And Union-Busting
With the industry’s expansion has come unionization. The UFCW now represents more than 10,000 workers nationwide, from cultivation to processing to retail to delivery, a union representative told Work-Bites. It represents workers at all of New York’s medical-marijuana companies and half of cultivation workers in Connecticut. This year, the UFCW says it has supported workers organizing at 35 different locations, including a dispensary owned by the Canadian company TerrAscend in the town of Buchanan, Michigan, where workers voted to join Local 951 in April.
At least six states—California, New York, Minnesota, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware require licensed cannabis businesses to have labor-peace agreements, that they won’t interfere with workers’ union-organizing efforts. That doesn’t mean winning a union there is automatic, the UFCW representative cautions.
The growth of cannabis corporations has also brought in professional union-busting operations. Three of the five largest companies—Curaleaf, Green Thumb Industries, and Verano—have hired the “union avoidance” law firms of Littler Mendelson or Jackson Lewis. The UFCW has filed unfair-labor-practice cases against all five.
Curaleaf is the worst offender, with 37 ULP cases against it in the past five years. All but one were filed by the UFCW, mostly in Illinois, Arizona, and Massachusetts. Its allegations included that the company retaliated against union supporters and refused to bargain in good faith or recognize the union. According to National Labor Relations Board records, 23 of those cases are still open, 11 were withdrawn or dismissed, one was settled, and the company was judged to have violated the law in two, both in Massachusetts.
Regardless, the UFCW representative says, what makes the real difference is if the workers are willing to stand together and build a strong union.
Lindrose says she was motivated because “my dad was in the Carpenters union, and that gave me perspective on the importance of unions. It was how I had health care when I was a kid.”
Horner, meanwhile, wants his job back. He’s 49, and had been working at Bloom Medicinals for almost two years when he got the ax.
“I put too much work into that dispensary to just walk away from it,” he says. “I miss my coworkers. I miss my patients.”