Page 2 of 6
After drawing attention from investors on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley — and having morphed from a "legalization movement" to a "cannabis industry" — many medical marijuana entrepreneurs no longer think they need a labor union to make them legitimate. "I support the right of workers to organize, but I don't like the kind of backroom sweetheart deals I've seen cooked up between some of the unions and the employers in the cannabis industry," says Stephen DeAngelo, founder and CEO of Harborside Health Center in Oakland.
At Harborside, workers listened to a union pitch — and voted against joining, DeAngelo tells SF Weekly. "I like even less the idea that a union would try to accomplish legislatively something they couldn't get workers to directly approve," he adds. "My CIO-labor-organizer grandfather would be rolling over in his grave at the sight of it."
In a time of need, the cannabis industry welcomed the union in. Now, the union is here to stay, whether the industry likes it or not.
Cannabis has been good to California. In rural Mendocino County, in the heart of the state's marijuana-producing Emerald Triangle, per-capita retail spending is 2 percent higher than in any county in the North Bay, according to federal Bureau of Economic Analysis figures. More cash per person is swirling around on old logging roads than on the highways in chic, wine-producing travel destinations like Napa and Sonoma.
That is thanks to marijuana. It's also thanks to federal law enforcement that, while unable to stop a massive, flagrant and ongoing violation of the Controlled Substances Act, has succeeded in preventing the violators from banking. Therefore, what is earned is often immediately spent, or reinvested in the local economy.
As with any other economy operating partly in the shadows, marijuana's true contribution to the state's bottom line is hard to accurately gauge. What estimates are out there are astounding. A 2010 state analysis pegged the worth of California's cannabis harvest at $14.1 billion, by far the state's biggest cash crop. Wine, at $2.9 billion worth of grapes, is supposed to have $61.5 billion worth of "economic impact," according to the Wine Institute, a more nebulous figure that chambers of commerce like to tout when advocating for pet projects. By extension, the economic impact of the state's cannabis industry is immense.
An economy of that magnitude needs workers. And cannabis is a labor-intensive commodity, with humans required at every stage to plant, grow, harvest, process, transport, and sell the product.
Estimating how many people work in marijuana in California is even more challenging than guessing at the crop's value. Those cash-rich farmers in Mendocino County don't pay payroll taxes when hiring trim crews to process the year's crop. Nor do many dispensaries, delivery services, bakers, or hash oil producers in urban areas, all of which operate without state licenses.
As a result, "we don't have a good tracking mechanism," says Rob Eyler, an economics professor at Sonoma State University. "But, reaching around in the dark ... it could be as high as 100,000 people" — or exactly the number of workers who have left UFCW since George W. Bush's election. This decent-sized city's worth of workers is operating largely off the books. Put another way: The working conditions under which the state's chief cash crop is produced are almost entirely unregulated. "I don't think there's any doubt," Eyler says, "that marijuana is likely the biggest labor black market in California."
In other industries, rampant abuse of workers thrives under such conditions. In California's "legitimate" agriculture industry, a 2013 Center for Investigative Reporting probe found widespread rape and other abuses of female workers, most of whom are Spanish-speaking immigrants. That exposé led Gov. Jerry Brown to sign legislation promising new protections.
It appears the marijuana industry does not yet have those problems. Despite a well-publicized case of a Humboldt grower shooting and killing an undocumented worker the grower had brought to his ranch in 2010, cannabis appears to be mostly staying true to its feel-good hippie roots. And the numerous "trimmigrants" who descend on Mendocino, Humboldt, and other rural California counties are happy to take the several hundred dollars a day they can earn processing farmers' crops under the table before moving on to the next job.
What's more, despite Goldsberry's executive troubles at BPG, workers lower on the food chain, at dispensary counters, make about $15 to $18 an hour to start, according to an SF Weekly survey of selected local shops. Those jobs also include health and retirement benefits. As a result, competition for the jobs is akin to admission to Harvard; Goldsberry remembers fielding hundreds of applications for a single counter spot.
That is one reason why labor's entry into cannabis was not brought on by underpaid workers putting in long hours or growers forgetting where in the backyard they'd buried the PVC pipe stuffed with $100 bills. This was about an emerging economy that lacked respect from society. That's why labor entered at the top, by way of a chain-smoking union organizer who rides a custom Harley-Davidson painted with the Superman logo, and knew a golden opportunity when he saw it.
To call Dan Rush a union man is a vast understatement. The Oakland native's father and grandfather were Teamsters, his grandmother a union retail clerk. A career in the Teamsters was Rush's birthright until the 19-year-old with a pro wrestler's physique participated in the 1978 strike of Safeway truck drivers.
The demonstrations were already vicious before a tractor-trailer truck driven by management struck and killed a 24-year old union driver while crossing a picket line. An off-duty, out-of-town cop was riding shotgun for security. It got worse when Rush fired a .40-caliber slug from a wrist rocket at a car that carried more out-of-town cops. The slug put out one cop's eye. Rush pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and spent three years behind bars. On his release, a condition of his probation was that he could not be a Teamster.
Showing 1-3 of 3
Comments are closed.
