Dealin: Organized Labor Wants Its Piece of the Cannabis Industry by Chris Roberts

Discussion in 'Marijuana Legalization' started by jainaG, Sep 26, 2015.

  1. http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-news-cannabis-marijuana-weed-organized-labor-unions-united-food-and-commercial-workers-ufcw-dan-rush-debby-goldsberry/Content?oid=3794451&showFullText=true



    Proud union employee Debby Goldsberry lost a
    $260,000-a-year job at the dispensary she cofounded after what she
    describes as a "hostile takeover" by her partners. That would not have
    happened, she says, had she been a union member then.


    Cannabis was good to Debby Goldsberry. The time she spent
    in the late 1980s and early '90s following the Grateful Dead on tour,
    passing out photocopied fliers that agitated for marijuana legalization,
    led to a high-paying career. After California legalized medical
    cannabis in 1996, Goldsberry cofounded one of the state's first major
    marijuana businesses, Berkeley Patients Group.


    One of the most successful dispensaries in Northern California, BPG
    grossed more than $15 million in sales in 2009. That year, Goldsberry
    earned $263,299 - less than her fellow cofounders and co-executives
    (both men), but still good money, considering her job's illegal origins
    20 years earlier on Shakedown Street.


    Sometimes the light's all shining on me.


    Things fell apart in 2010. With recreational marijuana legalization
    on the state ballot, Goldsberry and her partners disagreed about BPG's
    future. That summer, she was removed from the company's board of
    directors after a no-confidence vote.


    One day in the fall, she showed up to work and found someone else
    occupying her desk. She took time off after a doctor advised her that
    work-related stress was getting to be too much. When she returned on
    Dec. 31 of that year, her partners handed her piece of paper: an at-will
    termination form.


    Other times I can barely see.


    Once the shock cleared, Goldsberry learned something about California
    employment law. "I was an at-will employee, even though I was a
    founder," she says. That meant she could be fired at any time without
    explanation, and without severance pay.


    Goldsberry had immense respect within the legalization movement - High Times
    later declared her marijuana "activist of the year" and flew her to
    Amsterdam - but respect doesn't pay the mortgage or the grocery bill.


    Sometimes your cards ain't worth a dime.


    Bereft, Goldsberry turned to a new friend who'd appeared on the
    marijuana scene earlier that year: a union organizer with United Food
    and Commercial Workers, which had just become the first labor union to
    organize workers in the American medical cannabis business. UFCW found
    her an employment attorney, who sued for wrongful termination (the suit
    was settled out of court in 2012 for an undisclosed sum). The union also
    found her a new job.


    After working on a union effort in San Jose, Goldsberry landed a
    dispensary gig - with a union contract - at Magnolia Wellness, near the
    Port of Oakland. Much smaller than BPG, Magnolia is nonetheless
    described by UFCW's Local 5 as its "flagship" shop. (Its location -
    along one of the main routes for container traffic in and out of the
    port, where a labor dispute earlier this year ground container traffic
    to a halt, slowed the economy, and led to layoffs across the West - is a
    meaningful coincidence.)


    Like most activists-turned-entrepreneurs who founded the state's
    first wave of medical marijuana enterprises, Goldsberry had come from a
    cash-only, hustle-and-share economy. For a Deadhead hippie, a rigorously
    enforced union workplace existed in a different world.


    "I never worked in a place with organized labor," says Goldsberry,
    who is now a staunch advocate for unions. "I found out the hard way: had
    I been a contract employee, none of this would have ever happened."



    Labor helped Goldsberry. Labor is also trying to help the American
    cannabis industry. The UFCW, best known for representing grocery store
    workers at chains such as Safeway, began signing up California
    budtenders, trimmers, joint-rollers, and growers - jobs it prefers to
    call "technicians" and "processors" - in 2010. Unions offered cannabis
    badly needed legitimacy in the eyes of politicians and the public at a
    time when marijuana's economic potential was still dismissed.


    Like Goldsberry, most dispensary workers enjoyed pay and benefits far
    above and beyond what they would see at a grocery store. So, in a
    departure from traditional bottom-up organizing, UFCW advocated for
    would-be business owners. Organized labor's imprimatur helped convince
    leery city councils and leaders of neighborhood associations that having
    a dispensary in town wasn't such a bad idea. "You can trust us," was
    the message. "We're with the union."


    Today, about 1,000 workers in the California cannabis industry are
    card-carrying members of UFCW, the union estimates. Those workers
    include joint-rollers, chocolate makers, and dispensaries in Los
    Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento. Of UFCW's 1.2 million
    members nationwide - a considerable portion of the 14.6 million union
    workers in America - 3,000 are counted in its fledgling "medical
    cannabis and hemp division."


    But with recreational marijuana legal in four states and a majority
    of Americans in support of outright legalization, there is tremendous
    opportunity to expand. UFCW hopes to represent workers in every one of
    the 23 states so far where some form of medical marijuana is legal. The
    union also is flexing its political muscle, using the age-old
    connections between Democratic politicians and the labor movement to
    lobby for legal marijuana. In the push to legalize cannabis outright in
    Ohio, UFCW is a key player.


    Labor is also trying to help itself. At a time when private-sector
    union membership continues to decline in America, the burgeoning,
    labor-intensive cannabis industry represents the best opportunity in a
    generation for UFCW - which has lost 100,000 members since 2000 - to
    build back its membership. And the union is using those political
    connections to ensure it has a piece of the action.


    When dispensaries in New York open their doors later this year,
    cannabis patients won't have to look out for the union label - every
    worker at every shop will be union, thanks to a rule written into state
    law at the union's bequest. In California, union lobbyists are pushing
    the state Legislature to include similar language in a bill winding its
    way through Sacramento that would, for the first time, regulate the
    state's enormous marijuana marketplace.


    Meanwhile, cannabis has become uncomfortable with labor's presence.
    More and more industry leaders see the union as an opportunistic
    outsider with one chief concern: the union. There are rumors that unless
    UFCW is included in the plans to legalize next year, it will work to
    block legalization entirely. The relationship is so uncomfortable that
    when a union lobbyist working on statewide policy paid a visit to a San
    Francisco dispensary, the shop's executive director - who also happens
    to be a sitting Democratic politician - took him aside to say, "Let me
    tell you why we don't need a union."




    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.




    Instead, Rush took a job organizing for the meat-cutters union, a
    career path that led to UFCW. He had enough success to rise to a
    position called "statewide special operations director," in charge of
    identifying potential new members and signing them up.


    Rush was spending the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2009 poring
    over ballot initiatives for the next year, seeing where UFCW could help
    out, when something caught his eye: A marijuana legalization initiative
    had qualified for the ballot. The campaign running it was in downtown
    Oakland, a few doors down from where Rush's grandmother would take him
    shopping as a child, and just a short Harley ride up Telegraph Avenue
    from the family's home near the MacArthur BART station.


    Rush knew nothing about cannabis at the time. He did know that
    Oakland's long-moribund downtown was enjoying a revival thanks to the
    collection of dispensaries and marijuana businesses sprouting up on
    Broadway and Telegraph. And anyone or anything that was good for Oakland
    was good for Dan Rush. So he hopped on his Harley and rumbled up to the
    legalization campaign's headquarters in a building on Broadway near
    where his grandmother used to work. It was a Sunday morning and the
    election was almost a year away. He was surprised to see a buzzing
    office full of volunteers and piles of empty pizza boxes.


    This was a chance. The legalizers had a cause and they had people.
    What they didn't have was an organization or political connections, two
    things that could help them win badly needed legitimacy, not to mention
    the election the next fall. UFCW had both. The legalization campaign,
    run by the leaders of downtown cannabis college Oaksterdam University,
    was thrilled to have the union.


    Rush retells this story while sitting in a cramped office at the back
    of his house on a recent sultry June afternoon, feeds from multiple
    security cameras on a monitor in front him. He's surrounded by Superman
    kitsch, honorary proclamations from politicians, and memorabilia -
    including thank-you certificates - from a certain notorious motorcycle
    club with strong Oakland roots. "That chair you're sitting in - that's
    Sonny Barger's chair," he tells me, referring to one of the more
    notorious founding members of the Hell's Angels' Oakland chapter.


    For Rush, signing up Oaksterdam's workers was a social justice issue.
    Even though they were paid well and treated well, "cannabis workers
    were absolutely marginalized," he says, "but not by their employers."


    At Oaksterdam, Rush met a lesbian couple. They both worked in
    marijuana, and they were planning to get married. But they were afraid
    to go home and confront their families at Christmas - because they
    worked in weed, not because they were gay. Rush met another individual,
    an overweight man who wore unflattering skin-tight lycra bicycle wear to
    and from work. When asked why, the man explained: Proving that he
    literally had nothing to hide was the only way he could commute to and
    from work without being stopped and searched by police.


    "And this was in fucking Oakland," Rush says, his voice rising. "If
    that's not a disparaged workforce, I don't know what is. They weren't
    oppressed at work. They were being oppressed by an ignorant society."


    It was still a tough sell to union honchos. UFCW gives its locals a
    fair measure of autonomy, but this - a bunch of stoners breaking federal
    law - was something else entirely. Preferring to beg for forgiveness
    than ask permission, Rush told the legalizers that the union was in.
    Later, when pitching the idea to his union superiors, Rush keyed in on
    two points: One, cannabis is a retail product "for human consumption and
    wear," and UFCW represents workers in agriculture, textiles, and other
    similar industries; two, it was an expanding industry with great growth
    potential - and other unions were nowhere to be found. UFCW had the
    field to itself, if it wanted it.


    On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend 2010, the union issued a
    press release announcing it had organized workers at Oaksterdam
    University and its affiliated dispensaries and businesses. "Four
    hundred" media outlets around the country ran the story, Rush says. With
    UFCW's help, the legalization measure, now called Prop. 19, received
    backing from the state NAACP as well as drug reform and marijuana
    advocates.


    Most mainstream Democrats, however, stayed away. U.S. Sen. Dianne
    Feinstein served as the "No" campaign's chairwoman. Financial support,
    other than the life savings of Oaksterdam founder Richard Lee, was in
    short supply. The final straw was an October surprise courtesy of the
    federal Justice Department, which said it would prosecute city officials
    who allowed legal weed operations to open. The initiative won more
    votes than Meg Whitman did in her bid to defeat Jerry Brown for
    governor, but still lost, barely, with 47.5 percent of Californians
    voting in favor.


    UFCW was nevertheless committed. The union soon created a "national
    medical cannabis and hemp division," of which Rush was made director. He
    sold dispensary operators on UFCW's political clout, leverage that
    could be used to win them local approval to open. The union also worked
    city halls. When Oakland chose to expand the number of permitted
    dispensaries allowed in town from four to eight, UFCW ensured that when
    the "merit-based" permit applications were considered, union membership
    counted. (Of the four that were granted permits, only Magnolia Wellness
    was - and still is - organized.) A similar reward for union membership
    is in place in Berkeley, which will select one of eight applicants for
    an additional dispensary permit later this year.


    The union also helped cannabis become more sophisticated. Most
    everybody working in California cannabis policy today has had at least a
    few meetings with UFCW. Or, as one Sacramento-level lobbyist told me
    recently, "Dan Rush fucking made me."




    But there were limits to UFCW's clout. When the federal Justice
    Department started threatening dispensary operators and their landlords
    with prison time in fall 2011, the union had no answers. Hundreds of
    dispensaries across the state closed, and union jobs vanished along with
    them. In 2012, federal authorities raided Oaksterdam University's
    campus. Rush and some other union workers appeared at rallies denouncing
    the feds, but shied away from endorsing marijuana agitators' main
    message: that President Barack Obama was breaking a campaign promise to
    leave them alone. The union was playing smart politics, and while some
    members privately shared the cannabis industry's outrage, marijuana
    advocates felt jilted nonetheless.


    Politics would annoy the cannabis industry yet again when UFCW sided
    with Los Angeles' political establishment to support a local ballot
    initiative there, Prop. D, that put a cap on how many dispensaries could
    operate in L.A. Under Prop. D, several hundred cannabis clubs would
    have to close. Union honchos preached the wisdom of playing ball and
    cutting deals, but some marijuana hardliners only saw more dispensaries
    shutting down. At the same time, UFCW worked to bring the survivors into
    its fold, organizing 30 of the remaining Los Angeles clubs.


    Meanwhile, attention shifted away from California. With help from
    veterans of Prop. 19 as well as support from UFCW, legalization
    initiatives in Colorado and Washington passed in fall 2012. Soon,
    big-name Democrats including California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who had
    endorsed a no vote on Prop. 19, came out in support of cannabis
    legalization.


    By that time, Rush was out of California, working on turning other
    states green. Some industry insiders and lobbyists say he overreached
    and angered superiors by going around them to directly lobby state
    politicians such as former Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg.
    Union officials say the UFCW intentionally shifted resources to other
    states. "California was such a mess," says Jeff Ferro, a top aide to the
    union's head of organizing, "that the work organizing was much more
    precarious [here] than in other states."


    Then and now, California lacked strong statewide marijuana-industry
    regulations, which were all but demanded by federal Justice Department
    officials in a 2013 missive known as the Cole Memo. That made California
    a risky investment, for both capital and the union. So, rather than
    slog along in a ruleless California, UFCW would work in other states,
    such as New York, where it could play a role in writing the rules. The
    union's earlier successes did not go unnoticed. As The New Republic
    observed in 2013, "The UFCW has been an unseen force in nearly every
    big push to pass marijuana-friendly laws and ordinances in Western
    states."


    But the union wasn't winning people over with the same ease it had in
    Oakland in 2010. When merchants in Denver opened their doors on New
    Year's Day 2014 to mark the first legal recreational marijuana sales in
    American history, not a single union worker could be found. Organizers
    blame Colorado's independent streak and less labor-friendly laws for
    being left out of the country's biggest recreational cannabis economy.
    By contrast, in the state of Washington, where officials reported
    average daily sales of $1.4 million per day and tax revenues twice what
    was expected, UFCW signed up its first shop last month.


    In San Francisco, the union proved it could be an enemy as well as an
    ally. When a dispensary tried to open next to Mission Organics in 2011,
    the same union attorney at SF's lone union shop - the one who filed
    Debby Goldsberry's lawsuit - filed an appeal in opposition. It failed
    and the new shop, now affiliated with Sunset District-bred rapper
    Berner's Cookies brand, opened up. Still, the cannabis industry took
    notice and was disturbed.


    Last fall, union honchos also pushed the city's Planning Commission
    to deny a permit for a second dispensary location for SPARC, one of the
    city's leading cannabis shops, which like other clubs is finding itself
    unable to meet the enormous demand for its products. (At the time,
    SPARC's executive director, Robert Jacob, was the mayor of Sebastopol in
    Sonoma County, and had apparently failed to return a political favor.)
    The SPARC permit was denied, no small setback in a city where medical
    cannabis dispensary permits are so valuable that existing permit-holders
    are reportedly entertaining - and rejecting - six-figure offers for
    their permits. As it happens, the only dispensary that succeeded in
    securing a medical cannabis dispensary permit despite organized
    neighborhood opposition was the union-backed Mission Organics. Still,
    the episode led some to loudly question UFCW's purpose.


    "They haven't really hit their stride in providing benefits to their
    members," says Brendan Hallinan, a San Francisco attorney who
    specializes in cannabis businesses, including one dispensary that agreed
    to sign up with the union, only to have organizers disappear until
    after their permit was won. "They were, I hate to say it, disorganized,"
    Hallinan says. "I have yet to hear anybody say that they received much
    benefit from being in the union."



    UFCW is far from all-in on marijuana. The union just got around to
    endorsing Oregon's legalization initiative, Measure 91, a mere few days
    before voters approved it last fall. A month later, in his farewell
    message to members, outgoing UFCW Local 5 President Ron Lind ­­- whose
    shop was the first to organize cannabis workers ­­­- only mentioned
    cannabis in passing. UFCW's most recent victory in California came last
    year, when workers at the Oakland location of Bhang Chocolates, one of
    the nation's leading edibles companies, signed their union cards. But
    since then, UFCW has stepped back from worker-oriented organizing and
    zeroed in on changing policy in Sacramento. There, the union is working -
    just as it is in other states - to ensure it will have a piece of the
    cannabis industry, especially if there's a legalization measure on the
    ballot next year.


    It is Jim Araby's job to provide that assurance. A goateed former
    grocery store worker from Boston, Araby is the executive director of
    UFCW's Western States Council, an umbrella group responsible for pushing
    pro-union policies in four states including California. In addition to
    backing labor's push for a $15 minimum wage and for better pay at the
    bargain grocery chain El Super, Araby and the UFCW are concerned with
    cannabis.




    The union has paid for polls and focus groups to test voters'
    attitudes on legalization for next year (those polls, conveniently,
    found support for a "professionalized workforce" as well as recreational
    cannabis for adults, Araby told the Sacramento Bee). Araby also
    sits on the American Civil Liberties Union task force, chaired by Lt.
    Gov. Gavin Newsom, that is supposed to release recommendations for
    legalization ballot language this summer.


    And Araby is involved in the push to pass a bill that would, for the
    first time, regulate California's cannabis industry at the state level.
    He wants to make sure that any regulations passed are friendly to labor.
    "For us," Araby says at his one-man office in an Art Deco building in
    downtown Oakland, "two things need to be in every bill." Those things
    are ensuring that dispensary owners allow union organizers into their
    shops and don't speak ill of labor, and instituting a workplace training
    program similar to the ones in New York and Minnesota.


    The cannabis bill currently under consideration in the state
    Legislature would create a new Office of Medical Cannabis Regulation
    under the purview of Gov. Jerry Brown. It would require commercial
    cannabis enterprises at every step of the supply chain to acquire
    licenses. It also would create minimum training standards for workers at
    licensed dispensaries and grow sites.


    Such an "apprenticeship program" is a rare thing in the private
    sector outside of laborers or building trades, but it's a notion that's
    gaining traction. Both Brown and President Obama have called for more
    apprenticeship programs. "Everyone is pushing it, because it works,"
    says Carol Zabin, a labor economist at UC Berkeley's Labor Research
    Center. "Our economy produces a lot of low-wage jobs, and this kind of
    job training" - in which the industry makes a direct investment in the
    quality of its workers - "protects the industry from going the really
    low-wage route."


    Just who would administer a cannabis apprenticeship program, however,
    isn't clear. This will be a point of contention for the rest of the
    summer. The union, predictably, wants it to be the union. The industry,
    just as predictably, believes it has a good handle on things. "We all
    agree there needs to be standards for workers," says Nate Bradley,
    executive director of the California Cannabis Industry Association, a
    Sacramento-based trade group with whom UFCW shares a lobbyist, San
    Francisco-based Platinum Advisors. "You're dealing with a psychoactive
    substance - you should have some knowledge of what you're selling to
    people.


    "But there should be a choice" of who provides the training, Bradley adds. "We're opposed to mandatory provisions here."


    It's unclear how hard UFCW will push for its agenda. The situation is
    precarious: This is the fourth year in a row that the Legislature has
    considered a regulatory bill for the marijuana industry, and at no time
    has the Legislature been closer to passing one. The bill sailed out of
    the Assembly with Republican support, but it needs to clear a few
    hurdles in the Senate before it reaches Brown's desk. To have the union
    pull out and oppose the bill would be stunning, but not unthinkable.


    Meanwhile, UFCW is unapologetic about using the Legislature to
    achieve its ends. "Workers need to have a voice in what goes on in their
    workplace," Araby says. "If that has to be guaranteed through
    legislation, so be it."



    Marijuana's speedy shift from a fringe cause celebre to the
    billion-dollar Green Rush it is today could have been predicted. After
    all, weed was the world's most popular illicit drug; demand has never
    been an issue. Yet the quick shift surprised the union, which now has a
    new breed of cannabis entrepreneur to try and deal with. Gone are the
    activists. Now there are investors.


    "In a few short years, we went from guys in jeans and tie-dye, to
    guys in bad suits, to guys in very expensive Canali suits," UFCW aide
    Ferro says.


    The newcomers also have new values. Today's cannabis industry has a
    very strong libertarian streak that's more in line with Silicon Valley's
    anarcho-capitalism than with true-blue Democratic populism.


    At the end of June, the National Cannabis Business Association held
    its annual conference in Denver, where it threw a $2,700-per-person
    fundraiser for a presidential candidate: Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand
    Paul. If this is where weed is going - libertarian and
    investor-fetishizing, just like tech - then that is bad news for
    workers.


    Some cannabis startups have the same worker problems as some of
    Silicon Valley's highest-valued companies. The drivers who work for
    Eaze, a company that promises to deliver marijuana ordered from a
    smartphone in as little as 10 minutes, are not employees but independent
    contractors. Fittingly, Eaze calls itself the "Uber of marijuana." Just
    like Uber drivers are on their own if there's an accident, Eaze drivers
    assume all the risk involved in driving around the city with 8 ounces
    of cannabis packaged for sale, something done at their peril even in San
    Francisco. Last year, an independent delivery driver was pulled over
    and charged with three felonies by District Attorney George Gascón.


    These issues show how far cannabis has come to being a legitimate
    industry. Like other industries, marijuana is now dominated by capital
    and the cult of entrepreneurship. In a way, it shows how the union's
    early efforts - all aimed at getting politicians and the public to drop Reefer Madness
    rhetoric and take notice - have borne fruit. "At first we went top
    down. Now, we're fighting the top," says Rush, who says he doesn't feel
    betrayed by union-doubting industry figures like Harborside's DeAngelo,
    to whom Rush introduced pols like Newsom. "This is the natural course of
    every industry."




    Cannabis's independence is also not an entirely bad thing for the
    worker. Unlike in other industries, the path from bottom-rung employee
    to cannabis business owner can be very short. Skills learned at a
    dispensary counter or in a grow room can be easily ported to one's own
    enterprise.


    At the same time, a skilled workforce with standardized training will
    be valuable to capital as well. One entrepreneur I spoke to, Ata
    Gonzalez of G Farma Labs - a company that produces pre-rolls,
    chocolates, and hash oil - was an Oaksterdam University student at
    around the time Rush organized the workers there. Now, Gonzalez is
    planning to open a 90,000-square-foot production facility that could
    employ 75 people. When I ask him who will work there and if he's been
    talking to the union, he responds quickly: "Do you have their number?"


    Cannabis still presents labor's best chance in memory to ensure a
    developing industry that appears poised to be worker-friendly. "It's our
    future," Rush says, simply.


    The industry's new libertarian, "we'll handle this ourselves" tone is
    an attitude shift that's also a sign of cannabis's maturation from
    movement to huge commercial enterprise. But as the balance of power
    between labor and capital is being determined, it's being done in an
    old-school way: by political connections and in back rooms, worlds still
    fairly foreign to marijuana. "Something we really don't have access to
    is going to make or break our ability to move forward," one cannabis
    advocate told me on condition of anonymity. "That's really fucking
    annoying."


    In earlier years, when politicians' doors were closed, the cannabis
    movement welcomed the union. Now, says Araby, "It's 'we don't need
    outsiders to tell us how to run our business.' They sound like any other
    corporate person."
     

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