High Stakes
by Mars Maddox
For the last seven years, the government has chosen to ignore the needs of approximately 80,000 workers in California by excluding cannabis professionals from employment data. Little information was available on the wages, working conditions, training, and benefits of these workers until 2025, which caused a lack of representation of these workers during formative policy making. Taking matters into their own hands, the UCLA Labor Center and Cannabis Worker Collaborative has been working toward the release of the first quantitative study of cannabis workers in California. Surveying over 1100 employees and conducting over 50 in depth interviews, this team has come together to create a geographically representative research sample; the first of its kind.
The findings of this research study are complex and involve a lot of numbers, which often can cause eyes to glaze over. Our goal with these Project Sister Dope posts is to break down this 90 page document into several smaller articles that can be read at your convenience and in any order (meaning if you have a specific focus, you can skip to that part). While we do encourage checking out the full study available online here, the research showed that cannabis workers do not have the extra time to dive into deep readings because they are often working multiple jobs and asked to perform additional tasks off the clock. Hopefully, these shorter articles will make the research more accessible to the community as a whole.
So let’s talk about the community. Who are the cannabis employees? This research surveyed budtenders, delivery drivers, cultivation workers, and even some managers to learn about the dedicated employees that are holding the cannabis industry together during its inaugural years. What they found is that the cannabis industry is dominantly composed of young (under 40; 89%) people of color (68%) with a high representation of queer (23%) and formerly incarcerated (8%) folks. A majority of workers in the cannabis industry (38%) identify as latinx, with the next largest group identifying as white (32%). This may not seem like a surprising number since the data was collected in California, but 22% of cannabis workers identify as black compared to 5.6% of the California population as a whole. 68% of cannabis employees are between the ages of 25-39 with 18-24 year olds comprising 21%, and only ONE PERCENT of employees surveyed were over the age of 65. In general, these workers expressed experiencing difficulty finding employment in non-cannabis industries (26%) with black workers reporting this difficulty significantly more frequently (36%).
This data suggests that the cannabis industry may be a good break-through industry for those who have been systematically oppressed because it's easier for them to become employed. Unfortunately, getting a job is only the first part of the employment battle. Cannabis employees reported experiencing discrimination from customers, vendors, and employers showing that this industry is not exempt from problems. We’ll be covering all of this data in more detail through several articles that will be published on the Project Sister Dope newsletter as well as available digitally on our website.
The research also showed that informing non-cannabis users about policy surrounding cannabis can help increase support. Many are unaware of the strict laws required to operate a dispensary, and we encourage those who don’t know much to learn more! Legal cannabis companies are operating with stricter regulations than baby food manufacturers. We highly encourage you to share this information with those who don’t work in the cannabis industry as well to help reduce the stigma against legal recreational use. To sign up for our newsletter and make sure you’re the first to read new articles about the High Stakes report, visit our website where you can also find each previously published article and more reading on other topics surrounding cannabis.
