High Stakes

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.