According to a report from the Chicago Tribune, as Illinois’ marijuana industry exploded to surpass $1 billion after just a year of sales, marijuana laborers are now working to unionize.
“The industry has unfortunately just provided jobs, and not the well-paying careers that we all thought cannabis was going to generate,” said Moises Zavala, the director of organizing at Local 881 of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. The union is currently representing cannabis workers in Illinois.
It was this past December that Illinois’ first cannabis union contract was ratified and started the process of giving 180 workers at Cresco Labs cultivation center protections.
It was in February that 40 employees at Sunnyside in Chicago had become “the first dispensary workers in Illinois to ratify a union contract.” Terms of the deal include “built-in wage increases, more vacation time, reduced health care costs and a 40 percent discount on Cresco-brand cannabis products,” the Chicago Tribune reports.
“If they’re able to get some significant victories and negotiate some good contracts, they can build momentum, they can point to those as they organize workers at other facilities,” Martin Malin, co-director of the Institute for Law and the Workplace at Chicago-Kent College of Law said to the Chicago Tribune.
Illinois produced $1.03 billion in revenue in its first year of sales of recreational marijuana. Most came from recreational marijuana at $669 million while over $366 million was generated in medical sales. This is according to data from the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, which regulates dispensaries in the state.
