Cannabis has become a big business in California and other states. While increasing amounts of people are becoming familiar with the consumer side of the legal cannabis industry, we hear less about the production end of the business. The booming cannabis industry is already facing critiques about exploitation of the marginalized workers–often immigrant women—who grow, cultivate, and harvest cannabis for sale.
Immigrant Women in Cannabis Farming
Cannabis farming produces consumable extracts and flowers that millions of people consume daily across California and in other states where cannabis production is legalized. Cannabis farms are also spaces of harassment and discrimination against women workers. Women’s involvement in cannabis farming in California stretches across the industry, from cultivating, trimming, lab testing, and marketing, to retail sales associates, and more. Research shows that 22% of wholesale cannabis cultivators in California are women. The cannabis industry, like other agricultural sectors, relies upon immigrant workers. While there are projects underway to map the cannabis workforce in California, there currently is no comprehensive data on the demographic characteristics of the cannabis industry. However, some research on immigrant cannabis workers suggests that the workforce is predominantly Latino (96%), likely (51%) to be undocumented, and about 165,000 are indigenous farmworkers from Mexico.
Cannabis farms replicate similar patterns of reliance upon migrant workers in seasonal agriculture, although with a more diverse workforce, and reproduce structural exploitation of raced and gendered immigrant workers.
Despite their acknowledged presence in cannabis farming, undocumented immigrants and U.S. visa holders working in the cannabis industry are deemed “drug traffickers” by the Department of Homeland Security. An undocumented immigrant worker who is found to have worked in the cannabis industry, or convicted of possessing more than 30 grams of cannabis is at risk of deportation. For immigrant and undocumented cannabis workers, an association with cannabis negatively affects their immigration status or procedures for establishing a good moral character under the United States Citizen and Immigration Services Policy Manual.
Gender Discrimination and Sexual Violence in the Cannabis Industry
As scholars have long documented, women in agricultural sectors often face high rates of sexual harassment and assault. Approximately one-third of California’s agricultural sector are women, who do the work of planting, harvesting, and packaging, as well as the unpaid carework of parental and familial responsibilities. It is estimated that up to 80% of women farmworkers have experienced sexual harassment or assault at work. When overlapped with race, Latina farm workers experience sexual violence at much higher rates compared to other women. The cannabis industry is no exception to these disturbing trends.
Women trimmers face gender discrimination and harassment. After cannabis has been harvested, trimmers clip off the cannabis flower bud and trim the leaves to make it presentable to the consumer. Women are often shunted into the role of trimmers due to stereotypes about women possessing nimble fingers. Trimming is considered some of the most tedious work in the entire cannabis supply chain. Due to cannabis overproduction in the state of California, the pay rate for trimmers decreased from $150 per pound in 2020 to $100 in 2021. Women trimmers are underpaid in comparison to men and have been subject to egregious forms of sexual harassment, including pay incentives for working topless at cannabis farms. In response, experienced female trimmers have created collectives that demand to be hired in clusters, or built cooperative relationships to facilitate transportation and mutual aid.
Crews of cannabis trimmers often travel or migrate from across the state, country, and national borders to seek seasonal employment in Northern California’s cannabis farms. Known as “trimmigrants,”–nearly half of whom are women—these workers are especially vulnerable to sexual violence.
In one egregious instance, an undocumented Mexican woman was brought to Mendocino County by a grower who took advantage of the woman’s precarious immigration status. The grower sexually abused her, threatened her to prevent her from running away, impregnated her, and later refuted the accusations of rape when the victim reported the incident to law enforcement. Detectives handling her case accused her of lying to obtain a U-Visa, a special visa available to victims of trafficking and sexual assault.
Unsustainable cannabis farming practices also affect seasonal cannabis workers by exposing them to physical hazards like dust, pesticides, injuries, and substandard temporary housing. Additionally, immigrants working in cannabis farming are vulnerable to exploitation in ways that are similar to agricultural workers including labor trafficking, wage theft, and psychological stress, stemming from intersecting power structures. So far, immigrants have been “unable to reap the economic benefits of legalization” even under existing cannabis social equity policies.
Labor Organizing in Cannabis Farming
In response to their exploitation, women in cannabis farming have organized harm reduction workshops designed to foster a safer environment for trimmers and the least powerful of cannabis workers. Since 2016, thousands of workers have joined and are now represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), forming a new cannabis division of the union (Los Angeles, Hayward, Buena Park). Cannabis unions—like unions more generally—move the industry closer to gender equity by “reducing the risk of exploitation and abuse,” and promoting public safety and sustainability.
In 2019, cannabis workers fought for a labor peace agreement. Under California state law, a labor peace agreement is a “contract between an employer and a union that prohibits employers from disrupting efforts to organize their employees.” Cannabis companies with 20 or more employees are required to enter into labor peace agreements. Beginning July 1, 2024, companies with 10 or more employees will be included in this policy. Peace agreements are a good opening window for greater unionization efforts, but workers need greater support from the federal government. Currently, the National Labor Relations Act exempts agricultural workers, including cannabis workers, from protection. After the 2016 coverage on abuse and harassment, the UFCW Western States Council sponsored the cannabis workers protection bill that would require legal marijuana business owners, except agricultural workers and cannabis farmers, to complete a 30-hour training program on occupational health, sexual harassment, and discrimination run by the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
While cannabis social equity policies are a good step toward addressing the harms of marijuana criminalization, these policies need to also include provisions for the agricultural side of the business.
Community groups working on social equity policies advocate for the development of Cannabis Working Groups as a “standing mechanism for interagency collaboration” that can address and work towards mitigating social and environmental harms. One way to address gender disparity in the cannabis industry is to require that businesses source 50% of cannabis from women-owned farms. Additionally, cannabis social equity policies need to include measures to protect undocumented and immigrant cannabis workers from punitive immigration policies that threaten harm.
Cannabis farmworkers, especially immigrant women, toil in discriminatory and often dangerous working environments that benefit a billion-dollar cannabis industry in California. Building a sustainable and equitable cannabis industry rid of gendered and racial exploitation requires collaborative efforts among policymakers, industry leaders, researchers, and workers.
