Workers at the Mango Cannabis dispensary in Henrietta have begun contract negotiations with their employer.
In a letter of union recognition delivered to Mango management on March 31 and shared with the Beacon, employees cited concerns about job security, health and retirement benefits, respect, job safety, and a voice at work. It was the first notification to management that Mango’s employees were organizing.
Last month, Local 338 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers (RWDSU/UFCW) gained official recognition from Mango as the legitimate representative of employees in collective bargaining.
Based in Edmond, Okla., Mango is a midsize, family-owned cannabis dispensary company with locations in Oklahoma, Michigan, New Mexico, and New York.
Employees at Mango have had to work long hours with insufficient pay and limited health care and retirement benefits, they say. Through a union, they are also hoping for more vacation time, sick leave, and a standing policy of just cause termination. Currently, Mango has an at-will employment policy, which allows the company to dismiss employees for any reason without notice. (New York is an at-will employment state.)
Mango did not respond to the Beacon’s request for comment.
“I feel like the want for a union came out of the ‘We’re a family’ culture that was there because we want to take care of everybody and we want everybody to be able to go to the doctor if they need it,” says Carly Monahan, a budtender at Mango and member of the employees’ bargaining committee.
“We don’t want to have to start a GoFundMe for our co-worker,” adds Juliette Mueller, another budtender and member of the bargaining committee.
The union will also provide employees with an arbitration process outside the company’s human resources department for workplace grievances or issues.
“It’s an agreed-upon mechanism to address violations of the contract, but also issues that arise in connection with, you know, the union, employment, employment status, employee relations,” says Luca Negrini, an organizer with Local 338 who helped guide the collective bargaining effort at Mango.
Employees also have safety concerns such as a lack of sufficient lighting in the dispensary’s parking lot and armed security at the store’s entrance.
In other states with legal cannabis industries, like California, where recreational cannabis has been legal since 2018, state regulations require all cannabis businesses with storefronts to hire security. Though New York does not have those same regulations, legal marijuana dispensaries rarely operate without security to deter belligerent customers and burglars.
Mango is the second dispensary in Rochester where employees have successfully organized, after Rise Cannabis. Mueller says employees at Rise had served as inspiration for the organizing effort at Mango.
“One of their workers came in in November,” she says. “They came in, and they were telling us how they have paternity leave and how they’re unionized at Rise Cannabis.”
Local 338 has also succeeded in organizing workers at several other dispensaries across Central and Western New York.
“Over the last couple of years, cannabis has been a big center of new organizing that they basically encouraged many UFCW locals to focus on,” says Negrini.
Local 338 is a part of RWDSU/UFSW’s efforts to organize workers across the burgeoning legal cannabis industry in its Cannabis Workers Rising campaign. Advocates for legalization have long argued that a legal cannabis industry would be an opportunity to rectify the wrongs of the “War on Drugs,” a wide-reaching government effort that began in the 1970s to combat the sale and use of illegal narcotics.
Critics of the War on Drugs say the effort has done little to stem the spread of narcotics and instead was meant to target Black and brown people with racist policies. Legal cannabis is an avenue for employment and business ownership for those most impacted by the War on Drugs.
“If we can, through unionization, basically force these employers to do the right thing by the workforce, we could be helping tens of thousands of families by creating sustainable careers,” Negrini observes.
“We’ve seen people a couple years into employment able to get a new car, they have their first kid, and they’re in our insurance plan, and it doesn’t cost them thousands of dollars to have a child,” he adds. “There is real impact on people that have unionized their cannabis shop.”
According to Green Rush, a cannabis industry news source, unionization drives in the cannabis industry have pushed starting wages for entry-level jobs to $18 to $24 an hour in several markets. The gap between union and non-union wages in the legal cannabis industry is $2 to $5 an hour.
