One of the nation’s largest labor unions has been waging an aggressive and — in some ways unprecedented — political fight to gain a stronghold in Oregon’s cannabis industry.
United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 has called for boycotts against two Eugene cannabis dispensaries after employees voted to quit the union. Last year, UFCW 555 also waged an unsuccessful recall campaign against Rep. Paul Holvey, the retiring Democrat of House District 8, alleging Holvey helped kill a bill that would give the union a significant edge in unionizing cannabis workers.
UFCW 555 is now taking its fight directly to voters. Measure 119 on the fall 2024 ballot would require Oregon cannabis businesses to sign a “labor peace agreement” that would require them to stay neutral if their workers consider unionizing. The cannabis business could not receive a license or a license renewal unless it signs the agreement.
In Oregon, that’s UFCW 555, which donated more than $2.4 million to gather signatures and place the measure on the fall ballot.
“We’re just trying to close out those loopholes,” UFCW Local 555 spokesperson Miles Eshaia says. Cannabis “was something that was illegal 10 years ago, and we’re just trying to bring it out of the dark,” he says.
But UFCW’s hardball tactics have also brought political defeats. Holvey says a 2023 bill to require labor peace agreements could have violated federal law. State records show the union later spent $354,000 in its failed effort to recall Holvey. In Holvey’s Oct. 3 2023 recall election, more than 90 percent of voters in his district voted against the recall.
UFCW Local 555 says the union represents 35,000 employees across Idaho, Oregon and Southwestern Washington.
The UFCW labor union represents 10,000 cannabis workers across the U.S.
UFCW Local 555 is Oregon’s largest private-sector labor union, which represents grocery and retail, plants and manufacturing, and health care and pharmacy workers.
So far, the only cannabis employees to join UFCW 555 wasted little time in quitting the union, complaining that UFCW paid little interest in them once the union had them signed up.
SpaceBuds employee Abi Lingam says her co-workers became convinced they needed a union after UFCW Local 555 officials made multiple cold calls to the dispensary.
“UFCW would cold call all the time and rally employees behind concepts of ‘you’re going to be protected and have all of these things,’” Lingam says.
SpaceBuds employees voted to unionize in April 2022, one month after Flowr of Lyfe employees also voted to join UFCW.
Lingam says that once unionized, SpaceBuds workers were not able to get a hold of their union representative for six months. “When I finally did get a hold of someone after six months,” Lingam says, “they were super hostile towards me and other employees.”
Flowr of Lyfe employees describe a similar experience. One employee, who asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation, says UFCW officials didn’t take the time to understand employees’ concerns. “It seemed like they were tripping people up and trying to push into the industry,” the anonymous employee says. “They didn’t even know what we wanted because they never talked to us.”
The Flowr of Lyfe employee says the workers didn’t have a positive relationship with their union rep from the get-go. Because of those strained interactions, the employee voted against unionization, saying he believed the union would not have acted in their best interest. “I just didn’t think that they were going to be good bedfellows, and that was just from my personal interactions,” he says.
“I felt like I was getting bullied right out of the gates.”
Eshaia says he believes Measure 119 would have helped employees at both dispensaries, noting that the slowness of NLRB decisions can make the process of unionizing more difficult. “Part of this bill moves it [cannabis unionization] towards a card check,” Eshaia says.
A card check process includes union agents getting signatures from employees agreeing to become unionized, which can happen sooner than a formal employee vote.
Lingam says the hardest part was trying to decertify its own elections while being blocked by UFCW Local 555 at every turn. “That’s what was made difficult,” Lingam says.
Employees at SpaceBuds and Flowr of Lyfe say the move to decertify came from the workers, not the companies. “We decided to step away from the table,” the Flowr of Lyfe employee says, “and it had nothing to do with the shop owner.”
UFCW Local 555 also filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge against SpaceBuds’ parent company, Eagle 5 Enterprises, claiming the dispensary was “failing to bargain in good faith for an initial collective bargaining agreement with the Union, including by engaging in surface bargaining and failing to meet at reasonable times and locations.”
On August 26, the NLRB dismissed the charge after finding SpaceBuds acted in good faith and never canceled a meeting.
UFCW 555 has launched boycotts against both companies on its Facebook page and other social media accounts.
Flowr of Lyfe owner Morgan Glenn says he was personally targeted by a Facebook ad that ran for one month in December 2023. The text calling Glenn a “union buster,” who never came to the negotiating table, was placed over a photoshopped picture of his face.
However, Glenn says this isn’t true as he was in negotiations with his employees’ union for over a year and a half. “I’m a huge union supporter. I have been all my life,” he says. Glenn says he was “intimidated and afraid” by UFCW Local 555 after seeing what they did to Holvey. “This was a David and Goliath situation. I have five employees,” he says. But UFCW? “They’re worldwide.”
Glenn says he was nervous to speak with Eugene Weekly because the union is “a billion dollar organization, and they put in billions of dollars just to get this [cannabis measure] on the ballot. They can really destroy small businesses,” he says.
After a point, both parties began using a federal mediator — a specialist in facilitating labor-management negotiations — to communicate. The mediator would go back and forth between Glenn and his attorney, and UFCW 555 representatives to essentially relay the message.
At one point, Glenn says the mediator came in with an offer from UFCW 555. “They basically said to me if you sign this contract right now, they said they will destroy SpaceBuds for you. They said they didn’t like SpaceBuds.” If Glenn kept delaying, he says, the federal mediator told him “they’re gonna unleash the holy wrath of God on you.”
EW reached out to SpaceBuds ownership, but did not receive a response in time for press.
The employees say SpaceBuds and Flowr of Lyfe saw a decline in sales. Lingam says SpaceBuds compared its sales in the summer 2022 to past summers and saw an overall 37 percent decrease in sales.
Both Lingam and the Flowr of Lyfe employee say they believe that a union would cause too much oversight, especially at smaller dispensaries. “I feel like a union could muddy the kind of relationship we have where we’re already entrenched in the community and are medical minded,” the anonymous employee says.
Lingam says that the ballot measure is unnecessary at this stage of the cannabis market in Oregon. “It’s premature, we’re not anywhere near there as an industry,” Lingam says.
With additional reporting by Bentley Freeman.