The green industry’s dirty little secret: It hates unions

Cannabis was supposed to be different. Ask the budtenders at Exclusive Brands how that worked out.

When Emily Hull, a budtender at the Ann Arbor dispensary of the Livonia-based chain with seven locations in Michigan, and a handful of coworkers walked off the job in August, they were asking to join a union.

They wanted to join UFCW Local 876, the same union that represents 18,000 workers in grocery, meatpacking and food processing. And cannabis.

“This industry is about healing and caring about people and lifting each other up,” Hull said at the time. “And this company is actively doing the opposite to its own workers.”

What happened next was not a surprise to anyone who pays attention to labor in this industry. It was a masterclass in how to crush a union drive.

The strike at Exclusive began on August 28, 2025, a day after UFCW Local 876 filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board. The charge stemmed from the termination of a pro-union employee at Exclusive’s processing facility; the union called it retaliatory and illegal.

It became the longest strike in the history of the American legal cannabis industry.

The previous record was less than two weeks. Workers and union allies held the picket line outside the Ann Arbor store, convincing customers to shop elsewhere, and they urged the state’s Cannabis Regulatory Agency to consider Exclusive’s conduct in any future licensing decisions.

The CRA already had its own complicated history with Exclusive Brands, with several examples of tracking system problems.

And yet, Exclusive had a trump card that most union-busters would envy.

 

Illegal/legal loophole

The company retreated behind a legal argument as cynical as it is clever.

Essentially, because cannabis remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance under federal law, the NLRB has no jurisdiction over cannabis businesses — meaning workers can be fired for organizing, and there’s nothing a federal labor board can do about it.

Translation: We’re going to argue that federal labor law doesn’t apply to us because our product is federally illegal — even as we operate under state law, pay state taxes, maintain state licenses, and build multi-million dollar businesses.

It’s a legal argument that may be a long shot. But it doesn’t have to win in court to be effective. All it has to do is buy time. And this time, it bought enough.

While the legal arguments played out and the NLRB charges wound their way through bureaucratic channels, Exclusive hired new employees. The four workers who had organized the drive eventually lost their jobs.

When the vote finally came, the union supporters lost. According to sources with direct knowledge of the campaign, it wasn’t close.

The NLRB charges? Dropped — largely because the current administration has shown little appetite for aggressively enforcing labor protections in an industry the federal government still considers criminal.

Start to finish, it took a few months, a handful of replacement workers, a convenient legal theory and a friendly political environment to snuff out one of the most significant union campaigns in Michigan cannabis history.

If the story at Exclusive sounds familiar, it should.

A year before, in November 2024, workers at PharmaCann’s LivWell cultivation facility in Warren — one of the Detroit metro area’s first cannabis operations to seek union representation — voted overwhelmingly to join Teamsters Local 337. There were 59 newly minted Teamsters, celebrating what felt like a breakthrough moment. The union was already representing PharmaCann workers in Illinois. There were plans for bargaining, for contracts, for careers.

Within weeks, PharmaCann announced it was shutting the facility entirely. All 222 workers lost their jobs. The union didn’t even have a contract yet.

The company cited Michigan’s low prices and competitive market conditions. The Teamsters president said he believed it. Maybe he’s right. But the optics are impossible to ignore: in Michigan’s cannabis industry, the surest way to lose your job is to vote for a union.

 

The larger pattern

Michigan’s cannabis industry employs somewhere around 41,000 workers statewide, depending on who’s counting and how generous they’re being with part-time positions.

But job creation and job quality are not the same thing. An industry that responds to union organizing by firing the organizers, replacing the workforce and running out the clock on labor charges isn’t building careers.

The 24% wholesale tax that went into effect in 2025 has given companies another excuse to squeeze labor. When an ounce of recreational flower is selling for $60-something and taxes are assessed on the wholesale price — not the profit — payroll becomes the first casualty. Workers are kept part-time to avoid benefit triggers. Raises don’t come. Schedules get cut when someone complains. And if they try to do something about it collectively, they find out that the marijuana industry isn’t much different from the rest.

 

The Lansterdam verdict

Cannabis legalization was supposed to repair some of the damage prohibition caused.

What we actually got, in part, is an industry that can use the plant’s federal legal limbo as a union-busting tool.

Emily Hull stood on a picket line in Ann Arbor for months. She and her coworkers documented retaliation, filed charges, and fought for what workers in every other sector of the economy are entitled to do without losing their jobs.

They lost anyway.

This industry likes to say it’s about healing. It’s going to need to do a lot more of it before that claim holds up.