Following the pattern of the expansion of agricultural overtime requirements, a bill to allow a minority of cannabis workers to create a union holds a threat to all agricultural workers and Washington’s already struggling farmers and ranchers.

House Bill 1141 creates a structure for unionization of “certain agricultural workers” and leaves the door open for a legal challenge to expand that language to all agricultural workers.

The bill’s prime sponsor, Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, testified during a hearing that “no precedent is being set,” but that is a dubious claim given that the creation of the overtime law began with dairy workers and was quickly expanded to all farmworkers.

Under the auspices of the bill, cannabis workers can unionize via a card-check system. Only 30 percent of the workers in a “working unit” must express support for a bargaining representative to trigger unionization and all contact information for new hires must be made available to the union that is formed within 21 days of their hiring.

The bill was opposed unanimously by Republicans and by House ag committee Co-Chairs Reps. Christine Reeves and Melanie Morgan as well as Senate ag committee Chair Sen. Mike Chapman. The bill was also opposed by cannabis growers and retailers.

Among the amendments proposed, and rejected, for the bill was an election by secret ballot and a removal of the card-check component. By allowing for secret ballot elections rather than open elections, the potential for on-going pressure and threats to individual employees to support a preferred candidate is removed, creating a safer and fairer system. Similarly, card-check based unionization systems have been shown to have no legal preference over election-based systems. 

Additionally, Washington state’s constitution is clear that one segment of a population cannot be singled out in any instance. So, while Section 18 of the bill reads:

This chapter may not be interpreted by any court to apply to or otherwise extend any rights to any employee who is not specifically employed by an employer to perform the work of cultivating, growing, harvesting, or producing cannabis, including defoliating, drying, bucking, precuring, curing, drying, trimming, sorting, and loading, if performed on a farm.

The bill is ripe for a legal challenge to apply unionization to all agricultural workers. It is, in fact, the same basis for legal challenge that spurred the legislature to make a change for agricultural overtime to be phased in via legislation rather than via court challenge by individual commodity.

If unionization, and the potential for strikes during harvest season, is applied to all Washington state agriculture, it could be catastrophic to much of our farming and ranching community. Strikes during crucial periods risk the livelihoods of countless farmworkers and put numerous farms and ranches at greater risk of operating without employees or not at all.

It is time for legislators to consider the long-range implications of their actions. While unionization in a single sector of a business may seem like a harmless endeavor, the overall implications to our state are not. Cannabis certainly has a time component in its harvest. However, its economic impact on the state pales in comparison to the failure of an apple, potato, or cherry harvest that goes unpicked because of a union strike. It is not just the dollars of lost revenue to the farm. It is the pay lost to workers who then cannot feed their families, the lost property tax revenue, the lost B&O tax revenue, and the numerous other pieces of income that are all lost as the crop goes to waste.

Cannabis unionization is the gateway drug to unionization of all agricultural workers and much worse for Washington state’s agricultural community.