Employees of Green Thumb Industries (OTC: GTBIF) filed a petition seeking an election to remove United Food and Commercial Workers Local 360 union officials’ “monopoly ‘representation’” over them.
According to a statement from National Right to Work, Michael Potter, a lead warehouse technician for Green Thumb, filed the decertification petition with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of his coworkers at five locations across New Jersey.
If the GTI employees win the decertification election, around 275 workers will be freed from UFCW union officials’ bargaining power.
“Many of us believe the UFCW does not advance our interests and that we would be better off without the union in our workplace,” Potter commented. “We simply seek a secret ballot election that was denied to us when the union was installed, so we can determine what the majority of Green Thumb employees want.”
Pressure to unionize
Potter said he has collected more than enough employee signatures on his petition to trigger a decertification vote under NLRB rules. He filed the decertification petition to challenge the so-called “card check” unionization campaigns that he claims the UFCW union bosses used to pressure his coworkers.
The statement noted that with card checks, union officials can bypass the secret ballot election process as long as a majority of employees want to unionize. Without a secret ballot, the employees claimed that “union officials can repeatedly solicit and pressure workers face-to-face to demand they sign union authorization cards, which are then counted as ‘votes’ to impose the union on workers.”
In addition, New Jersey lacks a Right to Work law, and the result is that union officials can demand that workers pay union dues or fees just to stay employed. Employees who didn’t want to join the union or oppose it also are still subject to its contract decisions.
Days to spare
Potter filed the petition with days remaining under a 2020 reform to the NLRB’s election rules. Known as the “Election Protection Rule,” it allows employees to submit decertification petitions to force a secret ballot vote after a union gains power through a card check.
However, the NLRB in Washington, D.C., issued a final rule that went into effect Sept. 30 that undoes the Election Protection Rule and makes it much harder for workers to vote out union officials they oppose.
“If Mr. Potter had filed his decertification petition just a week later, workers at Green Thumb Industries would be denied their right to vote out union officials who seized power over them in a hasty and coercive manner,” National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix said.
1885000-1885933-502 rd petition
Unions lose their buzz
GTI employees aren’t the only cannabis workers who have had second thoughts about being part of a labor union. In July, Cresco Labs employees in Illinois voted to decertify its union. Employees voted 97-34 to decertify their unit with the UFCW.
That was the second group of employees at Cresco to dump their union. Workers at a production facility in Fall River, Massachusetts, voted to drop the UFCW in April.
Green Market Report previously reported that the decision comes down to economics. Jonathon O’Connor, an automation technician who led the decertification effort at Cresco’s Joliet packaging and processing facility said, “There were multiple issues. People filed grievances, but we didn’t hear from (the union) until we began the process to get rid of them. There wasn’t much interaction . . . we never had a steward. People felt like they were paying them (dues) for nothing.”
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