eNewMexican

Greener pastures

By Abha Bhattarai

Many retail and restaurant workers who lost or left their jobs during the pandemic have found new positions in the rapidly growing legal marijuana industry.

After a year on the front lines, Jason Zvokel traded in his 15-year career as a Walgreens pharmacist for a different kind of drugstore: a marijuana dispensary.

Now instead of administering vaccines and filling prescriptions, he’s helping customers make sense of concentrates, tablets and lozenges. His pay is 5 percent lower, he said, but the hours are more manageable.

“I am so much happier,” said Zvokel, 46, who’s worked in retail since he was 18. “For the first time in years, I’m not miserable when I come home from work.”

The cannabis industry is riding a pandemic high: Marijuana dispensaries and cultivation facilities — deemed “essential” by many states at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic — became an early refuge for retail and restaurant workers who had been furloughed or laid off. The industry has continued to grow, adding nearly 80,000 jobs in 2020, more than double what it did the year before, according to data from the Leafly Jobs Report, produced in partnership with Whitney Economics.

An estimated 321,000 Americans now work in the industry, a 32 percent increase from last year, the report found, making legal marijuana one of the nation’s fastest-growing sectors. In other words: The U.S. now has more legal cannabis workers than dentists, paramedics or electrical engineers.

Many Americans reassessed their jobs as the pandemic reshaped their social and working lives. Retail workers in particular are quitting at record rates in search of consistent hours, better benefits and more opportunities to advance — which many say they’re finding in the legal cannabis industry.

“There has been a seismic shift of workers from retail and restaurants to cannabis” said Kara Bradford, chief executive of cannabis recruiting firm Viridian Staffing, where she has fielded as many as 500 applications for one opening. “There is a sense that this is a booming industry that’s fun and interesting, with a lot of opportunities to move up quickly.”

Hourly pay at dispensaries, she said, runs from $12 to $15, in line with most retail and warehouse jobs. But given the newness of the industry, entrylevel workers can often move up in less than a year to more specialized positions, she said.

Workers’ rights groups are pressing for broader unionization in the cannabis industry, calling it a critical time to establish well-paying jobs with proper protections. They say, the industry could become a pipeline to middle-class jobs much like manufacturing used to be.

“It is so rare to have an opportunity to shape an industry from its inception,” said David Cooper, an analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “There is an urgency to establish guardrails now, for well-paying, middle-class jobs, before cannabis is legalized federally and really takes off. Otherwise these jobs could quickly start to look like existing retail and agriculture jobs, which are oftentimes the worst jobs in the economy.”

FRONT PAGE

en-us

2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://enewmexican.com/article/281809992045679

Santa Fe New Mexican