The Times: Essential news from the L.A. Times

Legal weed, massive worker exploitation

Episode Summary

When California voters legalized cannabis, growers vowed a break from decades of worker exploitation in the state's agricultural industry. A Times investigation found otherwise.

Episode Notes

When California voters legalized cannabis, growers vowed a break from decades of worker exploitation in the state’s agricultural industry. A Times investigation found otherwise.

Today, where it all went wrong and what’s being done to stop it. Read the full transcript here.

Host: Gustavo Arellano

Guests: L.A. Times investigative reporter Paige St. John

More reading:

Dying for your high: The untold exploitation and misery in America’s weed industry

The reality of legal weed in California: Huge illegal grows, violence, worker exploitation and deaths

Lawmakers want investigation, hearings into ‘Wild West’ of California cannabis and farm work

Episode Transcription

Gustavo Arellano: Cristiano came to the United States on a promise. 

Cristiano: My plan to come here was to make money and leave. I was coming to work for weed.

Gustavo Arellano: He found work on cannabis farms in California and Oregon.  

Cristiano Clip: What kind of work did you do? Transplanting, watering, lifting, harvesting, everything what the plants need. 

Gustavo Arellano: Cristiano worked for a few years. But he says some of the cannabis farms he worked on didn't pay him what they promised. One farm, he claimed, still owes him about $4,000. 

But he couldn’t just leave. 

Cristiano said he was stuck until he could get the money that he was owed.

Cristiano: I spent all the winter without money because of that, living in a van, and trying to figure out how to get paid.

Gustavo Arellano: The legalization of cannabis in California and other states has brought a multibillion-dollar industry out of the shadows … and into brightly lit neighborhood dispensaries.

But a Los Angeles Times investigation found that cannabis workers in Oregon and California, the people like Cristiano who are actually harvesting the crop, suffer wage theft, hazardous workplaces, threats of violence and squalid living conditions.

I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.” It's Wednesday, March 1, 2023. Today, the exploitation and misery of workers in America's cannabis industry.

Paige St. John covers criminal justice, disasters and investigative stories for the Los Angeles Times. Paige, welcome back.

Paige St. John: Thank you.

Gustavo Arellano: So you spent two years investigating the pitfalls of legal cannabis in California and Oregon. And one of the big issues you looked into was investigating exploited cannabis workers. Who are these people working, and how are they ending up on cannabis farms?

Paige St. John: Well, California's cannabis farms today draw very heavily from the immigrant communities. So these workers are being pulled from immigrant communities already in the United States, like immigrants from China who are living in Los Angeles and New York. Or people from Central America who are working the fields in the Central Valley or San Jose. But they're also being drawn directly from countries like Argentina, Spain, Portugal, where economies are suffering and people, you know, some of them college professionals, are just looking for money.

Gustavo Arellano: And what kind of work are these people doing exactly?

Paige St. John: This is intensive, hard labor. 

They're hauling water, they're hauling soil. Some of these farms are on steep hillsides, and all of that has to be put on the backs of humans to get to the plants, to water them and tend them and, at the end of the season, to cultivate, to cut the plants, hang dry and then trim the final buds. So it's an intensely labor-intensive crop. Every step of the way is touched by human hands.

So these workers, when they arrive to farms, are often following someone who's picked them up at a grocery store parking lot or some other kind of recruitment area and follow their bosses up into the hills, into remote areas. There's no housing for workers. They're expected to either camp, sleep on the ground or live in their own vehicles. There's often no sanitation, fresh water, no rest breaks. 

Gustavo Arellano: What did you see when you went to some of these farms?

Paige St. John: Oh, these conditions were horrible. The squalor was pretty bad. 

I also found workers who were without food. They were an hour and a half or more away from food banks and without transportation and without money for gas. So I did find workers who looked as thin as a rail, for instance. They had rigged holes in the ground for toilets. They work from sunup to sundown, and do it again the next day.

The work that they do isn't just hard but often tedious. And in order to make up for the low wages, some workers are just simply working extra hours. I heard a story about one woman who would wear adult diapers so that she could trim cannabis for 15 hours at a stretch without taking a break because her hourly wage worked out to about $5 an hour.

So among the people I spoke to was a woman from Spain who'd managed a farm on Chicken Ridge. It’s a narrow ridge in the heart of the Emerald Triangle in Mendocino County. 

Sabrina: For the hot water we use the black bucket and leave all day in the sun, after we hang in the tree … and we have a shower there.

Paige St. John: That won't shower very many people.

Sabrina: No, every person have one bucket. 

Paige St. John: There was a single toilet for some 30 workers, and when that overflowed or was too foul to use, the workers took shovels to the garden.

Sabrina: It was horrible. I try my best with the toilet. But is really bad situation.

Paige St. John: It was very rudimentary living. And this particular farm is licensed by the state of California. It had told inspectors from Mendocino County it would have zero employees.

Gustavo Arellano: Zero.

Paige St. John: Zero. So one of the tricks used to keep these workers invisible is carried out by the farmers who are filling out their licenses and declaring with a straight face that they'll have zero employees, or one or two. Therefore, there's no need to provide housing. There's no need to provide infrastructure, sanitation or pay workers comp, taxes, and give these workers protections.

Gustavo Arellano: So, everything you’re describing sounds like agricultural conditions in California going back to the days of “The Grapes of Wrath.” Factories in the fields, you know? What my mom and aunts faced. And one of the big issues that those farmworkers also had to deal with is chemicals — pesticides. Is that the same for cannabis farmworkers as well?

Paige St. John: It is in California. Despite state testing programs for the cannabis that’s sold in shops. When I was on farms, I routinely found empty containers of Raid. Of pesticides no longer safe for use in the United States, like methamidophos. It’s a nerve agent.

Gustavo: Geez. 

Paige St. John:  In fact, there's one farm that we were at with the Sheriff's Department in San Bernardino County where a pregnant woman had been sleeping right next to the greenhouses and the air reeked of this nerve agent.

Gustavo Arellano: More after the break.

Gustavo Arellano: Paige, you're describing terrible conditions for workers in the cannabis industry, exposure to pesticides, all these other things. What else do they have to deal with?

Paige St. John:  Well, the promise was, pretty good cash. And from the perspective of workers, the biggest issue is wage theft.

Workers had come expecting $200, $300 a pound for trimming, for instance. But the market crash in cannabis dropped those prices to $50 a pound if they could get it at all. They were promised payment at the end of the season. Farmers weren't able to sell their crops. Many of these farms didn't pay at all, and wage theft became rampant in the last few seasons in farms in California and southern Oregon. And so extreme that it has drawn the attention of labor advocates, of people like Dagoberto Morales with Unete, a southern Oregon labor advocacy organization, who visited one of these labor camps with me. 

Cross talk between Paige St. John and Dagoberto Morales: So we are about to enter worker housing. 

Paige St. John: Dagoberto told me that it reminded him of the days when he was picking strawberries in California in the ‘80s.

Gustavo Arellano: Is there any way these workers can get help to get the money that they're owed from these cannabis farms?

Paige St. John: They can, if they know what to do. And I found that most workers did not. They mistakenly thought that they could complain to cannabis regulators. That agency refused to provide any information on the complaints it received, but it admitted it had never taken action against a cannabis farm for failing to pay its workers or abusing its workers. These laborers can file wage theft claims with California's Department of Industrial Relations, which is supposed to respond to those within four months. We found people waiting as long as two years to get a hearing. 

So one of the licensed farms that we focused on – and I have to say that this, I'm told, is typical of the conditions and the way these farms operate – was on Chicken Ridge deep in Mendocino County in the Emerald Triangle.

It's a licensed farm. Had 20 to 30 workers, most of them were working without pay. And left the farm, returned to their countries with promises that the money would come, you know, January, February, March, and to this date have received, at most, only a portion of the money that they're due. These workers were all undocumented individuals that had come to the United States on tourist visas, so they weren't working with the permission of the United States in this country, and that was used against them as leverage to their exploitation.

Paige St. John: Sabrina, who is the manager of this farm, told us that most of the workers were not receiving their pay and had been shorted a $100,000 by her books.

Sabrina: To me, he need pay me 30,000, but for other person is 7,000, 10,000, 3000. A 1000. Every person a different bill.

Paige St. John: So when workers told us that they tried to get their money, they often encountered threats, threats of violence. Sometimes guns were pulled on them or intimidation. We talked to people who had worked at a farm in Helltown, for instance, who had tried to confront a grower who had been sexually harassing the female workers on the farm the entire season, and then when it came time to pay them, refused to give them money and insisted that they take bags of weed.

Workers in Helltown: They pay this money. Do you understand me? One cent on the .. “Who told you that? Who's your agreement with? Beat it!”  

Gustavo Arellano: So what's keeping these workers on these farms or even going to these farms if things are so bad?

Paige St. John: Gustavo, you've hit on the nexus of labor trafficking and how it works. The workers are drawn in for the money, but what they find are situations of fraud and coercion. They're physically intimidated. I had one worker talk about being choked by a farmer when she threatened to go to police about not being paid. Others are threatened with being reported to immigration and being deported or having all of the money that they've earned being forfeited if they try to find work elsewhere. 

It's not something particularly strongly investigated in California. There's been criticism by think tanks like the little Hoover Commission, that California law on labor trafficking is very weak. But that's the situation these workers find themselves in, and they're often desperate. One of the farms that we went to after a police raid had housed 200 to 300 estimated workers, in an illegal operation in southern Oregon. And I toured the labor camp that the workers had set up for themselves with Dagoberto Morales.

Cross talk between Paige St. John and Dagoberto Morales: They were asking about recovering their wages. Yes. And your answer was, it looks good, or it does not look good. Well... 

Paige St. John: So after a raid on a farm in southern Oregon, Dagoberto Morales brought the workers, who were all from Argentina, back to his office. Dago also wanted them to fill out paperwork to file claims for their wages. And the workers were unwilling to do that. They were afraid that if they put their names on any sort of paperwork, that immigration authorities would come after them and they'd not be able to return to Oregon and California in the future to work in cannabis.

Cross talk between Paige St. John and Dagoberto Morales: It's like the farmer knew he could not pay those people because what are they gonna do? Yep. Yeah. Pretty much. They not going to pay them. 

Paige St. John: And he noticed something else about this, that the conditions for these workers, remote, one worker told us that the guards, with guns refused to allow them to leave, had all of the hallmarks of what he called a kidnapping.

Cross talk between Paige St. John and Dagoberto Morales: If you don't have a car, you cannot go nowhere. You have to be stuck in there and you don't know where you can go. You have to stick in there like it or not. And they know. This is why they bring they brought those people here because they know they cannot go nowhere.

Gustavo Arellano: Knowing that these workers are essentially trafficked in, how is law enforcement dealing with situations like this?  

Paige St. John: Yes. For a few sheriffs, there's been a huge shift in how they look at the people on these farms. In the past, they would be rounded up, handcuffed, sometimes taken to the jail and booked. But now, Kory Honea, who's the sheriff of Butte County, and some of the other sheriffs in Northern California have begun to realize that these people are most likely victims.

Kory Honea: What our experience was that California's legal environment has created an excellent opportunity for drug trafficking organizations and cartels to exploit the legal environment in California.

Paige St. John: So after seeing one of these camps firsthand, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea gathered the other sheriffs in his area. He found funding from a philanthropist, and they have begun to fund a task force. 

Kory Honea: It is a collaboration between law enforcement leaders here in Butte County, as well as Humboldt, Lake County, Mendocino County and Trinity County. 

Paige St. John: So these workers, they're not living in squalor by choice. They're often without pay. Some cases, in a case that Sheriff Honea investigated, their passports had been taken from them. So they began to bring in aid workers and resources to workers and try to gain their trust to talk and tell them what's really going on.

Kory Honea: Under no circumstances would any worker in any other industry or, for that matter in the legitimate agricultural industry, be required to live in the conditions that these people are required to live in or be concerned about whether or not they were gonna be paid a fair wage or for that matter, whether or not, if they spoke out about what they were dealing with, if their families might be harmed, you know, back in Mexico. So those are all the kinds of things that we started looking at.

Paige St. John: That's the shift that took place I'd say in the last two years, starting with Butte County and then spreading to Trinity and some of the other Emerald Triangle counties where they began to ask these workers, the people that they used to chase through the woods in handcuffs, do you want to be here? Are you being paid? And realize that these people are potentially victims.

Gustavo Arellano: More after the break.

Gustavo Arellano: So, Paige, we have mostly immigrant workers being taken advantage of and severely mistreated in the cannabis industry. Like I said earlier, all this sounds just like the agricultural sins that California has experienced for decades. But was it supposed to be different in the legalized cannabis industry?

Paige St. John: Well, there's a deep irony here. Before cannabis was legalized, growers had a deep interest in protecting their workers: in paying them, because those workers could report them to authorities and cause criminal complications for the growers. But with legalization came steep reductions in the criminal penalties, and I found both licensed and unlicensed farms had given over to this farmworker model of exploiting the most vulnerable workers that they could find.

Gustavo Arellano: That's crazy. So once it got legalized, it got worse.

Paige St. John: Yes. The promise with legalization is that it would not only right the social wrongs of the past with the drug wars and provide, you know, easy access to recreational cannabis, but it would run criminal organizations out of business and clean things up, right? But the truth in what we found in our reporting is that farmworkers never had a seat at the table when these negotiations were being made. So there were no protections built into California's regulation of cannabis to deal with what's gonna happen to the farmworkers. The other unforeseen shift was that with legalization and the opening up of markets, not just in California, but across the United States, triggered a green rush. And instead of just growing a single season outdoor in the sun, growers flocked to areas like the Emerald Triangle and even the desert in San Bernardino County, and built greenhouses where they could get two, three, four  crops in a single season. And that intense cultivation has created lethal conditions for workers because they're being run off of generators. And those generator fumes in these enclosed greenhouses are producing lethal carbon monoxide.

Gustavo Arellano: Yeah. We did an entire episode last year about these greenhouses at the edge of the desert in Los Angeles and just all the environmental degradation that was happening, but we really didn't touch on just all the workers that were being exploited as well.

Paige St. John: They're an unseen victim class. It wasn't until I pulled coroner records from Los Angeles County that I found immediately carbon monoxide poisonings on these very cannabis greenhouses. One gentleman died sitting up in his chair on Christmas day as he's watching a crop there in Los Angeles. Two brothers died in another greenhouse in the desert there. And a third gentleman within weeks after that. And everywhere I looked, Mendocino County, Humboldt County, southern Oregon, I found more of these deaths. Twenty carbon monoxide poisonings on cannabis farms in the last few years.

Paige St. John: But Carbon monoxide poisoning isn't the only threat. We also found workers dying from violence, from a massacre on a farm in Riverside County to people who simply disappeared.

Paige St. John: One of those cases is Victor Medina, who had been working on a cannabis farm in Covelo in Mendocino County. It wasn't until days after his phone went silent that family members from San Jose called police and the search began to find Victor's body. And first they had to find where the farm was.

Berta: Sí, pues de encontrarlo y, pues, darle Susana sepultura y este. Y pues antes seas tenerlo con uno, pues porque pues ahorita, pues no está desaparecido, no sabemos. (Translation: They want to find Victor's body so that he can have a proper burial, says his sister, Berta.) [Sitting next to her on the couch is Victor's mother, who wails in grief and cradles her arms in front of her, as if holding a baby.]

Paige St. John: So a fellow reporter, Marissa Gerber, and I tracked down Victor's family in San Jose and sat with them in their living room as they told us about their search: two years to try to find Victor's body and to try to keep law enforcement interested in solving this case.

Berta: Y este y dicen que ajá. Y que se oyeron balazos. Entonces, ya en la mañana, cuando ya todos se despertaron, ya no había ni un carro. Ya ya no había nada de gente. (Translation: They say they heard bullets. Then in the morning everyone disappeared; there wasn’t even a car. There was no one.) 

Gustavo Arellano: Paige, do government officials in California and Oregon know what's going on with these workers and these farms? I mean especially after legalization, what sort of enforcement or regulation infrastructure are they doing to try to make sure that these things don't happen?

Paige St. John: It is like a tale of two cities. Everywhere that I went, state workers in Oregon and California, who worked in the trenches knew very well what was going on. The stories they told me were shocking. But they'd been unable to get bosses higher in the administration to pay attention. And we found the leaders in Sacramento, for instance, very, non-responsive or unresponsive to our questions. And not willing to talk about exploitation of workers on cannabis.  Uh, counties are left to their own to devise an inspection system. So some of them go to a farm before it's even growing, so they don't see the workers, they don't see the plants. They have to take at face value statements by the farmers that they will have no workers, which I saw again and again in the licensing papers of farms: statements that these huge operations would have zero, one, or two workers on their properties. So state regulators or inspectors who would show up on these farms would sometimes see squalid conditions. And we even found an internal email from October where staff were asking the law enforcement division at cannabis control  what do we do when we see labor trafficking and signs of it? And the response back was, well,  tell us about it, but we don't have a procedure yet on how to refer these cases out. And this is after five years of legalization. 

Instead, the rhetoric and the narrative has been about taxation, and expanding the cannabis market.

Gustavo Arellano: Oh, geez. Were you able to talk to any of these cannabis control workers?

Paige St. John: Oh, yes. Under conditions of anonymity, because every one of them told us that they would lose their jobs if they were found to be talking to the reporters about what's going on. They provided some of the documents that the agency refused to release. They provided firsthand accounts of what they see in the field. And they said that they're very upset. They're very frustrated. They feel like they're not able to do their jobs.

Gustavo Arellano: How have lawmakers and people inside the cannabis industry reacted to your finding?

Paige St. John: It's been a slow response, but it's picking up steam. We now have one lawmaker, Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who's announced that he's going to seek a statewide investigation into public corruption, exploitation of workers, and many of the other woes that we've disclosed in our series on cannabis in California. Two other senators say that they're going to call for hearings this spring on farmworker exploitation in California, so that will include people on these cannabis farms. And other lawmakers are talking about introducing bills specific to deal with labor trafficking on cannabis farms.

Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula: I believe we need a single entity that can help us to prosecute and then prevent labor trafficking in the future.

Paige St. John: One of those lawmakers, Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, is willing to take on the governor's office on this issue. He said he is going to come back with legislation that Gov. Newsom vetoed last year insisting that labor trafficking be handled as a criminal issue by the state Labor Department.

Joaquin Arambula:  When you're in the midst of an agricultural community, you hear the stories firsthand, and I'm determined to make sure that we have a unit that is working to prevent labor trafficking going forward.

Paige St. John: Newsom in his veto message had said he preferred it to be something given to the Civil Rights Department and treated as a civil matter.

Paige St. John: So Newsom's office, after weeks of inquiry, did respond to us but did not address the issue directly. It said that in this statement that the governor remains ultimately concerned about federal immigration policy and federal cannabis policy, but he did not address directly the issue of cannabis exploitation in California. Among the senators who've been calling for action is the chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, Dave Cortese, who with the chair of the Ag Committee, Melissa Hurtado, are calling for hearings on farmworker conditions in California. Both of them said that it's shocking and shameful that farmworkers at this point have not been given a voice when it comes to cannabis policy. 

Cortese: It's really the wild, wild west when it comes to regulation, behavior, and it's really no exaggeration. Rampant abuse, wage theft, slave labor, etc., etc. And so we're seeing that, I think in the cannabis industry now, and we shouldn't be surprised. What we should be is a little bit ashamed that we've allowed this helter skelter approach to commercializing and legalizing the cannabis industry.

Paige St. John: They're also concerned about other major California policies that have left farmworkers in the cold, such as climate change and water rights.

Gustavo Arellano: Finally, Paige, we've talked a lot about the workers. We've talked about government officials, we've talked about law enforcement, we've talked about growers. But what about consumers? Do they even know that all of this exploitation is happening? And if so, could their purchasing power help improve these conditions? Because I'm thinking about, you know, how there was a nationwide boycott of grapes during the 1960s and ‘70s organized by Cesar Chavez and United Farm Workers, and that boycott led and all the publicity around it that led to improved working conditions in California's fields and beyond.

Paige St. John: Yeah, Gustavo, that shows the power of the consumer. Nobody can have more impact on the cannabis industry than consumers. Yet the labor exploitation that's gone into growing this crop remains one of the most hidden defining narratives of cannabis.

Paige St. John:  There are things that consumers can do. There are some private certification programs that not only ensure that the cannabis you're buying is organic, pesticide-free, but ask, what are the conditions for the workers? Do they have written contracts? Where do they live? Are they paid clean Green Certified is one. There are a few others. They're just getting steam, but it'll be up to the consumers to ask.

Gustavo Arellano: Paige, thank you so much for this conversation.

Paige St. John: Oh, it's my pleasure.

Gustavo Arellano: And that's it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.” Kinsee Morlan and David Toledo were the jefes on this episode. It was edited by Jazmín Aguilera and Heba Elorbany, and Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it. 

Our show is produced by Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our fellow is Helen Li. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen. 

I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Friday, with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.