Help wanted: Cannabis.

'How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree'?"

Pay them well.

Cannabis gives employees a Plan B. Having another good option is empowering.

Farm work is hard work. Most of it is done outdoors in the weather--hot, cold, wet, windy, dusty. Most of it is tedious. Workers get dirty. Often it is done stooped over. Sometimes it involves moving heavy things. It isn't high status work.

Cannabis farming has its own special problems. As cannabis plants grow they become sticky with resin, which doesn't come off easily. You can wash your clothes and wash yourself, but you and everything about you has a scent. You may well get paid in ten dollar bills. The laws keep changing, so a job and skill-set and career that exists one year might disappear the next.

This economy has low-paid jobs in food service, in caregiving, in retail, and those jobs still exist. The Albertsons grocery store in my neighborhood has a big display at the entrance inviting people to apply "for a great career." The McDonalds and Burger King stores in Medford have big signs saying they pay $14 and $15 an hour to start. There are people who want those jobs. They can envision themselves ringing up sales or working in fast food but not doing hard physical labor. They have driven by farm fields and seen agricultural workers and don't want to be one of them. Seeing people standing on a ladder picking pears, or on their knees inserting hemp plants, looks like hard, boring work.

People unwilling to do farm work form the bulk of the entry-level labor market, but at the margin, something changed in Southern Oregon. This is ground zero for excellent quality outdoor cannabis. It is an industry that employs thousands of people entering and exiting the unskilled labor market. People who quit jobs in retail and hospitality to take jobs in the cannabis industry are sending price signals to employers--and to their former co-workers. There is something better out there.

Market participants tell me that for several years entry-level wages in cannabis had been $15/hour--a couple of dollars per hour more than the prevailing local wage. The price of labor has gone up, and is now nearer $20 an hour. People with experience and a good work ethic who can work independently make more--sometimes much more. Bonuses are a common feature for long-term employees, particularly when they can be paid "at the back end," after the product is sold.

The outdoor cannabis season has jobs over most of the year. It includes preparing clones from a "mother plant" in the spring, planting in May and June, caring for the plants through the summer, an early harvest in August, another harvest in October, and drying and trimming the product through the fall and into January and later. There are multiple time-critical periods. Cannabis plants can grow from a few inches in size to twelve feet tall in the course of a season and that kind of growth requires special feeding, irrigating, trellising and branch supports, pest management, and as harvest time nears, security. There are narrow windows when tasks must get done. Employees need not have a union to have bargaining power. Time-critical work--and the reality that most native-born Americans don't want to do it--gives it to them.

Cannabis growers are in the same bind as airlines. They are capital intensive industries with up-front sunk costs, with a perishable product. An empty airline seat is revenue lost forever. When the plants need to go in the ground, or when a hemp field needs a re-check for males or hermaphrodites, or when the trichomes on buds have turned from milky white to amber, certain things must be done, right then. The cannabis grower will pay what he needs to pay. An entire crop can be devalued because a single male plant escaped notice and "seeded" a garden, or russet mites were noticed too late, or a mature plant wasn't harvested before a rainstorm. If a pilot doesn't show up, a plane doesn't fly. If the window for a critical task in the cannabis cycle is missed, a crop may be unsellable.

There are sedentary jobs, too, for people who couldn't handle outdoor farm labor. One of the tasks in the industry is "trimming" and it is done indoors at a trimming table, after the harvest. It is typically paid as piecework. The end-consumer of cannabis seeks nice clean stem-free buds. The photos of cannabis buds that greet travelers at the Medford Airport have been "finished" by a trimmer using tiny scissors. In 2021 cannabis needs to "look good" in the package to sell. Trimmers had traditionally earned $100/pound to turn dried buds with bits of stems and leaves into a finished product. Diligent employees might do three pounds per day: $300, or about $40/hour. Some are faster. I have observed people working in a production line with division of tasks where the group of four people trimmed a pound per hour per person in a ten hour day. Each person made $1,000 a day.

Small, untrimmed buds

Growers have adjusted by doing mechanical trimming for a rough-draft trim, leaving less work for the hand finish and therefore paying them less per pound, but trimmers bring value to the growers' product. Mechanical trimmers knock off and waste some of the buds, meaning there is less of the $1,000/pound finished bud product and more trim waste, which is sellable, but for far less. A hand trimmer brings net value, and both the trimmer and grower know it. Theoretically, trimming is not time sensitive, but in practice the grower has a lot of time and money in the product at the point that it is trimmed. It is valuable and vulnerable to mishap, so the grower is motivated to get that last task completed.

I have heard employers in the hospitality industry complain about the competition for employees and the difficulty caused by employees quitting on them to work in cannabis. They complain that employees game the system by working "off the books"--an unfair advantage. The cannabis industry still cannot use banks, so employees are frequently paid in cash, which may not be fully reported and taxed. An employee working two thousand hours paid at $20/hour, with a back-end bonus of another $10,000, untaxed, gets twice the net pay than she would earn working 2,000 hours in retail at $14/hour, taxed. It is a problem for restaurants, but a net positive for the local economy.

The cannabis industry brings money into the area. Long-established local businesses are servicing that industry with equipment, supplies, materials. What is tough on restaurants is good for hardware stores, irrigation companies, sellers of fertilizers and soil amendments--and employees. Young workers earning $20/hour can afford to pay off student loans. They can buy things. They can rent an apartment without roommates. They don't live in poverty.

Equipment bought locally