New Cannabis Symposium Seeks to Connect Workers
North East Regional Cannabis Symposium (NERCS) to be held Aug 30-31
Hey Folks, I’ll have a full newsletter to you tomorrow per usual, but in the meantime, I wanted to use to this space to bring some attention to a cool upcoming event.
Regular readers will know that I’m a big supporter of improving conditions for workers in the cannabis space, so I wanted to let everyone know about the upcoming North East Regional Cannabis Symposium in Worcester on August 30th and 30st.
I sat down with NERCS team members Cara Crabb-Burnham and Maggie Kinsella to discuss the event.
Burn After Reading: What inspired you to plan NERCS?
Cara: It’s a proactive responsive action to the needs of the workforce. Maggie, Jess and I worked with bigger, Massachusetts-based companies, and we’ve seen some stuff.
I just feel like the workforce has not been promoted as professionally as it should be. I feel like these companies aren’t realizing that by people doing their jobs correctly, they’re keeping themselves out of federal prison, they’re keeping their licenses intact. It’s really important, the record keeping, the inventory, the training.
So we just saw an opportunity where there’s a lot of information that’s being held on to by people who are touching the plant and who are the front line with consumers, and we need to get it from them and share it widely.
Maggie: The problem is that no one’s talking to [the workers], it’s getting filtered. The people working in it should be the ones who are talking about the regulations, and the compliance factors, and the job duties. Not the C-suite executives.
How much planning has gone into this event?
Cara: I remember about two years ago, I floated this by a couple different groups in Massachusetts to see if anyone who was already established in holding these types of events was interested in picking this idea up. I got a lot of “it’s really not very sexy,” and I’ll be the first to admit: It’s not a sexy event! It’s a nerdy event. We want to talk to you about work, but in an interesting way.
About six months ago, we launched the survey. It was shortly after we lost Lorna McMurrey, and I was like “Okay, you know what? This is out of line. I need to launch a survey. I need to know what people think.”
So we started this survey, and the responses were really traumatizing! People have been through it. People feel abandoned and unsafe. They’ve been asked to do things they’re not supposed to do. They’re mistreated.
But I believe that some of the people who will attend the event are also happy with their work. I think between the two we’ll get a really good perspective between the disgruntled employee and the satisfied employee. So we’ll take this information from the survey, from the event, from the followers and the moderators, and put it into a comprehensive report.
What have been some of the takeaways from the survey so far? What’s surprised you the most?
Maggie: I guess maybe I’m unsurprised by more things than I’m surprised about.
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback about the things that Cara touched upon, people feeling unsafe, people having higher-ups not listening to their feedback. Work life balance is off across the board.
I will say that for most of the retailers, customer happiness was high on their list of what they were doing right. A lot of them also have good employee benefits, which I like.
But on the other side of things, companies are often out of compliance. Employees also feel like they’re not being trained well enough in their positions.
Cara: A majority of people who responded said that their favorite thing about their job is their co-workers. I think that says a lot about cannabis industry workers.
Have you had any talks with the Cannabis Control Commission?
Cara: We’ve been going back and forth with them via email. There’s a lot going on over there, and a lot of bureaucracy in attending things. We really do want them to attend, I’ve followed up with them several times hoping to hear back soon. I’d love for them to bring the CCC inspectors, investigators and all of their agents to this event.
You mentioned worker safety earlier. Obviously, we had the death of Lorna McMurrey at Trulieve, and there are a lot of concerns both in terms of these types of emergency incidents as well as the longer term impact of some of these work environments. Now it seems like OSHA is starting to take these issues seriously, but it seems like they’re still years behind. What do you think the solution is here?
Maggie: I went to the Department of Public Health in 2017 with everything on mold, with everything in terms of working environment when it comes to things like air quality and working with plants. They know about these issues years ago, and it almost feels like they waited for something — which they could have prevented from happening — to happen.
I think what we need is consistency. We need individuals who are going to come and not just make up things as they go along. What I would ideally like is consistency in the application [of regulations], so our employees are taken care of and people aren’t, quite literally, dying at work.
Cara: We obviously can’t offer an 18 hour or 30 hour OSHA training at the event, but we have prepared a pre-training for OSHA training. There's a lot of people going into jobs at these facilities who have not had any sort of OSHA training before, and they don’t know what could be missing or what they’re supposed to be learning from it. So what we want to do at the event with the pre-training for industry employees so they know what to expect.
We want them to be empowered to say “you’re not storing this chemical properly” or “no one showed us how to use the emergency defibrillator,” or whatever it is. If you don’t know you’re supposed to learn it, then you don’t know to ask when you miss it. We want to empower employees to be prepared for these training sessions and to speak up for themselves.
I know there are a lot of different aspects to the Symposium, but are there any you are most excited for?
Cara: I think I’m most excited about being surrounded by people in the industry who are empowered, who are excited about being solution driven, and who have positive attitudes, so we can find a way back to a healthy cannabis industry.
Maggie: I would concur that I’m excited about that, but I think that the report is also exciting. The compilation of best practices from the people actually doing the work and having that go to the CCC unfiltered.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This is not a sponsored post, I just wanted to help bring more attention to this event. Readers can use discount code BAR150 to a $50 discount on individual tickets.