Colorado agricultural workers can now unionize. So why aren’t they?

Water leaking from the growhouse ceiling. Algae spreading on the floor. Standing water pooling at workers’ feet.

Those were just some of the conditions alleged by workers at the Denver marijuana grow operation of Green Dragon, a Florida- and Colorado-based cannabis company.

Two years ago, workers had enough. So they organized, battling what they claimed to be the company’s intimidation tactics to form the first agricultural workers union under a 2021 state law designed to improve working conditions on Colorado’s farms.

Now the workers have a contract with multiple built-in raises, paid vacation and a committee to address workplace safety issues.

“It’s important for ag workers to have a union because they can be taken advantage of,” said Jimena Peterson, organizing director for United Food & Commercial Workers Local 7, which helped Green Dragon employees negotiate their deal. “By having a union, the company is now held to a different standard.”

The Green Dragon story, however, represents the exception rather than the rule in Colorado agriculture.

The 2021 law, dubbed the Farmworkers Bill of Rights, allowed Colorado ag workers to unionize for the first time. But nearly three years later, the Denver cannabis operation remains the only success story.

No other Colorado farms have seen their workers successfully form unions.

Unionizing in agriculture has long been tough sledding for workers, many of whom are immigrants worried about their legal status, experts say. It can be highly dicey, they say, to rock the boat and risk a good-paying job.

The numbers in Colorado, though, stand in sharp contrast to the heyday of ag unions 50 years ago, a trend that has slowly dissipated as organized labor in America has fallen off a cliff. Despite repeated headlines and the White House asserting that “organized labor appears to be having a moment,” union membership for all sectors in 2022 dipped to its lowest point on record.

“In modern ag, unions are kind of irrelevant,” said Bruce Talbott, a Western Slope peach grower.

“It’s a long road”

The 2021 law represented a sea change in how labor is paid and treated on Colorado’s nearly 40,000 farms and ranches.

The bill removed the exemption of agricultural labor from state and local minimum wage laws, which had long carved out farmworkers, and allowed them to join labor unions and bargain collectively. Farmworkers would be eligible for overtime and be entitled to regular meal and rest breaks during the day.

After the death of a La Salle dairy worker in 2021, advocates said unions could have prevented the deadly incident if workers had received the proper training and been taught safety measures.

Bill sponsors said it was long past time agricultural workers in Colorado received the same benefits as other laborers. The bill’s fiscal note said the state anticipated six votes to unionize per year.

Thus far, there’s only been one in nearly three years.

State Rep. Karen McCormick, a Longmont Democrat and bill sponsor, said she wasn’t alarmed by the lack of unions. The law, she said, wasn’t necessarily intended to make unionization spring up at every farm, but to remove barriers should workers decide they wanted to organize.

“The idea was to put some power in the court of the workers themselves,” she said. “If they felt they wanted to unionize, that pathway was open. If they don’t want to, great, they don’t have to.”

While only one organizing effort has made it to a successful election, United Food & Commercial Workers representatives say they have five or six strong campaigns going in cannabis growhouses. None are outside the marijuana sector.

“It’s still early,” said Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7.

Cordova pointed to extensive union-busting tactics as one complicating factor, with Green Dragon as a prime example.

Management put up sheets of paper in the Denver growhouse, showing the cut the union would take from their wages, said Anthony Sykes, a Green Dragon harvest technician.

“It was intimidation,” he said.

In 2022, amid the organizing efforts, Green Dragon brass fired three employees for supporting the union’s efforts, Denverite reported. After the union picketed, management reversed course and gave the three workers their jobs back.

Green Dragon did not respond to interview requests from The Denver Post.

Other companies use fear and misinformation to convince workers not to join, Cordova said. Some hire union-busting law firms to delay the process.

“It’s a long road for workers to organize,” Cordova said, “but it’s worth it.”

“I’m going to keep my mouth shut”

The unionization conversation barely makes a blip on growers’ radar.

“Labor organizing and unionizing is not the highest concern of ours,” said Dan Waldvogle, director of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, a coalition of family farmers and ranchers. His members, he said, are split on how they feel about workers organizing.

Talbott, whose family has been growing Palisade peaches for 100 years, said he would be “very disappointed” if his workers unionized.

“I would hope never to see a union,” he said. “I don’t see it as a realistic outcome under current circumstances.”

Industry experts say it’s not surprising that there has been little union action in Colorado since the new law went into effect.

Immigrants represent 70% of U.S. agricultural workers nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Four in 10 workers are undocumented and many others can only work here on a temporary, seasonal visa.

For Mexican workers making less than $100 a month back home, even minimum wage in the U.S. represents far more than they could ever make.

“Why would I ever risk that by being a troublemaker?” said Greg Schell, a longtime farmworker attorney in Florida. “I’m going to keep my mouth shut.”

Part-time workers are also far less likely to organize, he said, given that the long-term benefits of unions are more difficult to see. Plus, workers on temporary H-2A visas worry that if they agitate, they won’t be asked to return the following season.

Unions also have different connotations in Latin America.

In Mexico, for instance, “being part of a union was not a good thing,” said Mayra Juárez-Denis, executive director of Centro de los Trabajadores, a Denver-based labor organization for immigrants. “There’s a lot of corruption.”

Her organization is trying to get the word out to farmworkers that unions in the United States can enhance their standard of living.

Long past their heyday

Organizing among agricultural workers remains low nationwide.

Just 2.2% of agricultural and related industry employees were part of unions last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At the height of the United Farm Workers union in the 1970s, it had 150 contracts and 80,000 members in California, Texas, Arizona and Florida.

But the union’s contract count by 2021 had fallen to 31 nationwide, with membership at just over 5,500 workers. The University of California Merced estimated in 2021 that farmworker union membership nationally had fallen to a statistical 0%.

Decades of research show union members earn higher wages — known as the “union wage premium” — and enjoy better working conditions across industries.