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In this provided image, Dan Clay, president of UFCW Local 555, prepares to submit boxes of signatures to state elections officials on July 5, 2024. The union is pushing hoping to qualify a ballot measure that would help cannabis workers unionize.
Courtesy UFCW Local 555
Ballot Measure 119, the United for Cannabis Workers Act, appears to have passed in early returns on election night.
The measure will require employers at cannabis retail and processing businesses to sign a “labor peace agreement” with a labor union to receive a license from the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission.
In that agreement, employers must agree they will remain neutral if their employees choose to unionize.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 — Oregon’s largest private sector labor union — led the effort to put the measure on the ballot. Several other groups supported it, including Oregon Center for Public Policy, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) — Oregon’s largest farmworker union — and several other statewide and local elected officials.
At least one statewide group publicly opposed the measure, the Taxpayers Association of Oregon.
“Oregon’s legal shops pay high taxes, have extreme red tape, and cannot compete against untaxed and unregulated illegal pot farms that uses human-trafficked, slave-like labor,” the association wrote in an opposing argument in the 2024 Oregon voters pamphlet. “If passed, Measure 119 would likely cause labor costs to spike and hurt a fragile industry already in decline, giving more power to illegal street drug dealers.”
Another group, the Oregon Business and Industry, or OBI, had opposed a similar policy when it was introduced to Oregon lawmakers in the form of a bill during the 2023 legislative session, though that bill died. At the time, some lawmakers were concerned the bill would have been unconstitutional. Representatives for OBI had said it would have required employers to “surrender rights protected by federal law.”
This time around OBI did not publicly oppose Measure 119. A spokesperson for the group told OPB in September it will talk with its members and consider possible actions when the time is right.