Now, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) has addressed in at the Board level on the status of post-harvest cannabis workers. In a decision issued on April 23, the Board rejected vertically integrated Missouri operator BeLeaf Medical, LLC’s argument that post-harvest workers at its facility in St. Louis are exempt from NLRA protections. BeLeaf had been fighting a unionization drive by the UFCW since 2023. Despite the employer’s argument, the NLRB found that post-harvest work constitutes processing and manufacturing because the workers are taking a raw plant and turning it into something that would be found on a dispensary shelf and therefore their work falls within the NLRA’s coverage. Previously, the Division of Advice and regional directors of the NLRB had weighed in, but this is the first Board decision on the issue.
The fact that the Board has now spoken on the matter carries weight. It sends a clearer signal to the industry about how these classification fights will play out going forward.
So, what does this mean in practice? Workers who grow the plant will continue to be treated as agricultural employees exempt from the NLRA. Workers on the other end of the spectrum, such as workers ringing up customers at the dispensary counter, are covered by the NLRA. The clarification by the NLRB pertains to the middle category: employees who take the harvested plant and turn it into a finished product. In the BeLeaf case, those workers were producing pre-rolls, entering product data into computer systems, and converting dried marijuana into packaged consumer goods. That is not pruning a plant or tending a crop. It is an industrialized process that transforms cannabis from its natural state into finished products prepared for sale. According to the Board, that kind of work looks more like a factory floor than a farm, and those workers get the full protection of federal labor law, including the right to organize. The same logic likely extends to workers producing edibles, concentrates, or other manufactured cannabis products.
The consequences of classification matter. Workers who fall outside the NLRA as agricultural employees have no federal right to organize, and their ability to unionize depends entirely on state labor law. Only a small number of states, including Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, extend organizing protection to agricultural workers. In most states, those workers simply have no path to unionization at all.
For companies running a vertically integrated cannabis operation, this is worth paying attention to. Understanding how the workforce shakes out for labor relations purposes is not just an academic exercise. It has real operational implications. And as union activity continues to pick up steam across the cannabis industry, these distinctions are only going to matter more.