Michigan cannabis industry bucks struggles in hiring
DETROIT — Jerome Crawford spent most of last year furloughing employees on a rotating basis in his role as senior corporation counsel at an automotive supplier as the auto industry shut down under stay-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You’re talking 14-hour days, every day,” Crawford said. “It was roll out of bed and jump on the computer. That’s all we did for a period of time. It was a total crisis.”
But in November, he left his job to join the cannabis company Pleasantrees, which has a cultivation facility and dispensaries in Hamtramck and East Lansing, as the company’s director of legal operations and social equity.
“I’ve been in the doom and gloom,” he said. “With cannabis, there’s upside. Sure, there’s a risk. Maybe a company makes it and maybe it doesn’t. But that’s intriguing. You don’t have that intrigue in far more established industries, and frequently in industries that have struggled in recent years.”
Crawford is one of many workers joining this industry in Michigan, which has become a nearly $3.2 billion market in 2020, according to a recent study by the Anderson Economic Group and commissioned by the Michigan Cannabis Manufacturers Association.
That’s in contrast to many industries in Michigan that have gotten smaller over the past year because of stay-home orders and low consumer demand.
Even though hard-hit industries like leisure and hospitality and manufacturing have recovered in recent months compared with the same time last year, both industries have employment levels well below prepandemic levels, according to the May employment figures from the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget.
From hourly workers to C-suite executives, the state’s marijuana industry isn’t facing the same difficulties in hiring as some other industries, executives at marijuana staffing companies and economists say.
Matching jobs to values
While they say a myriad of factors that make hiring more difficult are still present — such as limited child care options for workers with kids, fear of contracting COVID-19 and more generous unemployment benefits — the excitement around the industry, opportunities for growth and often higher starting wages, outweigh those factors.
“Post pandemic, people don’t want to return to a dead-end job,” said Sloane Barbour, chief revenue officer at Flowerhire, a cannabis staffing firm, and the founder of engin, a tech platform for matching hourly workers with jobs in the
cannabis industry.
“They want something that has career growth, that’s new and that really resonates with their values — values around social equity and progressive thinking,” he said.
The proof, these executives say, is in the numbers.
Michigan was the sixthlargest employer of all legal cannabis states last year, with jobs nearly doubling in 2020 to 18,078, according to Leafly, a website that offers information on cannabis. Leafly puts out a jobs report on the industry on a yearly basis, a measure not tracked by the government.
“Over the last four years, the actual growth we’ve seen is 161 percent (in the U.S.),” said Bruce Barcott, a
senior editor at Leafly and the author of the jobs report. “So this industry is absolutely booming. It was not all that negatively affected by the pandemic.”
Hiring hurdles
He said that puts Michigan on track to see an increase in jobs in the marijuana industry by up to 60 percent over the next decade.
“Those job opportunities are everything from an entry-level trimmer to a budtender, to manager and finance people, and folks who are lawyers and accountants,” Barcott said.
Krys Wdowiak, the founder and president of Mary Jane’s Friends & Co., a cannabis servicing company in Troy, has had to hire several workers over this past year after launching the company about a year ago during the pandemic.
Wdowiak’s company offers trimming services for growers and will show up at their facility to complete the work.
When hiring, he found himself up against an interesting challenge: While he was happy to see lots of interest in the openings —` which pay on average between $20 and $25 an hour and usually attract workers in their 20s — some applicants thought they could smoke marijuana on the job.
“One of the questions I ask is, `Why do you want to work for us?’ and the feedback that we get most of the time is, `I love weed,’ ” Wdowiak said. “As blunt as that.”
Since the state’s Unemployment Insurance Agency reinstated a work search requirement — which requires claimants to report to Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency at least one work search activity per week — Wdowiak said he’ll get as many as 150 applicants within 48 hours.
He said if he reaches out to 50 applicants to set up an interview, 30 will get back to him to set up an appointment. Of those 30, only 10 will actually show up to the interview. He assumes some people are only applying to show that they’re looking for work, but don’t intend on taking a job.
“No one can escape the perfect storm of hiring challenges,” Barbour said, adding that it can generally be hard to hire hourly workers in the summer.
But he said hourly workers can often make more money at a cannabis company to start out compared with another retailer. He said that’s often because of a phenomenon he calls “hazard pay,” which offers more money for cannabis workers to make up for the fact that they may have had to be paid in cash or couldn’t tell their bank, even though that’s often no longer the case.
He also said there are many opportunities for career advancement because fewer people have skill sets in the marijuana industry compared with other industries.
“There’s not nearly as much competition with the skills that you’ve acquired over the last six months in the cannabis industry,” Barbour said, citing the example of a budtender being promoted to running a dispensary within months. Within a few years, they could be the head of retail and marketing for the company.
While Crawford had to technically take a pay cut to join Pleasantrees, he got equity in the company, leveling out the offer, he said.
“Especially if you want to do something that is on the rise and growing, what are the intangibles?,” he said. “Not just what’s on paper. For me, it was a no-brainer.”