In a suburban oasis amid golden hills north of San Francisco, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union are processing thousands of marijuana cigarettes a day, rolling joints in rice paper cylinders from Amsterdam.
The startup factory for a Bay Area firm called Medi-Cone is part of a commercial industry evolving to serve the hundreds of thousands of medical pot users who can legally use the drug in California, as well as marijuana dispensaries amassing an estimated $1.3 billion in annual transactions.
As Californians prepare to vote on a November ballot initiative that would expand legalization to recreational pot use, labor groups see the potential for perhaps tens of thousands of unionized jobs.
United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 5, which has 32,000 members in California working in trades including the grocery and food processing industries, began organizing marijuana "bud tenders," greenhouse workers, packagers and laboratory technicians last spring.
"The cannabis industry is a retail agriculture food processing industry and we are a retail agriculture and food processing union," said Dan Rush, the union's director of special operations. "If we were not on top of this industry and its emergence, we would be asleep at the wheel."
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