Oregon state lawmakers allocated $6 million to community groups this year to help with what they’ve called a humanitarian crisis for workers in the state’s cannabis industry.
In the basement of a Medford church, a group of migrant farm workers gather, all of them coming from different parts of Mexico in search of better paying jobs.
For the last few years, Jesus found work seasonally on marijuana farms. (He chose not to share his last name because of his immigration status).
But Jesus says he and many other workers stopped working at these farms after losing out on the wages they were promised last year.
“There was just a little bit of marijuana left and they were about to bring out the payment but then the bosses, the heads arrived,” he says. “They had a little meeting and all the owner’s stuff disappeared that day. I saw after that they didn’t give us nothing, nothing.”
Jesus says he lost $18,000 last year, all wages never paid by the people who hired him.
He’s not the only one. Many other migrant workers lost out on thousands of dollars in wages last year alone.
“The kind of abuses that we’ve seen in the cannabis industry have been very widespread and also very intense,” says Corinna Spencer-Scheurich, executive director of the Northwest Workers Justice Project.
Workers JPR talked with described 12-hour work days in hot greenhouses, no access to water and exposure to toxic chemicals. Most never saw a single dime for their work.
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