Lured with false promises of high pay and decent labor conditions, immigrants are held against their will by outlaw farmers who withhold their wages
“It’s much more challenging with the illegal grows,” Keesee explained. “Because it’s like they’re there one day, and then the next day — literally overnight — they pack up the plants and they’re gone.”
Criminalization “is creating all the incentives for us to cheat,” said Nathan Howard, co-founder of licensed cannabis farm East Fork Cultivars in southern Oregon. Without access to the same resources as other employers or even other farmers, choosing to farm cannabis is “not just risky, it’s insane.”
But when Isabella, Maria and Leticia showed up at the farm to work, the woman was nowhere to be seen. And, it turns out, neither was the $15 an hour. Workers lived on many of the sites. At Q Bar X, there were only eight portable toilets for hundreds of laborers, many of whom are undocumented, and they were only cleaned out once a week — often filled to the brim with human waste. At another, workers were left to go to the bathroom in the forest.
Yet when fraud and coercion are involved, the middlemen are not just part of a recruitment scheme — they’re abetting forced labor. On top of that, the lack of regulations means there are none of the same guardrails that apply to other kinds of agricultural work. Unlicensed growing operations escape oversight by the Labor Department or other agencies — meaning there is no federal government to step in when wages are stolen and workers are otherwise mistreated.
Sheriff Nathan Sickler of Jackson County, Ore. says mounting a criminal case for forced labor is often more complicated than charging cartels and other growers with workplace violations like poor living conditions. Raids often occur while growing or harvesting is underway, and employers can claim they planned to pay workers when the harvest was complete. In addition, many of the workers themselves don’t want to testify.
But with federal decriminalization appearing unlikely this year, that leaves the burden of dismantling the demand for illegal marijuana on states and consumers. There are many reasons that the illegal market survives in any given state or city. Yet still, these states illustrate the impact of different regulations. Licenses to grow and sell marijuana are cheap and plentiful in states like Montana and Washington, while they are limited and expensive in Illinois. In Seattle, there is approximately one dispensary for every 15,000 residents. In Chicago, there is one dispensary per every 159,000 residents.
From their hiding place, they watched as two men emerged from a bordering river to retrieve clothes left behind. They followed them back through a tangle of thorny blackberry bushes and into the water.
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‘Real People That We Care About Are Being Exploited’Lured with false promises of high pay and decent labor conditions, immigrants are held against their will by outlaw farmers who withhold their wages.
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