From boom to gloom.
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Aurora laid off 12% of its workforce in June. Cannabis companies across Canada have been bleeding jobs, but where are all the weed workers going?
By Matt Mernagh
The hiring spree is over.
The cannabis industry’s impressive employment gains, once predicted to be rural Canada’s employment job saviour, have turned to depressing job losses.
Production workers’ job security has eroded as facility-after-facility closed.
Originally it was blamed on the pandemic, not product over-saturation or product people didn’t want.
Production and market share reduced, large licensed producers slimmed their payrolls further by eliminating head office jobs, too.
Quarterly reports from Canada’s largest producers often contain personnel restructuring announcements, which is investor language for layoffs.
In June alone, Aurora announced it was laying off 12% of its workforce, on top of a previously announced 13%, Hexo continued to cut payroll, laying off an additional 450 people, and The Flowr Corporation pink slipped 40% of their employees.
In April, Canopy eliminated a tenth of its workforce, including closing its Environmental, Social and Governance department, which revealed in their inaugural report, “In 2020, our total employee turnover rate was 67%. Involuntary turnover was 47%.”
Though the job requires following detailed Standard Operating Procedures, Statistics Canada classifies production workers as agriculture workers. The federal agency doesn’t track employment in the agriculture sector, and budtenders are lumped into the same category as beer and wine retail workers.
Their data for salary employees looked odd, and the agency footnote for April 2022 notes the data quality is graded a lowly C.
If layoffs weren’t revealed during quarterly announcements, the public would have no idea there’s significant job loss happening.
Highly talented workforce ‘packing it in’
“It’s really disheartening to see. There’s a human toll to all these announcements,” says NORML Canada executive Jennawae McLean, who is also a retail store owner in Kingston, Ont.
“All licensed producers are in austerity mode. They are all trying to save, and the budget for staff has become much less. The budget for staffing has become a lot less because they’re limited in where they can save.”
With less opportunities, experienced people are opting to put their cannabis professional careers behind them.
“It’s a highly talented workforce, and people are just packing it. Including two of my colleagues at NORML Canada. The industry is not easy for anyone right now. Most people are packing it in because it’s so disheartening. I hope it’s not a permanent pack in, there will be rewarding jobs, but right now they are few and far between,” McLean explains.
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