Green Thumb Workers in New Jersey Vote Out UFCW Union

Workers at Green Thumb Industries‘ New Jersey operations have voted to remove the union that represented them, a decision federal labor regulators certified on July 14, 2026. The outcome cuts against the wave of organizing that swept the state’s cannabis retailers after adult-use sales began in 2022.

The National Labor Relations Board certified that employees voted 94-13 to decertify United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 360, the dominant union in New Jersey’s cannabis sector. The bargaining unit covered roughly 269 workers in retail, production and cultivation roles across four sites: a distribution and manufacturing hub in Hackettstown, two facilities in Paterson and a dispensary in Bloomfield. Union representatives challenged another 74 ballots, but the board determined those challenges were too few to change the result.

For Green Thumb, one of the largest multistate operators in the country and the company behind the RISE dispensary chain, the vote strips UFCW Local 360 of its exclusive bargaining rights over a core slice of its Garden State workforce — the people who package, move and sell product in one of the East Coast’s busiest markets. With the union removed, the company is no longer obligated to bargain with Local 360 over those employees’ pay and working conditions.

A two-year wait to count the ballots

The votes themselves were not new. Michael Potter, a lead warehouse technician at Green Thumb, filed the decertification petition on September 24, 2024, with free legal help from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a Virginia-based group that backs workers seeking to remove unions. Employees cast their ballots on November 7 and 8, 2024. The ballots then sat sealed and uncounted for more than 19 months.

The holdup came from “blocking charges,” unfair-labor-practice complaints the union filed against the employer. Under NLRB procedure, such charges can freeze a ballot count until they are resolved, regardless of whether they relate to the election itself. The foundation characterized the filings as a meritless stalling tactic. After the dispute settled in 2026, the board opened and counted the ballots on June 29, 2026, and issued its certification two weeks later.

“Workers should not have to wait the better part of two years just to have their votes counted,” said foundation president Mark Mix, who urged the NLRB to eliminate the blocking-charge policy he said lets unions “trap workers in union ranks.”

How the union got in

UFCW Local 360 was originally recognized at Green Thumb through a “card check,” a process in which an employer accepts a union once a majority of workers sign authorization cards, without a separate secret-ballot election. The foundation argues card check invites pressure and coercion because workers sign in front of organizers; unions counter that it is a faster, legally recognized path that still requires majority support.

The union defends its record at the company. When the petition was filed, UFCW Local 360 organizing director Hugh Giordano said in comments to NJBIZ that the union had negotiated raises, holiday pay and a grievance procedure into the workers’ contract, and dismissed the foundation as “an out of state organization, which is anti-union and is funded by billionaires.” Green Thumb was not a party to the petition; the case was driven by employees and their outside counsel.

Against the grain of cannabis-labor organizing

New Jersey has been one of the most union-friendly cannabis markets in the country. UFCW Local 360 organized dispensary and production workers at Green Thumb, Curaleaf, Ascend and other operators after the 2022 launch, helped by state rules that require licensees to reach labor peace agreements as a condition of holding a license.

The Green Thumb result is part of a run of foundation-backed decertifications across the industry. UFCW locals were voted out this year at Curaleaf’s Camelback dispensary in Phoenix and removed from Holistic Industries’ packaging plant in Monson, Massachusetts, and a Teamsters unit was dissolved at an Ohio dispensary. That counter-current runs alongside continued union gains elsewhere. In Missouri, the NLRB cleared cannabis workers to organize and organizing campaigns have kept spreading.

For retailers, the lesson is as much procedural as political. A union brought in through card check can be removed at the ballot box, but the timeline is unpredictable: the blocking-charge mechanism that stalled the Green Thumb count for a year and a half is still in place, and how the current NLRB treats it will shape how fast future removal votes — and organizing drives — actually resolve. In New Jersey’s fast-growing retail base, where operators keep expanding and trading licenses, both sides have plenty left to contest.