Trimming Is What Built California’s Legal Weed. The People Who Do It Are Still on Their Own.

A firsthand account of California’s harvest labor and a landmark federal ruling converge in the same week — and together they tell you exactly how much the cannabis industry still owes the people who built it.

By Maya Torres

Ana Bacigalupo had never trimmed cannabis in her life when she bought a plane ticket from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles. She was a secretary at a private medical clinic. She did her nails. She had a stable life and a clear routine, and then someone told her she could spend a season in California, work in the fields, and come home with enough money to change things.

The story she was sold was the one everyone sells about trim season: cash, freedom, mountain air, a kind of romantic seasonalism that California cannabis has always been good at marketing.

What she found was something else entirely.

“I remember crying inside the tent at night,” Ana told High Times in a new account published Tuesday, the first installment of a reported series on trimmigrant labor. “Saying: ‘What am I doing here? I’m completely alone. If something happens to me, where do I run? Where do I go?'”

No one had a good answer to that question then. Legally speaking, most trim workers still don’t have one now.

The Workforce No One Counts

California’s cannabis industry produced somewhere north of $5 billion in licensed retail sales last year. The packaging is beautiful, the branding is sophisticated, the menus are curated. What gets talked about less is the labor that sits upstream of all of it — the seasonal workers, many of them immigrants, who actually harvest the crop.

Research from the University of Minnesota’s Gender Policy Report found that the cannabis cultivation workforce is approximately 96% Latino, with about 51% likely undocumented and roughly 165,000 workers being indigenous farmworkers from Mexico. These are not people with HR departments and health insurance. Many are people like Ana — individuals who arrived with a version of the opportunity that bore little resemblance to the one they encountered.

Ana’s account, which traces six months of tent living in California’s Central Valley, describes a world most dispensary customers have never seen and most cannabis brands have no interest in acknowledging: coyotes at night, no private sanitation, bosses who owned the territory and everything on it, pounds going missing, police rumors circulating at breakfast.

“You wake up for breakfast and you see five Mexicans and four Americans talking about missing pounds, making plans, saying the cops are coming,” she says. “And you never live in peace.”

She eventually moved from trimmer to grower — offered four greenhouses, 100 plants each, twenty percent of the harvest in exchange for the equivalent of a bed and a shower. After months in a tent, a roof felt like a raise.

What “Legal Cannabis” Didn’t Fix

The legalization advocates had an answer for this, once. The argument was that bringing cannabis out of the shadows would force the labor conditions out of the shadows too. Licensed grows would mean regulated workplaces. Regulated workplaces would mean workers with rights.

That hasn’t happened, at least not completely.

The California Department of Industrial Relations classifies cannabis cultivation as farm labor, meaning trim workers fall under the state’s farm labor contractor laws. On paper, those laws offer some protections: licensing requirements for contractors, wage rules, some housing standards. In practice, enforcement in remote cultivation areas has been thin, and the informal economy of trim season — traveling workers, informal housing on-site, cash arrangements — has continued largely undisturbed by the legal market that exists alongside it.

“Everything that we as a society have built for our workforce,” one enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times in an investigation that remains the most thorough account of California cannabis labor conditions, “goes out the door the second they step onto these cannabis grows.”

Women face an additional layer of exposure that the industry rarely discusses and regulators have been slow to address. Ana describes the daily calculus of being a woman in an isolated, male-dominated environment where no one designed the conditions with you in mind and where the power dynamics made it difficult to name what was happening, let alone report it.

“You’re in the middle of nowhere and you’re on someone else’s territory,” she says. “They can do whatever they want with you.”

The Ruling That Changes One Thing

Last month, the National Labor Relations Board issued a decision that for the first time establishes a clear federal labor protection for at least one segment of the cannabis workforce.

In BeLeaf Medical, LLC, decided April 23, the Board rejected a Missouri cannabis operator’s argument that its post-harvest workers — people trimming dried plant material, packaging pre-rolls, entering product data — were exempt from the National Labor Relations Act as agricultural employees. The NLRB found that post-harvest processing is manufacturing, not farming, and that workers doing it have full federal rights, including the right to organize.

The ruling emerged from a unionization drive that the United Food and Commercial Workers had been pressing since 2023. BeLeaf argued its trimmers were farmworkers and therefore outside the NLRA’s reach. The Board disagreed: taking a raw plant and turning it into a finished retail product is industrial work, not agricultural work, and it gets the protections that come with that classification.

The decision is significant because it is the first time the full NLRB — not just regional directors or advisory opinions — has weighed in on how these workers should be classified. That carries real weight for future cases.

But the ruling has a hard boundary: it covers workers at licensed facilities with identifiable employers. For the workers Ana Bacigalupo describes — the seasonal migrants, the informal contract trimmers, the people living in tents on unlicensed grows — the NLRA’s right-to-organize provisions don’t reach them, and likely never will.

Those workers remain classified as agricultural employees in California. They have no federal right to organize. And in most states, including California for most purposes, their path to collective action under state law is limited.

The Gap Between Progress and People

Legal cannabis in 2026 is a story about how far the industry has come — rescheduling hearings, $60 million lending funds, sophisticated packaging regulations, a culture of consumer wellness. All of that is real.

But the workforce story that Ana Bacigalupo tells in her own words is also real, and it has been real the entire time that the industry was building itself. The informal labor ecosystem that sustained California cultivation during the decades when it was illegal didn’t disappear when the state issued its first licenses. It moved adjacent to the legal market, overlapping with it, supplying it, and remaining as invisible to policy as it ever was.

The NLRB ruling is a genuine step. It establishes that certain cannabis workers are not farmhands — they are manufacturing employees with the right to form a union, file a complaint, and demand a seat at the table. That matters. For the workers at BeLeaf in St. Louis who have been fighting for three years, it means something.

For Ana, who spent months in a tent in California’s Central Valley doing the same physical work, the ruling arrives about five years too late and several hundred miles from where she needed it.

The industry that profited from her labor doesn’t know her name. The legal protections that finally covered some workers like her don’t apply to her situation. And this week, her story is appearing in print mostly because she was willing to tell it to a journalist.

That’s not a policy. It’s an obligation that the cannabis industry, and the lawmakers who oversee it, have been running out the clock on since the first dispensary opened.

Maya Torres covers equity, policy, and the human side of cannabis for CannabisInquirer.com. Tips and sources: mtorres@cannabisinquirer.com