Green Thumb Industries, one of the largest publicly traded cannabis companies in the country, has built a genuinely substantial presence within New Jersey’s recreational and medical marijuana market, and this week the Chicago headquartered company found itself at the center of a significant labor relations story playing out at its New Jersey operations. If you’ve purchased cannabis anywhere in the Garden State, there’s a strong chance you’ve already encountered Green Thumb’s retail brand or one of its widely distributed product lines, even if the corporate name behind them wasn’t immediately familiar.
Green Thumb operates as what the cannabis industry calls a multistate operator, running operations across 14 different U.S. markets and controlling both ends of its own supply chain rather than relying entirely on third party partners. On the retail side, the company owns and operates the rapidly expanding RISE Dispensaries chain, giving it a direct consumer facing presence in the markets where it operates. On the production side, Green Thumb grows, packages, and distributes several widely recognized cannabis brands found not only in its own RISE stores but also across numerous third party dispensaries, with a portfolio that includes RYTHM, Dogwalkers, andShine, incredibles, and Good Green, giving the company a genuinely broad footprint across multiple product categories within the broader cannabis market.
Within New Jersey specifically, Green Thumb has become a genuinely major player in the state’s cannabis ecosystem. The company operates three RISE dispensaries across Northern New Jersey, located in Paterson, Bloomfield, and Paramus, giving it direct retail access to some of the state’s most densely populated consumer markets. Behind those storefronts, Green Thumb also runs two substantial manufacturing and cultivation facilities in Paterson and Hackettstown, supplying its own New Jersey retail pipeline with product grown and processed within the state itself rather than relying entirely on out of state production. The company’s New Jersey footprint has also served as a launching pad for other cannabis brands entering the state, including Viola, the premium, Black owned cannabis brand founded by former NBA player and Essex County native Al Harrington, which made its own New Jersey debut through Green Thumb’s Paterson and Bloomfield RISE locations.
That established New Jersey presence is exactly what made this week’s labor news so significant. On July 14, 2026, the National Labor Relations Board officially certified the results of a decertification election covering roughly 270 employees across Green Thumb’s four New Jersey locations, with workers voting 94 to 13 in favor of removing the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 360 as their bargaining representative. The vote itself capped off a genuinely lengthy and contentious two year legal battle over workplace representation at the company’s New Jersey operations.
The path to that certification proved considerably longer than the vote count alone would suggest. According to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represented the workers pursuing decertification, the ballots themselves were cast nearly two years ago but went uncounted for an extended period due to legal challenges filed by union officials following the vote. Only after that legal dispute was resolved did officials open and count the ballots on June 29, with the NLRB formally certifying the results roughly two weeks later.
The effort to decertify the union traces back to Michael Potter, a lead warehouse technician at Green Thumb who began petitioning the NLRB for a decertification election back in October 2024, acting on behalf of his coworkers across the company’s four New Jersey locations. Working alongside staff attorneys from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Potter specifically sought to challenge what’s known as a card check unionization process, arguing that the original unionization at Green Thumb had been established through card check rather than a secret ballot election, and that many workers believed a secret ballot process would have given them a more private, less pressured way to decide on union representation in the first place. Following the certified results, Potter stated that he and many of his coworkers believed the union had not effectively advanced their interests, framing the decertification vote as a long delayed opportunity to exercise the secret ballot right he felt had been denied when the union was originally installed.
Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation, echoed that framing, expressing pride in helping Green Thumb’s New Jersey workers pursue a secret ballot election, while also criticizing the broader delay involved in getting those votes counted. Mix pointed specifically to what’s known within labor law as the blocking charge policy, a rule that allows union officials to delay a decertification vote count by filing legal challenges, arguing that this kind of policy can effectively trap workers within a union they no longer support regardless of how decisively they’ve voted to leave it. He called on the NLRB to eliminate that policy entirely as a matter of protecting workers’ ability to freely choose whether to remain represented by a union.
UFCW Local 360 offered a considerably different account of the same underlying events. A spokesperson for the union told NJBIZ that throughout the two year process, workers came and went at Green Thumb’s New Jersey operations, and that UFCW Local 360 continued informing those workers of their rights and representing them throughout that entire period. While the union stated it never wants to see workers lose the protections that come with a union contract, it also affirmed that it honors workers’ right to determine their own union representation, and committed to continuing its broader advocacy for cannabis industry workers across New Jersey regardless of the outcome at Green Thumb specifically. UFCW Local 360’s Director of Organizing, Hugh Giordano, had earlier defended the union’s track record at Green Thumb directly, noting that the union had organized and negotiated a contract covering pay raises, holiday pay, and a formal grievance procedure for members. Giordano also raised concerns about the source of the decertification effort itself, characterizing the National Right to Work Foundation as an out of state, anti union organization funded by wealthy donors opposed to organized labor broadly, and framed the union’s ongoing role as continuing to educate and stand alongside cannabis workers against what he described as efforts by outside groups without direct ties to New Jersey’s own workforce.
For its part, Green Thumb Industries has maintained a notably neutral public posture throughout the dispute. A company spokesperson told NJBIZ that Green Thumb respects the rights of its team members, including their right to choose whether or not to be represented by a union, and confirmed that a decisive majority of union covered employees in New Jersey voted against continued representation by UFCW Local 360. The company stated it respects the process and intends to continue supporting its team’s decision, while looking forward to working directly with employees on the matter going forward.
The dispute also sits within a broader context shaping New Jersey’s still relatively young cannabis industry. State cannabis law requires management to negotiate in good faith whenever workers seek union representation, and that legal framework has led employees at several cannabis companies across the state to organize over the past three years, with representation spread across groups including UFCW Local 152, UFCW Local 360, and Teamsters Local 469. Green Thumb’s decertification vote stands as a genuinely significant development within that broader landscape, one that both sides of the labor debate are already pointing to as evidence supporting their own broader arguments about how cannabis industry workers should be organized, represented, or freed to make that choice for themselves going forward.
