Trulieve layoffs in Gadsden County 'unsettling' to community
North Florida-based cannabis giant Trulieve laid off part of its workforce in Gadsden County earlier this month as the company looked to reduce "redundancies" amid continued growth.
Company officials won’t divulge the number of employees who were let go from its operations in Gadsden County. Trulieve has two grow locations in Quincy and a processing facility in Midway.
However, said spokesman Steve Vancore, jobs were offered to employees in other cannabis operations in Jefferson and Madison counties and those who didn’t find a place to land were given severance packages.
Vancore said Trulieve’s acquisition of Arizona-based Harvest Health and Recreation revealed areas of overlap in the operation.
“We merged and acquired Harvest a year ago,” Vancore said. “This has been part of our merge while we're continuing to grow where we have redundancies and inefficiency. When you have 9,000 employees, this was really an efficiency move.”
The merger created the country’s largest cannabis company expanding Trulieve’s share of the market to 126 dispensaries with 22 cultivation facilities in 11 states.
Trulieve is expanding into other states and has quickly become a major player in the cannabis industry. The company and its operations in Gadsden County, which opened in 2018, quickly became the largest employer in the impoverished county, which was hit hard by the economic recession of the mid-2000s.
As recently as March, the company held a hiring fair in Gadsden in which it hoped to attract hundreds of new employees.
In the third quarter, Trulieve posted a net loss of $115 million but grew revenue by 34% year over year to $301 million, with 94% of revenue from retail sales, according to MarketWatch. The financial news site noted that its CEO Kim Rivers was cautious about its earnings in the final months of 2022.
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The company expected to end the year with nearly $1.25 billion in revenue, a low estimate, largely dependent on a downturn in the economy and less money in the hands of consumers to spend on cannabis.
The layoffs in Gadsden County have religious leaders concerned about the local economy and what job losses there could mean for families.
Jimmy Salters, the chaplain for the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office who regularly organizes community outreach and prayer vigils, called the timing “unsettling.”
“This has the community upset a little bit, losing their job this time of year,” Salters said. “People are panicking a little bit. Nobody knew it was coming and it affects the community as a whole.”
This week, laid off employees filed a class action lawsuit seeking compensation against Trulieve, claiming the company didn’t provide the required Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice for the terminations.
Companies must file a WARN Act notice, according to the lawsuit, if there is employment loss “at the single site of employment during any 30-day period for 50 or more employees excluding any part-time employees.”
The company’s attorney Glen Burhans Jr. referred questions to Vancore.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Trulieve layoffs in Gadsden County 'unsettling' to community
