- Nineteen prisoners use cutlery to break out of cells at Winchester prison
- France wants progress in Ukraine before Russia returns to G7
- Italy president begins talks to seek way out of government crisis
- Italian PM expected to resign as political chaos deepens
- Russia says US cruise missile test ‘regrettable’
- Kremlin - No date set for Normandy talks on Ukraine despite Macron meeting
- Egypt court hands out 6 death sentences on terror charges
- Putin says Russian nuclear explosion poses no threat
- Russian panel eyes alleged foreign interference in protests
- Gran Canaria wildfire triggers evacuation of thousands of people
- PM Johnson calls on Germany and France to compromise on Brexit
- Sudan's ex-president Bashir arrives at corruption trial
TEHRAN, Jul 1 - A cannabis-related job boom in the United States is not showing up in government employment data, leaving American workers in the dark about high wages and job opportunities in the marijuana industry, experts say.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -"Legal cannabis [recreational and medical] is America's greatest jobs creator right now," said Bruce Barcott, deputy editor of Leafly, an online magazine devoted to the cannabis industry. "The problem is it's untracked by the federal government, and state governments all have their own systems" for reporting.
Leafly and Portland, Ore.-based economist Beau Whitney released a state-by-state analysis of marijuana jobs and revenue in March that showed the industry has taken hold.
Part of the problem with tracking marijuana's financial weight in the economy is that the drug still is illegal on the federal level. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports lump any jobs in the cannabis industry in unspecified categories such as "agriculture," "manufacturing" and "retail sales."
Barcott said that obscured 211,000 cannabis-related jobs in the United States in 2018 in what he calls one of the country's fastest-growing sectors.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists industries with the fastest-growing jobs in its Occupational Outlook Handbook, but the marijuana business is missing. So the magnitude of its growth and potential growth cannot be determined, at least from U.S. government data.
Readers do learn that solar voltaic installer jobs are expected to grow by 105 percent over the next 10 years. Home healthcare aide jobs are expected to grow by 47 percent. And wind turbine technician jobs are expected to increase by 96 percent during that time, according to bureau projections.
Cannabis-related jobs have increased 110 percent in just three years and are expected to keep growing, Barcott said. Excluding those jobs from Labor Department lists withholds information that could help Americans map out their careers, he said.
Another barrier to reporting is that the industry is new. Codes and categories tracked by federal labor and census agencies are updated every five years by the White House-controlled Office of Management and Budget. The North American Industry Classification System tracks workers in hyper-specialized fields, for example, differentiating strawberry harvesters from grape harvesters.
Separate categories have not been created for marijuana industries, nor for industrial hemp jobs. Federal limitations on hemp cultivation and the plant's status as a Schedule 1 drug were removed by the 2018 Farm Bill.
Hemp is the source of cannabidiol, CBD, which is being added to many products and whose sales are climbing rapidly, spurring growth and hiring. Hemp-related jobs could be included in the next coding system update in 2022.
"We count all those jobs, but we just don't break them out in the data yet," said Egan Reich, a U.S. Department of Labor spokesman.
Source: upi
Your Comment