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“The Special Committee has taken and will continue to take decisive action based on facts,” she added, referring to an independent committee set up by the company in July to investigate what led to the unlicensed growing.

It was in late October last year when the employees said that they felt pressuredto work longer hours. In some cases, they were asked to work on weekends, although they were compensated for those extra hours.

The company had just embarked on a cloning program in late 2018 and one employee said he had to work 11 days straight with no breaks.

“They were trying to get us to produce enough clones so they could ship an entire batch at one go,” one of the minimum-wage employees said. “We had to produce 1,200 clones to 1,500 clones daily, so I was working non-stop trying to meet my individual target.”



Clones are cuttings that are taken from genetically identical cannabis plants to create a new harvest that is an exact replica of the previous harvest.

“The cloning project was the nail in the coffin for me, that’s when I decided to leave,” he said.

I could see how much more my immediate managers were getting…. And here I was working these crazy hours for just 15 bucks an hour former CannTrust employee

His frustration at the workplace culture was augmented by a leak from the human resources department in early 2017 that revealed the salaries of every employee at the company. “I could see how much more my immediate managers were getting, how much our master grower was making. And here I was working these crazy hours for just 15 bucks an hour.”

One current employee attributes the shift in work culture at Pelham to the “corporatization” of CannTrust upon Aceto’s arrival at the company in mid-October. “Peter did not know much about cannabis and all of us could feel that. Most of us who worked there care about serving medical patients and are proud that Canada legalized cannabis. He didn’t have that spirit.”