Dragonfly Wellness Employees Endured Onslaught of Illegal Union-Busting, Audio Reveals: Part One

Recordings captured by pharmacy employees during captive audience meetings demonstrate the lengths company leadership will go to in order to prevent unionizing.

The September 6th executive town hall at Dragonfly Wellness began like any other employee meeting inside Utah’s first medical cannabis pharmacy. The room echoed with conversations and laughter. Chairs scraped across bare polished floors as Pharmacy Agents (the legal term for medical dispensary employees in the state) arranged themselves in roughly aligned rows facing a small group of people who were largely strangers to them. Among those strangers were several of the executive officers from Sapa Investment Group (SIG), which owns and operates the vertically integrated cannabis company that is Dragonfly, from cultivation to the pharmacy. There was Chief Executive Officer Mai Nguyen, her husband Sean Dang, Sean’s sister and SIG’s legal counsel Diamond Dang, Mai’s own youngest sister and SIG’s Head of HR Lien Nguyen, and an additional stranger that didn’t work for the company. Not on paper, at least. That stranger was Miko Penn, a “Labor Relations Consultant” and known union buster.  Although this was the first of many such meetings to come, meant to deter collective action from the employees, it was hardly the beginning of the intimidation and coercion they would face.

Weeks earlier, on August 18th, pharmacy agent and mother of two Kimi Mason submitted a signed letter to her managers on behalf of the pharmacy agents, delivery drivers, and other frontline workers at Dragonfly Wellness. The letter petitioned management to recognize the employees’ right to vote on joining United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 99. Interrogations began later that day. A supervisor approached Mason and, claiming to act on the orders of Frank Casper, the Director of Pharmacy Operations at SIG, demanded to know who the head of the labor organization movement was. Despite actually being a recent addition to the cause, in a demonstration of solidarity Mason said, “I am.”

“It was not a doubt or a question in my mind,” she told me in an interview, “I was one of the later people to join up, but I joined in with both feet.”

Although she was the first to face interrogation and intimidation, Mason was far from the last. An Outline of Events and Charges obtained from a union representative for the employees shows that during the following weeks, many pharmacy agents were individually taken aside by managers wanting to know who was leading the unionization efforts. Sometimes the managers took a less direct but more intimidating approach, having loud conversations meant to be overheard by employees about the likelihood of SIG firing everyone or even shutting down entirely because of the employees unionizing. These attempts were witnessed by several employees, including Mason and Adriana Cahua, another pharmacy agent I interviewed who was feeling the division growing.

“I know that they’re telling leads not to talk to associates (entry-level pharmacy employees) in a friendly way,” Cahua said, “They’re trying to make us not go on breaks together.” She then told me of one such lead, a friend of hers now afraid of socializing, who was told by a manager that they were being “too nice” to the unionizing employees. 

After the initial rounds of interrogations aimed at employees, SIG then failed to complete on time the first, and ostensibly only, task required by law for them to perform, which was posting the union petition in the employee break room as well as electronically. Even famously anti-union companies like Amazon and Starbucks tend to obey this easily observed rule. SIG instead delayed the breakroom posting by three days, only doing so after the employer was ordered to by an agent from the National Labor Review Board (NLRB), upon whom Miko Penn later blamed the late posting. In spite of that, the company took an additional nine days to post the petition electronically, which arguably would have been easier. SIG and Dragonfly Management were making it clear that they did not plan on cooperating with unionizing employees. And all before they had even brought in the union-buster.

Miko Penn was introduced to the pharmacy employees the night of September 6th, but had likely started working for the Nguyens at least a day or so earlier. She is currently listed as a “Senior Consultant” at consulting firm The Crossroads Group LLC on Linkedin.com. On their website, thick with vague corporatespeak, The Crossroads Group claims to offer “Measurable Improvement Solutions” for companies and that their mission is to “to help organizations “hear the voice of the customer or stakeholder” and to respond to that voice with meaningful action designed to produce a measurable result.” Notice that they put part of their own mission statement in quotes, which could certainly just be someone thinking that’s how you put emphasis on something in a sentence, but could also be interpreted as being insincere or even sarcastic. More glaring however, is the distinct lack of the word “employees” in the group of people they are dedicated to hearing.

Additionally worth noting is that one of the partners and a leading consultant of the Crossroads Group is Miko Penn’s father, and possible namesake, Mike Penn. According to reports filed with the Department of Labor in 2018, Mike Penn was hired as a consultant by freight/shipping company XPO Logistics when many of their workers considered joining the Teamsters union. XPO paid him $350 an hour (yes, an hour) to do what his daughter Miko Penn was now preparing to do on behalf of SIG. Considering the rate of inflation these last five years, it’s unlikely she was paid less than what her father previously received.

For her part, Miko Penn has already been charged with violating labor relations policies at least eight times while working at The Crossroads Group. She has a single television credit for appearing in a 2021 episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the main story of which was, unsurprisingly, union busting. In said episode, she is heard on an audio file fear mongering terrible potential outcomes to employees of Columbia Sportswear and attempting to discourage them from unionizing, claiming to have seen people lose not just their jobs because of it, but also their “homes and marriages.” She would go on to use this scare tactic against Dragonfly Wellness employees as well. All of the information contained in this and the preceding paragraph is what appears in the first few results when you enter “Miko Penn Crossroads Group” or even simply “Miko Penn” into a search engine. It is highly unlikely that SIG was ignorant to all of it unless they disregarded due diligence completely. They have chosen not to respond to requests for comment at this time, on this or any matter relating to the unionization efforts.

On the night of the town hall, Lien Nguyen introduced Miko Penn as a “Union Educator Expert,” a title which sounds like it was improvised on the spot while intending to be unbiased, as the family constantly insist that they are. “If you guys feel that this is what we want as a company, then we’ll roll with it.” Lien Nguyen says at one point. “It will just mean more work for HR,” she adds. “We don’t care what you guys do,” Diamond Dang tells the employees with a nervous laugh.

“That seems a little disingenuous,” an employee replies, “why are we having this meeting if none of you care?” The room devolves into an uproar of voices shouting over each other before Diamond Dang becomes the loudest and says, “We don’t think everyone has all of the information about it.” Information that Miko Penn claims to have.

Before that statement can be questioned further, Mai Nguyen interrupts Dang to tell a personal story/rant that went on for several minutes about how she grew up poor in the projects of Oakland, the first restaurant she opened 27 years ago, what a miracle it was for them to obtain a liquor license, and how SIG as a company makes all of its money from its restaurants and nothing from cannabis because of government regulations among other things.

“We don’t make our money from cannabis, we make it in restaurants,” she says, “We own several in other states too… the reason we jumped into the cannabis business is because we don’t know any better.” 

They just don’t know any better.

Now, in her defense, there are a few things that do make medical cannabis a difficult venture to quickly profit from, the largest of which being IRS Code Section 280-e, whose specter is invoked multiple times throughout the town hall meeting. In short, 280-e prevents medical cannabis businesses from deducting otherwise normal expenses, such as costs of labor or office supplies. This code is applicable because in the federal government’s eyes these businesses are still “trafficking” a schedule I substance, one that is considered to have no medical value compared to its potential for harm under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

Fortunately for the cannabis industry, but unfortunately for Mai Nguyen’s argument, 280-e will most likely not apply to cannabis much longer (relative to the speed of the government). On September 13th, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report regarding the recommendation two days prior from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that cannabis be reclassified from schedule I to schedule III under the CSA. This recommendation came after a review released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The scheduling itself however, must be carried out by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) who in a 2020 congressional hearing said they are “bound by FDA’s recommendations on scientific and medical matters.” The CRS report concludes that based on this information, it is unlikely the DEA would disagree with the FDA at this time, considering that they haven’t ever in the past. All of this alphabet soup is to say, a new excuse will soon be necessary.

Mai Nguyen does also blame low profits on a competitor with “political sway” who she claims refused to do business with them. An interesting argument, given her sister Hoang Nguyen, who many employees thought was the pharmacy’s CEO before the town hall (it still says as much on her LinkedIn profile at this time), is currently running for a seat in Utah’s State House of Representatives as a “pro-business” Democrat and will provide SIG with sway of their own (projection, perhaps). A doubly interesting argument when Mai Nguyen contradicts it by later saying that they (Dragonfly) didn’t want to do business with them (the competitor) because, “they use coconut oil and I’m a patient myself.” Triple interesting, because Dragonfly uses coconut oil in their products (I have a jar of their cooling cream in my medicine cabinet, coconut oil is one of the ingredients) so she is almost certainly lying.

The most vague, but perhaps frequent, blame is set at the feet of “bad hiring decisions,” which were ostensibly made by people that she herself hired, or were hired by her sister Lien Nguyen, head of Human Resources. And what does all of the government regulation, competition, and bad decision making leave Dragonfly with? According to the CEO, “negative 125,000 to negative 400,000 a month.”

“Our company is holding on to the edge of a cliff with one hand,” she goes on to say, “and if we don’t do what we need to do before the end of the year we will go under.”

Although she never elaborates on what “do what we need to do” means, the intent of everything she has said up to this point seems to be, “it’s too costly for you to unionize.”

Of course, if it was as simple as that, then the company wouldn’t need to be putting on this charade. They could sit down at the negotiating table with the union, open up their financial statements and say, “See? We can’t afford better wages, we can’t afford better benefits. We’re consistently at a loss,” and the union would have to accept the best deal they could get or walk away. UFCW Local 99 can’t force money to exist from nothing. In general, there’s very little unions can force. But the very fact that SIG is holding its employees captive with these meetings, paying them to stay late so they can hear anti-union propaganda, paying a union-busting “consultant” potentially hundreds of dollars an hour to mislead and frighten them, all seems to indicate that the company can afford to negotiate better deals for their employees, they would just prefer not to.

This first town hall meeting was roughly an hour and a half long, ending just after 9pm. For reasons no one can seem to explain, there are no part-time shifts at Dragonfly Wellness. It’s full-time or nothing. So most of the employees at that meeting had already been there for 10 hours, if not more, as many of the job responsibilities can require a pharmacy agent to be at the store a few hours before it opens, and stay after it closes. The powers that be also gave only 24 hours notice of the meeting on Slack, an inter-office communication app all employees are required to use but not expected to check on their day(s) off, so many employees were unable to attend the meeting, let alone prepare in any way. It did not go unnoticed.

“This is nice and all,” an employee states early in the meeting, “but it feels a little disrespectful to people with only a 24 hour notice… it could have been a virtual thing but we were told no, it has to be in person.”

Diamond claims that this is because Mai and Sean just want to give everyone a chance to get to know them. In person. With their legal counsel present. And a union-buster. Again, not unnoticed by employees.

“Y'all have a lawyer and a union rep here, and we don’t have anything like that and I just feel a little blindsided by it,” one employee says.

Truly the biggest misstep SIG leadership took amongst all of this illegal union-busting was underestimating their own employees. They would not be swayed and would instead call out as much BS as could be spotted. Beyond the two previous examples, when Lien Nguyen says that, “We pulled together the numbers and in terms of wellness associates, we actually pay better than anyone else,” an employee immediately replies “I worked at [a competitor] and they paid $23 an hour equivalent.” 

The word “equivalent” is very important here. Dragonfly Wellness starts at $17. A wage becoming more and more difficult to survive on in Salt Lake City, especially when health insurance takes a significant slice, but most of the other medical cannabis pharmacies also start at, or around, as much. The major difference though, is that most if not all of those other pharmacies allow their employees to collect tips, which can substantially increase the actual amount of money earned per hour. At Dragonfly Wellness, extra change and money that would be otherwise given as a tip (sometimes at a patient’s insistence) is donated to “Pay-It-Forward” boxes at the various cashier stations. The proceeds of these boxes are used to buy lunch for the pharmacy agents a couple of times a week (reportedly $10 to $15 a plate), and at the end of the month the remainder is donated to a local charity. The agents are typically not asked for input on where lunch comes from or which charity the rest of the money goes to, nor are they given details about how much went to either in a given month. They are simply asked to trust those above them.

Another potential for increasing equivalent pay comes in the form of benefits like health care and paid time off (PTO), which SIG does offer to some extent, but many employees argue it is not nearly enough. When one employee cites their five days of PTO per year as being one for the “win” column (having also cited “the passion tax” as a reason why they should all allow themselves to be exploited) another employee says, “I’m sorry but the PTO is abysmal. People are getting sick and coming into work because they literally have to. So then the sickness goes around, and everyone comes to work sick… everywhere else I’ve worked has been three weeks minimum and sick pay on top of that” 

When you’re in an industry that has the word “medical” in it, you probably don’t want your staff to be coming in sick on a regular basis, at least not from an ethical standpoint. There are numerous patients registered with the state medical program who have autoimmune disorders, not to mention the general unpredictability of covid variants and flu strains in this era. Sick Leave that is given upfront and separate from PTO shouldn’t be considered unreasonable, especially when lives are at risk.

Although these particular requests, better wages and benefits, are what one would typically expect from employees wanting to unionize, what actually comes up most frequently in these meetings is the distinct lack of communication the pharmacy employees feel they receive from SIG leadership.

“There’s no cohesion between Sapa and Dragonfly,” an employee says, “I feel like I’ve been giving that feedback to whoever’s been coming over here for the last two years, and that’s how it’s always been.” Another employee adds, “it’s just been getting worse and worse for us.” Then someone voices a sentiment repeated many times by different employees throughout the meetings. 

“I don’t want this to feel like any kind of, you know, like we’re battling or it’s us versus them, I just feel like there is no plan to change. There hasn’t been anything of substance given to us to assure us that this is how we’re going to work together.” But instead of being given assurances, the employees are encouraged to follow blindly. 

Throughout the evening, Mai insists to the employees that, “You have to trust me,” and, “I promise you I have a plan, I just can’t tell you anything.” Miko Penn goes so far as to add that it would in fact be against the law for Mai to elaborate. She implied it would violate the period of “status quo,” which begins when employees elect to have a union vote and prevents any changes being made to their existing contracts until the union is voted down or a new agreement is reached. For the most part that includes basic things like compensation and benefits. Asking for an overall business plan from the CEO should not directly affect anyone’s contract and hardly fits under the status quo umbrella, but that wouldn’t stop the excuse being utilized as such throughout this and other meetings. It also begs the question, why even hold a town hall meeting if you believe you are legally prevented from answering most of the questions? What did they think the employees would want to talk about?

Towards the end of the first night, an employee brings up an often repeated complaint that certain people receive special treatment over others. “Some people get away with [a lot of things] and some people get held accountable for the dumbest things, and I feel like it comes from HR. I just want assurance that we will have fair treatment across the board.”

Again, assurances is not given, however Mai Nguyen claims to have an easy solution. “So once we have a head [general manager] here, that will solve that problem I hope. That’s what I’m looking for. Someone like a mom or a dad that can [inaudible] you guys cohesively.”

She attempts to go on clarifying this statement but is interrupted by Diamond who insists that Mai did not mean that how it sounds, awfully degrading. Diamond tries explaining that the analogy had something to do with Mai’s restaurant background (she does tend to employ her family members), but the audio becomes difficult to decipher at this point as many of the voices start to overlap. However, it’s difficult to imagine a situation in which it’s not at least a little insulting for a CEO to tell their employees they need a manager to act as a mom or dad to help them be more cohesive. Especially at a time when the employees are demonstrating an immense amount of cohesion already by uniting against unfair labor practices.

The first meeting ends not much longer after this with the promise of more to come. Twas was but an appetizer for the force-fed union-busting buffet that would follow. The employees are told they will be meeting with Diamond Dang and Miko Penn in small groups throughout the next several days to learn more, hours at a time. As was later discovered, learning more consisted of nearly as much fear mongering and misinformation as an abstinence-only high school sex education program, albeit with more shouting and threats of retaliation (perhaps).

Details from the meetings that followed, as well as an investigation into credible harassment allegations made during them, will be covered in the next part of this story, which is still partially developing. Dragonfly Wellness employees are not in the clear yet, and would surely appreciate hearing people voice their support online or in person. Thank you for following so far, and please subscribe to read the rest.