“Thinking Outside the Bud” Podcast
Mark DeRosa was invited to “Thinking Outside the Bud”, a business podcast devoted to driving innovation in the cannabis space. During each episode, founders, investors, thought leaders, researchers, advocates, and policymakers are invited to find out new and exciting ways for cannabis to positively impact business, society, and culture.
The interview started with a short description of Mark DeRosa’s path in the industry. He revealed that he has “been in the play benefit arena working with employers for almost 30 years now”.
He then continued by talking about the changes in the industry. Mark stated that “over the years, with the increase in government regulations and compliance requirements, our business and our expertise has really morphed from not only doing employee benefits but moving into the world of H.R. administration, working with companies to help develop H.R. best practices and Compliance Enforcement”.
Regarding the current cannabis issues, the host, Bruce Eckfeldt, opened up the conversation by saying that “one of the things in the cannabis world that we talk a lot about is kind of the legality and the whole issue of you know state versus federal and things like that and people talk about the finances, people talk about kind of the risk to the business”.
He then continued with one of the things that he considers overlooked is this whole issue and that’s “whether you’re in the cannabis business or you’re not in the cannabis business, how do you respond to this from kind of an employee policy, employee engagement point of view for these states that have cannabis legal state laws”.
Then, Bruce Eckfeldt claimed that he now has people taking cannabis, whether it’s medical or recreational and the thinks that this “causes a lot of kind of issues, questions, uncertainty”.
He then continued the conversation by asking from “sort of an HR benefits, policy, sort of legality point of view” what is Mark DeRosa’ point of view on the cannabis side “as an adviser, as someone who helps companies figure out these policies, helps figure out how to engage and manage employees in different ways”. Mark DeRosa answered by saying that “one of the interesting things that employers have to worry about now is not just at the federal level and it’s not uniform across the country.
So, employers, certainly employers that are in multiple states have many more issues to deal with when it comes to this. And then with cannabis, there are actually two different categories of it: there are the states that have passed cannabis use for recreational use, and then there are states for medical use. And that in and of itself creates more problems for an employer on how to define that”.
Then, Mark DeRosa remembered when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed and that every company that had more than 15 employees has been affected. He then claimed that “what happened in the past, happens in the future”. Mark DeRosa said that through that law, “federal government came up with a list of what they deemed a disability and then they went to the employer and said: you can’t hire or fire based on this disability”.
In conclusion, from an employer point of view, it means that he cannot use that as a decision-maker or a part of my decision-making process to: hire them or not hire them, or to fire them and not fire them unless it’s unable to perform the material functions of the position.
What’s your opinion?
Are you interested in finding out more about this current issue? Listen to the whole discussion in the following link: https://www.thinkingoutsidethebud.com/podcast/020-mark-derosa
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