Sacramento casino workers’ union escalates organizing campaign at Sky River
A unionization effort involving hundreds of casino workers in Sacramento County has extended into a yearslong legal struggle.
The crux of the dispute is whether the Sky River Casino in Elk Grove must allow Unite Here Local 49 to represent its workers, due to an agreement the groups reached in 2017, or whether it can require an election among the workers, as detailed in tribal law.
“We are calling on Unite Here to hold a fair, secret ballot election,” Cammeron Hodson, president of the Wilton Rancheria gaming authority, said in an interview this week. The Wilton Rancheria opened Sky River Casino in 2022.
The union, which represents workers at hotels and casinos in the Sacramento area, said a majority of workers have expressed their support since the summer of 2023 by signing union authorization cards, and an election isn’t necessary under the 2017 agreement.
“The workers have made their voices very clear,” said Aamir Deen, president of Unite Here Local 49.
History of the union’s involvement at Sky River
The 2017 agreement laid out the terms by which Unite Here could seek to represent the future casino’s workers. It said that an arbitrator would review employees’ union authorization cards, and if a majority had signed, the tribe would recognize the union as the employees’ representative. The union agreed to back the tribe’s efforts to secure the government compact it needed to establish the casino. The union’s state political director testified twice in support of the compact at California legislative committee hearings, according to court filings.
The compact was approved in 2017 and took effect in early 2018, according to court filings. In 2019, as required by the compact, the Wilton Rancheria passed a Tribal Labor Relations Ordinance.
Sky River — the Wilton Rancheria’s first and, so far, only casino — opened in August 2022. Unite Here said it informed the casino in the summer of 2023 that a majority of workers had signed union authorization cards.
But the union filed a lawsuit in November 2023, alleging that the tribe had refused to select an arbitrator to conduct the card-counting process.
Attorneys for the Wilton Rancheria responded in court filings that its labor code required both a card-check process and a union election. And the agreement the tribe reached with the union, it argued, said explicitly that the tribe’s code governs labor relations at the casino.
“Wilton Rancheria’s laws, like the (labor code), are the laws of a sovereign nation,” said Shaneeda Jaffer, a partner at Benesch Law, who is leading litigation on behalf of Wilton Rancheria.
“For us, if we don’t follow our laws as a nation, then what are we?” Hodson said. “We are a nation of laws, and that’s very, very, very important to us.”
Wilton Rancheria lost its federal recognition — and its autonomy to govern — in 1959, when the California Rancheria Termination Acts were enacted. The tribe regained its recognition in 2009 and today it has more than 1,000 members, many of them in the Sacramento region.
“Tribes are sovereign nations, and after decades of disrespect for their laws, one can understand why they might wish to have their own laws respected,” Kevin Washburn, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, said in an email.
Where the unionization effort stands
On its website, the union posted a copy of a letter from an arbitrator who found that the casino must comply with the 2017 agreement, and a letter from another who adopted the previous arbitrator’s conclusion. In August 2024, a district court judge denied a motion to dismiss the first arbitrator’s decision. In August the casino filed a motion in federal court to dismiss the second arbitrator’s award.
The union has argued that an election would extend an already prolonged process, and raises opportunities for complications and appeals.
“Making sure that our agreements are honored is really important to us, and to our members. It’s, in many ways, what we do — we enter into agreements with employers and we enforce them… We don’t think we should back down in this situation,” Deen said. “The workers have already waited for two years.”
The campaign trickled into Sacramento politics this summer, when Unite Here Local 49 successfully fought the expansion of a tax incentive package for development in the largely-vacant Railyards district, where the Wilton Rancheria-owned soccer team, Sacramento Republic FC, is now building a new stadium. The union organized district residents, who submitted more than 100 petitions protesting the deal, arguing that it required developers to build minimal affordable housing and would burden the city financially.
Stadium proponents posited that the union was driven by its campaign to organize the casino. Deen said the union’s involvement in the Railyards was solely motivated by a lack of housing for working-class people like its members.
Deen said Wednesday that the union seeks to represent 650 workers at Sky River. He said that more than 400 had signed cards when the union first notified the casino that it had a majority in 2023, and though there has been turnover since then, the union has maintained more than 50%.
In interviews, Sky River workers said they were motivated to join the effort largely for improvements around wages and the casino’s penalty system for calling out of work or arriving late.
Francisco Maldonado, a lead cook at the casino, said he makes $24.03 an hour and lives check to check, paying some bills late and rotating which ones he pays. Nikka Flores, a cashier in the dining area of the casino, said she makes $17.50 an hour.
“I love my job, I love what I do,” Flores said. “It can be such an electric environment… But there is a cloud above our heads.”
Hodson, the gaming authority president, said the casino offers strong wages, benefits and time-off policies.
“I believe we’re competitive in all those areas,” Hodson said.
The case is set for a hearing in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in December.
This story was originally published October 30, 2025 at 11:59 AM.
