Sky River Casino: Judges hear Elk Grove workers’ yearslong union dispute
Attorneys for the Wilton Rancheria and the local casino workers’ union argued, before 9th Circuit judges Thursday morning, a case involving hundreds of Sky River workers in Elk Grove, who Unite Here Local 49 have been organizing for years.
Unite Here has argued that the unionization process should follow a 2017 agreement the groups reached, that would have given workers a faster path to representation. The casino has said the union must follow a piece of tribal code passed in 2019, which calls for the casino’s employees to vote on the issue in an election.
The debate, Thursday, focused on a previous decision by an arbitrator who found that Sky River must adhere to the 2017 agreement, and allow Unite Here to represent its workers as long as the union secured signed authorization cards from a majority of employees. In August 2024, a district court judge denied a motion to dismiss the first arbitrator’s decision. Attorneys for the casino requested that the court reverse the district court’s order.
In court filings, attorneys for the Wilton Rancheria argued that the arbitrator had overstepped, and disregarded the tribe’s sovereignty and the labor law that it passed.
“This is a case about tribal sovereignty,” said Michael Meuti, an attorney representing the tribe, during oral arguments Thursday. “Wilton Rancheria, a sovereign nation, enacted the (labor act) through its full constitutional legislative process in 2019.”
The casino’s attorneys and leadership have noted that the original agreement said explicitly that the tribe’s code governs labor relations at Sky River, which Wilton Rancheria opened in 2022. And they have emphasized the importance of the tribe’s sovereignty.
Wilton Rancheria lost its federal recognition and autonomy to govern in 1959 under the California Rancheria Termination Acts, and only regained it recognition in 2009. Today the Wilton Rancheria has more than 1,000 members, many of them in the Sacramento region.
“Tribes are governments,” said Addie Rolnick, faculty director of the Indian Nations Gaming and Governance Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “They are enacting laws that reflect the various needs of their communities… So it is an important part of tribal sovereignty, to be able to have those laws respected.”
The union, meanwhile, argued in court filings that the tribe had given the arbitrator authority to make decisions about how the 2017 agreement interacts with its labor law.
The union has emphasized that an election would extend an already prolonged process: Union elections raise opportunities for legal obstacles that can drag on for years, said Kristin Martin, an attorney with McCracken, Stemerman & Holsberry representing Unite Here Local 49, following Thursday’s hearing.
The union has also argued that it has workers’ support. The union has previously said that, by the summer after the casino opened, it had secured union authorization cards from more than 400 of the roughly 650 workers who it sought to represent. Despite turnover, union leaders said they have maintained a majority since then.
The case comes amid larger, national debates about how labor relations should be governed at tribal casinos, and what role the National Labor Relations Act should have, said Rolnick, the law professor.
“The backdrop of this is a much longer question about how labor would be governed at tribal casinos,” she said. “This isn’t just happening in a vacuum.”
And as the legal process drags on, union leaders and members have said, Sky River workers are making less than their peers in the region. UC Davis researchers conducted a survey that found non-union casino workers in the Sacramento area earned, on average, $18.12 an hour, compared to $20.42 at union-represented casinos, a 12.7% difference.
The Wilton Rancheria’s gaming authority president, Cammeron Hodson, questioned the study’s findings last month, and the sample size: Researchers received 179 responses from workers at unionized casinos, and 59 responses from workers at non-unionized casinos.
Hodson reiterated his previous calls for the union to hold an election in a statement Thursday evening, and cast the legal effort as an “attempt to suppress” the Wilton Rancheria’s rights to self-determination.
This story was originally published December 4, 2025 at 2:56 PM.
