A Card Check Neutrality Agreement limits our ability to share information with employees, reduces transparency, and, most importantly, replaces the protections of a secret-ballot election.
Workers at Rodney Strong Vineyards in Sonoma County are organizing for union recognition in a campaign that has drawn in immigration enforcement, community protests and the county sheriff, making it one of the most closely watched labor disputes in the California wine industry this year.
According to reporting by David Bacon, published by Truthout on August 20, 2026, the flashpoint came in late July, when Raul Calvo, described by Truthout as a well-known California union-buster, called workers into a meeting. Salvador Ramirez, who had worked among the winery's tanks for 12 years, said Calvo told them he had received an email three days earlier saying that ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was outside, and that the vineyard was technically in a border zone because of its proximity to the ocean. Ramirez said workers were shocked and upset, not only by the implied threat but by the company's changed posture: the previous October, when rumors of Bay Area raids circulated, management had told workers, in his recollection, "You're our workers. We have to support you and we're not going to allow them to come in without a judge's warrant."
An organizing drive months in the making
The meeting capped months of organizing. Workers had reached out to North Bay Jobs with Justice, a coalition of community organizations and unions in Sonoma and Napa counties, which helped them form a workplace committee and connected them with Teamsters Local 665. In early June, 32 of the winery's 50 workers signed a petition asking the company to agree to a card-check process for recognizing their union and to provide what they called a fair process to organize without threats and intimidation. Community leaders, including Healdsburg mayor Chris Herrod, accompanied the workers when they delivered it to management.
Workers say they began organizing because the company was terminating longtime employees while cutting budgets. Rafael Malfavon, whom workers call Junior, said meetings brought news of no bonuses and no raises while workloads grew and executives were promoted. One fired worker, Belen Flores, had injured her knee at work and was then let go, the company citing a genetic vision problem as a pretext, according to the reporting. "I could always do my job to the last day," Flores said. "I never got even a warning."
Two views of a fair process
The company's response to the petition was to hire a local union consultant, Jesse Rojas, who held two meetings with workers, followed by Calvo, Rojas's superior. When Malfavon challenged Calvo in a meeting over misstatements about unions, he said he was ridiculed. A delegation of workers then went to the company's human relations director to complain that the consultants were trying to intimidate workers with immigration threats.
Christopher O'Gorman, Rodney Strong's senior director of marketing communications, sent Truthout a statement saying the company respects workers' right to decide on unionization but wants an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board: "A Card Check Neutrality Agreement limits our ability to share information with employees, reduces transparency, and, most importantly, replaces the protections of a secret-ballot election with a process that does not provide the same level of privacy for employees making this important decision." Calvo did not respond to Truthout's request for comment.
Workers favor card check because they believe the NLRB election process is tilted toward employers, a skepticism the reporting ties to the current administration's reshaping of the board. The article also notes that Calvo has not filed the LM-20 and LM-21 forms the Department of Labor requires of anti-union consultants since 2020, and that Rojas was paid $283,633 for work on another union-busting campaign in 2020.
A county-wide fight over ICE
The dispute has spilled well beyond the winery gates. Community activists mobilized at least three times, according to Teamsters Local 665 president Mike Yates: 200 people picketed a summer event, causing Rodney Strong to cancel it, and 250 attended a counter-demonstration at a company fundraiser, with public officials refusing to cross the picket line.
The campaign has fused with a broader Sonoma County fight over immigration enforcement. The reporting states that so far in 2026, the county sheriff has handed 21 people to ICE for deportation. When the Sonoma County Farm Bureau defended the sheriff's actions, the Sanctuary Coalition held a die-in and press conference outside its offices. The North Bay Central Labor Council has urged the Board of Supervisors to pass a non-collaboration-with-ICE ordinance.
For wine industry employers, the Rodney Strong dispute is a warning about how quickly a workplace organizing drive can become a public reputational crisis when immigration enforcement enters the picture. For workers and their union backers, it is a test of whether community pressure can substitute for a labor-law enforcement apparatus they do not trust. Neither side shows signs of backing down.