How the national labor movement arrived in Sonoma Valley

Workers for Sonoma Valley’s largest employer, the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn, announced they had formed a union last month amid a nationwide referendum on workers’ rights over the past two years.

The labor movement has struck a chord across the country, from actors in Hollywood, to assembly line workers in Detroit and Starbucks stores from Petaluma.

To capture the movement in Sonoma Valley, the Index-Tribune spoke with Fairmont workers last September to review the challenges, triumphs and resilience during their union drive.

“The pandemic really kind of pointed out to a lot of people that as employees we are worth a lot… I feel like our voices aren’t heard as much as they should be,” Erik Baumgartner, a bellhop at the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn, said. “That's why I'm not surprised that there hasn't been a big drive for unions across many industries that never had them before.”

Fairmont workers announced they had formed a union on Feb. 16 with UNITE HERE Local 2, a hospitality workers union in the Bay Area. An independent arbiter certified that workers had voted to create a union after a year of organizing, vigils for workers’ rights and complaints to the National Labor Board.

Baumgartner was one of the first employees to come out in support of the union, he said. At a vigil in January 2022, he spoke to more than 200 employees and community members to garner support from his co-workers.

Other Fairmont employees like aesthetician Ale Santoyo also talked about their desire for better health care, working conditions and wages, which had lagged behind the pay for workers at other Fairmont locations in the Bay Area. She also detailed the efforts by the hotel to dissuade employees from unionizing.

“It's been difficult because we had a really strong anti-union campaign for about six months,” Santoyo said last September. “Even people who are pro-union… they're scared and they're confused with all the misinformation.”

National Labor Relations Board findings

These actions included surveillance of employees’ union activities, hiring consultants to dissuade workers from unionizing and “threatening employees with adverse consequences for union activity,” according to National Labor Relations Board filings.

“We had to kind of talk in secret,” Baumgartner said. “The union busters were giving my peers confusing information, which might not necessarily be false information, but the way that they delivered it made it confusing for my peers.”

In January 2023, Region 20 of the National Labor Relations Board found “sufficient evidence” to proceed to a hearing for 43 labor violations against Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn management.

The findings eventually led to a settlement on May 17, 2023, which ended these anti-union tactics, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

The effort to unionize continued unimpeded for Santoyo and Baumgartner, who said they felt a new sense of self-determination. While the ultimate goal of forming a union was still a ways off, they had successfully defeated efforts to prevent them from organizing.

“I never thought I'd be part of a union drive,” Baumgartner said, “When you win big battles, like kicking out the union busters … that’s a big win. And it just showed to our peers that we are powerful when we stand together.”

Now, with a fully formed union, employees will enter a negotiation with the Fairmont to negotiate wages, benefits and working conditions at the luxury hotel in Boyes Hot Springs.

“We're at a point where we feel powerful,” Baumgartner said. “We feel like we can stand together and get things done and for what we believe in.”

Chase Hunter covers the Sonoma city government, breaking news, crime, agriculture, housing and homelessness. Contact the reporter at chase.hunter@sonomanews.com or at chasehunterb.weebly.com