Top image: The Winchester Mystery House on South Winchester Boulevard in San Jose. Photo: The wub / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
For more than a century the Winchester Mystery House has sold itself on mystery: staircases that end at ceilings, doors that open onto walls, a widow’s house that was never finished. On Saturday the story at 525 S. Winchester Blvd. was more ordinary and more modern. The mansion’s tour guides walked off the job.
Tour guides represented by Teamsters Local 856 staged a one-day unfair labor practice strike on Oct. 24, according to a union release, saying management had failed to bargain in good faith over a first contract for more than a year. NBC Bay Area and KTVU both reported the walkout Saturday.
What the guides are asking for
The union lists four core issues: wages, health care, longevity benefits and caps on the size of tour groups. The last item is a safety argument specific to the building. The house spans 24,000 square feet with 160 rooms and 47 stairways, the union says, and it describes “potential dangers due to improper ventilation” and rooms “not built for a large capacity of visitors at one time.”
The flashpoint that tipped the dispute into a strike, according to the union, was marketing. Teamsters 856 says management approached guides individually and asked them to sign waivers allowing use of their image and likeness in promotional materials, rather than raising the subject at the bargaining table. Under federal labor law, an employer with a certified union generally must negotiate terms of employment with that union rather than directly with the workers it represents; whether this particular request crossed that line is a question for the National Labor Relations Board.
“All we’re asking for is a fair contract,” said Emma Garcia Jones, a tour guide and San Jose native, in the union’s statement. She said guides spend much of each tour describing Sarah Winchester’s generosity as an employer, “and while it’s a beautiful legacy, it’s not one that management at Winchester Mystery House is living up to.”
J. Jaramillo, who the union says has worked at the mansion for more than five years, said: “These are the jobs that pay our bills, put food on our tables, and help us survive in one of the most expensive regions in the country.”
Veronica Diaz, the local’s Central Coast Division director and lead negotiator, said the guides “are united and will continue to lead the fight at the bargaining table.”
What the federal record shows
The guides’ union drive is documented in NLRB case 32-RC-370866. The representation petition was filed Aug. 6, 2025. In the election tallied Aug. 23, 2025, 35 workers were eligible to vote; 20 voted for representation and 8 against, with 4 challenged ballots that the tally marked as not determinative. Under the election agreement, lead tour guides were allowed to vote subject to challenge. The board certified Teamsters Local 856 on Sept. 3, 2025, as the representative of a unit of full-time and regular part-time tour guides at the San Jose site. The docket lists Womble Bond Dickinson as counsel for the employer.
This month the union escalated. NLRB case 32-CA-396570, filed Oct. 6, 2026, alleges violations of Section 8(a)(5) of the National Labor Relations Act, the provision covering an employer’s duty to bargain. The board’s docket lists the allegation category as refusal to bargain and bad-faith bargaining, including surface bargaining and direct dealing, and names the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as the charging party. The case is listed as open. A charge is an allegation, not a finding; the NLRB regional office investigates and decides whether a complaint is warranted.
Management’s side
No public response from Winchester Mystery House management appears in the union’s release or in NBC Bay Area’s report. KTVU reported that it reached out to the attraction for comment but did not hear back before publication. The company’s position on the waivers, the group-size proposal and the pace of talks is therefore not yet on the record, and the Chronicle will update this story if it becomes so.
Why a tourist attraction’s labor fight matters
The Winchester Mystery House is one of San Jose’s few genuinely global brands, a fixture of travel guides and Halloween programming that draws visitors who might otherwise never leave the freeway between the airport and Silicon Valley’s campuses. A 35-person bargaining unit is small, but the issues on the table are not unique to it.
Image-and-likeness rights have become a live labor issue across industries where workers’ faces end up in marketing, from performers to front-line hospitality staff, and the question of whether such waivers are a bargaining subject is likely to come up again as attractions lean harder on social media. The group-size cap is a reminder that a heritage building’s quirks are also workplace conditions.
The long view
San Jose’s cultural economy rests on a handful of institutions that predate the tech industry, and the guides at the Winchester house have framed their campaign around that history: a nineteenth-century employer remembered for meals, wages and housing, measured against a twenty-first-century cost of living. A first contract, whenever it comes, will set a template for how the city’s legacy attractions compensate the people who tell their stories. For a valley that likes to think about the future, the labor market for its past is worth watching.
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