Hey, no bigs. The state just fined a tiny winery $115,000 for using volunteers who were learning to make wine while getting the vineyard’s product to market. They were illegal paid labor, you see. Can’t have two free parties engaging in a trade of labor for specialized knowledge without the state getting involved and depriving the area of this particular business, its job opportunities, and its wares. Congrats, public. You have been served and protected:

A small-time vintner’s use of volunteer workers has put him out of business after the state squeezed him like a late-summer grape for $115,000 in fines — and sent a chill through the wine industry. The volunteers, some of them learning to make wine while helping out, were illegally unpaid laborers, and Westover Winery should have been paying them and paying worker taxes, the state Department of Industrial Relations said. “I didn’t know it was illegal to use volunteers at a winery; it’s a common practice,” said winery owner Bill Smyth. State law prohibits for-profit businesses from using volunteers. Before the fine, volunteer labor was common at wineries in the nearby Livermore Valley, said Fenestra Winery owner Lanny Replogle.

Smyth says he wasn’t just using volunteers in exchange for skills in an unofficial capacity, but had a true internship program, which should be allowed under California law. Many other wineries are now contemplating their own use of volunteers and interns, and many wine enthusiasts will no doubt lose such opportunities in the future:

“I had a formal internship program here with classroom study and everything,” Smyth told Wine Searcher. “I have volunteers because they want to be here. The volunteers are all professional people. A lot of them work at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. They all have their own health insurance.” Smyth, a retired teacher, said he usually works only about 10 hours a week at the winery, which is off the beaten path in Castro Valley, a rural suburb about 25 miles east of San Francisco. He said he sells about $200,000 worth of wine a year and nets about $11,000 in income.

“I did this for the passion and love of wine, just like all the volunteers do,” Smyth said.

Reason notes this kind of regulation won’t be hurting any of the big boys, of course. Instead, an $11,000-a-year enterprise and someone’s dream is down the toilet, and it may hurt other small wineries in the area:



A state spokesperson’s response was to whine about what might happen if there were a “catastrophic accident” (lawsuits?) and that it wasn’t “fair” for wineries that have to pay employees to compete with wineries who don’t. I don’t think anybody was worried that this $11,000-a-year empire was going to put anybody out of business, and it’s the state that mandated this system in the first place. Whenever anybody who works in government talks about creating a level field for the marketplace, you know some small business owner somewhere is about to get screwed over. The story notes that there are many small wineries like this one in the area who rely on volunteers. They had to send them all home.

You can visit these reckless rule-breakers at their Facebook page to offer your condolences.