Vail Resorts faces the possibility of another labor strike after settling with ski patrollers in Park City, Utah earlier this month — this time, from a group of employees at Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR).
The Crested Butte Lift Maintenance Union, composed of 12 lift maintenance technicians, passed a strike “authorization” vote on Jan. 20 with an overwhelming majority. An authorization vote precedes the actual decision whether to strike. In press releases and interviews, members cited low pay despite the physically demanding and hazardous nature of the job, alongside high worker turnover. Lift mechanics are tasked with keeping the chairs spinning, and make on-the-spot repairs to keep skiers safe multiple times per day.
The union had a three-hour negotiation with Vail on Monday, Jan. 27, which “went well,” according to union president Thomas Pearman. Pearman has worked with CBMR for four years, three of those as a lift mechanic.
“We definitely turned the page. Vail came to the table ready for a bargain,” Pearman told the Times. “We think that's largely due to our strike authorization vote and the outpouring of support we've got from the community with our petition and our strike fund.”
Vail Resorts is a publicly-traded mountain resort company valued at nearly $7 billion dollars. According to SEC filings, the company brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit from the 42 mountain resorts it owns in four countries, including CBMR.
Vail is working toward an agreement with the union and agreed the bargaining session this week was a step forward, CBMR Communications Manager Katie Lyons wrote in an email to the Times. If the union chooses to strike, CBMR will remain open, she added.
CBMR’s lift mechanics unionized in June of 2023, and are represented by the United Mountain Workers (UMW), a branch of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) AFL-CIO Local 7781. Crested Butte Ski Patrol, also represented by United Mountain Workers, is currently under contract with Vail set to expire next November.
At the start of last year, the mechanic’s union entered negotiations with Vail, requesting higher wages and a variety of other benefits like merit increases, stipends for work gear and more professional development, Pearman said. Lift technicians at CBMR currently make $21 an hour, and are asking for $23. But the union did not receive a formal reply for over nine months, Pearman said. At that point, the workers were offered the same wages they currently receive.
“We're in an era where most large companies are intentionally harsh on organized labor … It took seven or eight months to pass a wage counter back to the lift mechanics, which is directly intended to make the union tired and burned out, and is pretty classic bad faith bargaining," said United Mountain Workers president Max Magill.
Vail provides workers with uniforms and a boot stipend, but does not provide any money for skis or a snowboard, which mechanics use to get around the mountain to make repairs, Pearman said. Lift mechanic Rob Alexander said he has not received a raise in two years, and promotions within the crew have been a fight with Vail. Alexander has been a CBMR employee for ten years, and a part of the lift maintenance crew since 2019.
“It makes it more difficult to show up every day when I know I’m making the same money I was two years ago. And the negotiations aren’t really progressing, which has an effect on everyone’s personal mental health,” Alexander said.
Lyons wrote that bargaining with new unions takes time.
“As this is a first-time contract with a new unionized group, there are more topics to discuss and work through as we build the contract from scratch,” she wrote. “New contracts simply take more time, and we have a long history of reaching agreements with unionized employee groups.”
Last Friday morning, a cacophony of honks and cheers broke through the usual quiet that blankets the town of Crested Butte. Drivers, including a Rural Transportation Authority bus driver, rolling through the 4-Way Stop laid on their horns and others pumped fists out of car windows in support of a group of union picketers on the streetcorner.
The picketers, all current or former staff members of CBMR’s lift maintenance department, held signs that read “CBLM needs living wages” and “Honk for CBLM.” Locals stopped by on their way to work to supply the picketers with baked goods, and an employee from local restaurant, McGill’s, arrived with mugs of hot chocolate.
“We just want to be able to do more than just love our jobs,” said Nathan Rodekuhr, a CBMR lift mechanic for almost two years. “We want to be paid fairly. We want better training. We want to keep people working at lift maintenance to build the skillset that’s required to run the mountain. I want to build a career out of this job and have a future with the mountain that I love.”
In the last several years, many mechanics who had clocked 15-20 years on the crew left, taking over a century’s-worth of collective experience with them, Pearman said. The area’s oldest lift was installed in 1983. The mountain has four brands of lifts, meaning the types of repairs made on each varies widely. Lift technicians are also required to keep pace with upgrades in lift technology from major manufacturers.
The demanding and technical nature of lift maintenance, coupled with the hazardous conditions, has pushed many off the mountain and into jobs with a safer work environment and better pay, Pearman said. Mechanics work 40-50 feet in the air, in specialized baskets, traveling tower to tower to install heavy equipment. They’re out before the sun, in the bitter cold, with ski patrol making sure the lifts are running even in avalanche terrain.
“If the lift were to turn on or something was energized when we're in the positions that we're in, we could be seriously harmed,” Pearman said. “It requires a lot of trust from the other people that things are being done right.”
Unlike seasonal CBMR employees, mechanics work year-round. In summer months, the crews are some of the only people on the snowless swaths of mountain. They take the lifts apart to clean and inspect them, moving hundreds of pounds of metal, before stringing the chairs back on the line between the two terminals.
As of Jan. 27, of the eight open positions posted on CMBR’s job site, five were maintenance-related jobs, including a lift electrician and an experienced maintenance technician. Usually, the crew employs three electricians, but currently only has one, Pearman said. This means mechanics are often expected to learn the electrical workings of the machines, but aren’t compensated for this extra knowledge and labor.
The work of a lift technician is highly-skilled mechanical and electric work, requiring either formal certification or an apprenticeship. Colorado is home to one of the country’s only university-level programs that offers formal coursework for lift mechanics, as part of a larger associates degree. In the Colorado Mountain College (CMC) Skilled Crafts & Trades department, students learn all aspects of multiple departments such as ski patrol, lift maintenance, snowmaking and grooming.
More negotiation troubles
The strike authorization makes the maintenance crew the second group of Vail workers in recent months to consider strike as a negotiating tool. Park City ski patrollers were on strike from Dec. 27 to Jan. 8.
Like the CBMR lift technicians, workers requested a wage increase, better benefits and working conditions. Another cache of Vail-employed ski patrollers at Keystone Resorts are also in contract negotiations. Citing slow response from Vail and issues in the terms of the new contract, they staged a “collective walk-in,” in December, according to reporting in the Summit Daily News. This is a less disruptive form of protest meant to get management’s attention.
Strikes could prove costly for Vail, not simply in the possibility of closing resorts during the high season, but in legal fees. On Jan. 9, Park City skier and Illinois resident Christopher Bisaillon filed a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah alleging that Vail deceived hundreds of thousands of consumers when it failed to disclose that the union was on strike; it was called an “epic failure and intentional deceit.” The complaint describes three-hour long lines for access to less than 20% of the resort’s terrain.
The lawsuit may be the first time in history that a ski resort is being held to task by ticket holders over a strike. The argument alleges that the public was harmed by the lack of transparency, while Vail “continued to collect tens of millions of dollars” from the same skiers. Since the lawsuit was filed, Vail has promised to discount next year’s passes for the skiers affected by the strike, according to reporting from KPCW in Utah.
For one of Vails’ shareholders, Late Apex Partners (for which Vail is its largest position), it’s too little too late. Just a week after the strike authorization, Late Apex publicly called for an overhaul of the board and the resignation of CEO Kirsten Lynch, CFO Angela Korch and executive chairman Rob Katz.
The company’s “poor judgement” and the lack of accountability for managers have not only put shareholders at risk, but damaged the company’s reputation immensely, Late Apex stated in a Jan. 27 letter sent to Vail’s board of directors. In a nearly 100-slide powerpoint, the firm highlighted Vail’s negotiations with unionized ski patrollers (including Crested Butte Ski Patrol) calling the strike in Park City "disastrous."
“The core skiing community has labeled Vail the ‘Evil Empire,’ … Lynch and Korch are principally responsible for recent value destruction. Having demonstrated zero control over the business, their names have become toxic to employees, guests, and investors,” the letter read.
When Park City ski patrol went on strike, several patrollers from CBMR, and other Vail resorts across the West, were called to work in Utah to keep the chairs spinning while local workers refused to cross the picket line. However, if lift maintenance goes on strike, filling the gaps might prove impossible as the required technical knowledge is so specific.
“If we were to go on strike, the company [Vail] said they would bring in folks from other resorts. But in the end, the more time you spend with these machines, the better you are at getting them going,” Alexander said.
Ultimately, the goal for both parties is to avoid a strike, as the repercussions in rural, tight-knit resort towns tend to reverberate through the community, Magill said. United Mountain Workers represents ski patrollers across the Mountain West — in Purgatory, Solitude, Telluride and the Arapahoe Basin — and one other lift maintenance team at Park City. According to Magill, UMW is the only ski workers union in the country representing lift mechanics.
“Everybody suffers,” Magill said. “These ski communities are small and closely knit, and that does not exclude local management at our ski resorts, or other departments … I went on strike and it was heartbreaking. I cried my eyes out to leave some of my best friends in the locker room who the union can't protect to walk off a job … It just hurts everybody involved, and we don't want to have to play this card that shouldn't have to be played.”
The CBMR lift mechanics union also started a strike fund on GoFundMe, meant to cover lost wages if the union decides to go on strike. So far, donations have ranged from a few dollars to $1,000, many from anonymous donors. As of Jan. 29, the fund had raised over $11,000.
(Abby Harrison can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or abby@gunnisontimes.com.)
(Mariel Wiley can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or mariel@gunnisontimes.com.)
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