Both parties want to avoid a strike. But as the busiest time of the year for Utah’s ski areas comes to a close, Vail-owned Park City Mountain Resort still hasn’t successfully negotiated a contract with its ski patrol union, which recently launched a GoFundMe campaign to cover wages should negotiations sour.
On Monday, the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association will enter its 47th bargaining session, the union’s latest attempt to solidify a $17 an hour starting wage. The resort is currently offering patrollers a starting wage of $15 an hour — the starting wage for all Vail employees.
But unlike past sessions, the union is now touting a GoFundMe that in four days raised over $33,000. Patrick Murphy, the union’s business manager and a ski patroller of five years, describes it as “a rainy day fund, in case there’s any reason we’re not receiving paychecks.”
The negotiations started in August 2020. But the dozens of bargaining sessions that followed were unsuccessful, and patrollers entered the 2021/22 season with their old contract.
That means the starting wage for a patroller at Park City is currently $13.25 an hour, despite the $15 an hour minimum wage set for employees across all of Vail’s resorts.
Under the old contract, patrollers get a wage bump to $14.50 an hour at the start of their second year, then $16 for the third.
After 16 months, both parties say negotiations have dragged on longer than either would like.
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