Saiyel Gonzalez thought it was a good opportunity for her son.
Work five to seven hours serving up food and drinks at concession stands at Petco Park and Chula Vista’s amphitheater; make $80 in cash. It didn’t usually work out to minimum wage, but it was off the books and that meant no taxes. He would be working with other high schoolers, as well as immigrants without legal work permits, for a charity called Humble Hands, he said.
This system of staffing concession stands with would-be volunteers, though not well known, is a critical component of operations at venues across the country. Nonprofit groups like Humble Hands – which helps student athletes, according to its articles of incorporation – provide small battalions of workers. In return, the groups get to keep roughly 10 percent of their stands’ proceeds to advance their charitable mission.
The system is easily abused, venue insiders told Voice of San Diego.
What started as a win-win for professional sports teams and charities has now morphed into a system where some supposed volunteer groups are providing a cheap, off-the-books labor source to third-party concession companies, a Voice investigation found. These concession companies partner and profit share with venue owners and operators, like the Padres, which sometimes rent publicly-owned facilities, like Petco Park, from taxpayers.
Voice spoke to dozens of sources inside the world of concessions at major venues, including six different workers, who’d been paid...
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