BROOMFIELD- Members of the Eldora United Mountain Workers chapter picketed outside the corporate headquarters of Vail Resorts Saturday. This comes as more than 200 ski patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort in Park City Utah are on strike for what they claim are unethical labor practices by the ski conglomerate.
Eldora Mountain Ski Resort, the closest ski resort to the Estes Valley, is owned by POWDR, a separate company, but with Vail Resort’s corporate offices in Broomfield, less than an hour from Eldora, the union members showed up in solidarity with their fellow patrollers.
Park City patrollers began their strike four days ago after negotiations with Vail broke down. The union is claiming that vail refused to meet in good faith over pay proposals as Park City patrollers worked towards a contract. The union has also filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board. They claim the company’s actions violate the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Eldora ski patrollers voted to unionize in late march. While POWDR initially challenged the election results, which saw 90% of patrollers vote to unionize, they withdrew that challenge in early June.
Nick Lansing, chair of Eldora’s Professional Ski Patrollers Union, said that while Park City has a separate owner and is in another state they have their job responsibilities and livelihoods are nearly identical.
“The scale is, they have hundreds of people on the mountain at a time, and we have, you know 15,” Lansing said. “But we’re still providing patient care, doing avalanche control work and trying to get by living in a mountain town and doing a job we love keeping people safe.
Lansing made it clear that Patrollers were on the picket line in solidarity with their colleagues in Utah and not in protest of their employers. Currently, Eldora’s union is in negotiations with POWDR and Eldora Resort for their first contract.
“We’re cautiously optimistic right now about where we are, because bargaining so far has been productive,” Lansing said. “For however long Eldora is willing to engage with us in good faith, I think we’re happy to operate on goodwill and get a contract negotiated as soon as we can.”
The Eldora patrollers are hoping to have a contract in place by the start of next year’s ski season. But as Park City continues to strike, Lansing said Eldora patrollers will continue to show up on the picket line in solidarity.
“Everybody from all these other mountains have been so helpful to us that I’m sure if things ever came to that point that we were demonstrating that we’d have solidarity on their side of things there,” Lansing said.