Before you pick a public fight with your own staff, look at who's watching. Your customers know the people who serve them, often by name. They tip them at the holidays. When a pay dispute goes public, they will take the staff's side almost every time, and they'll do it loudly, in the places where your next customers are listening.
Disclosure, so you can weigh what follows: I once needed a ski patrol to get me and a shattered shoulder off a mountain. I'm not neutral on the people in the red jackets.
Park City Mountain in Utah, owned by Vail Resorts, is the largest lift-served ski area in the United States. Its roughly 200 ski patrollers and mountain safety staff first responders on skis, avalanche specialists -- had been bargaining with Vail since April 2024. The headline ask was a raise in the starting wage from $21 an hour to $23.
The union voted to authorize a strike on December 14. Vail didn't settle. On December 27 the week between Christmas and New Year's, when families who'd spent all year saving for a ski trip were arriving the patrollers walked out. The strike lasted thirteen days.
Vail's position had real substance. The company said it had raised patroller pay more than 50% over four seasons and had agreed on 24 of the 27 contract terms. That's a legitimate argument, and in a bargaining room it might have carried.
But guests weren't in the bargaining room. They were at the resort, and here's what they saw. According to local reporting, posts on the resort's X account acknowledging the strike's impact were deleted. The website quietly stopped showing the percentage of terrain open. A formal operations update didn't appear until January 4, eight days in. Plenty of guests learned about the strike from the picket line in the parking lot.
With a skeleton patrol, very little of the mountain could open. A class action filed later said less than 20% of the terrain was available and lift lines ran up to three hours for lift tickets costing as much as $289 a day. A video of guests in a lift line chanting "pay your employees" went everywhere. Local lodging companies reported cancellations and early checkouts.
The strike ended on January 8. Starting patrollers got the $23 they'd asked for, and veterans got raises averaging about $4 an hour, according to the union Vail characterized parts of the deal differently. The next day, a guest filed a class action in federal court in Utah on behalf of everyone who bought a Park City lift ticket during the strike, seeking more than $5 million and arguing that Vail knew a strike was coming and never warned anyone. A week later, the resort emailed an apology and offered pass holders a credit of 50% per day skied during the strike toward next season's pass.
So Vail paid the $2. Then it paid in credits across a very large number of guests, in legal exposure, in a public apology and in a holiday season people will be describing for years. I don't know the full ledger. Nobody outside the company does. But I'd bet a lot that it came to more than two dollars an hour for a few hundred people.
You run a private club with 600 members. Your grounds crew twenty people asks for two dollars an hour more, three weeks before the member-guest tournament.
Do the arithmetic first. Twenty people, two dollars, two thousand hours a year: $80,000. At a club where annual dues run well into five figures, that's roughly the dues from a handful of members.
Now picture the alternative. Your members know those people. They see them at 6 a.m. on the fourth fairway. The dispute reaches the members' group chat within a day, and the members side with the crew. Two resign in protest; others start asking at the bar how well the club is being run. The same math applies to a four-office dental group and its hygienists, who have more job offers than you have openings, and whose patients book specifically to see them.
Vail's best move was to settle before the holidays. The arithmetic was never close. Its second best was telling guests plainly, before they bought tickets, what the mountain would look like because the lawsuit wasn't about the strike. It was about the silence.
For owners:
The record from those two weeks the lawsuit, the lift-line videos, the coverage, the apology isn't going anywhere. It's what an AI assistant draws on when someone asks whether Park City is worth the money over the holidays. For a club or a practice, the equivalent sources are local coverage, staff reviews on job sites and whatever members and patients post. When people ask what your place is like, the answer includes how you treated the people who work there.
Read the room. Then do the math. It's almost never close.
Adapted from a piece first published January 9, 2025.
