After months of negotiations with Vail, the Park City Lift Maintenance Professional Union reached an agreement Monday, Dec. 18, on salary policies for new hires and safety protections for workers.
Matt Wright, a lift mechanic who served on the union’s bargaining committee, spoke with KPCW about what’s in the contract for workers across Park City Mountain.
Wright said a major motivating factor for the negotiations was to increase transparency on salaries for newly hired mechanics and electricians.
“After your 18 months to two years of in-house training, you should see some reward for that,” he said. “We were able to achieve something that reflects that those trainings and those promotions will result in incremental increases to your overall wage.”
He said those incentives should also help with employee retention.
Maintenance workers put in hours long before and after the public is on the mountain to ensure all the equipment is safe to use, according to Wright.
“We don’t leave until the lift is able to run for the public the next day, whatever that might entail,” he said.
The work can be difficult or dangerous at times, and it requires high precision. Wright described replacing the gearbox on the Payday lift over the summer, where the margin of error was just three thousandths of an inch. And he said mechanics weather everything from the hottest days of summer to the coldest days of winter.
“What we do in summertime directly reflects the public’s ability to ride those lifts come winter,” he said. “I just want people to recognize how vital that is to the operation and then I need Vail to recognize how vital it is to pay those individuals.”
Now, with the new contract signed, Wright said he’s hopeful the union’s efforts will encourage others to follow their lead.
“The more of us that we have, the more power we will have at the table,” he said. “Our problems are not our problems alone.”
Park City Mountain vice president and COO Deirdra Walsh said she was “pleased and grateful” for the contract agreement.
“We respect and care deeply about all of our employees, including our lift maintenance teams, and we will continue to do the right thing for team members across the company,” she said.
The new contract comes about a year after the mechanics’ historic unionization, the first of its kind in the U.S.
