A DAVID VS. GOLIATH STORY IN SKI COUNTRY
Park City, Utah, ski patrollers ratify a contract with Vail. Their strike is over. Karmic backlash is not.
The Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association announced Wednesday (Jan. 8, 2025) night its members had voted to accept a new contract with Vail Resorts, Inc. that runs through April 2027. A tentative agreement to end a strike that hobbled one of the largest ski areas in the United States was reached the day before.
In an announcement on social media, the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association said:
“We are proud to announce that on 1/08/25 we ratified a fair contract with vote of 100%. We feel strongly that we have secured a contract with a wage structure and benefits package that incentivizes retention and career growth on Patrol.
“This puts an end to this historic strike at the largest ski resort in the US. Tomorrow, 1/09/25, we are excited to return to work!
“We could not have done this without the support of our community. We are eternally grateful to everyone who donated, provided food, and stood with us on the picket line.
“We are proud. We are grateful. We are united.”
Overview:
- The contract includes a $2 wage increase for all entry-level patrollers and safety staff, a key demand during negotiations. Tenured patrollers will see average wage increases across the unit of $4 per hour, with some of the most experienced roles receiving an average increase of $7.75 per hour. The union says the deal incentivizes long-term career growth and retention and that it has achieved “wage parity with non-unionized Vail resorts.” The contract also includes “enhanced parental leave policies and industry-leading educational opportunities.”
- Ski patrollers in Park City, Utah, took on Vail Resorts, Inc., a ski and resort conglomerate valued at $6.74 billion. They believed their bosses adopted illegal tactics intended to stymie contract negotiations. So they went on strike Dec. 27.
- Holiday skiers filed a class action lawsuit on Jan. 9, 2025, against Vail Resorts. The suit says plaintiffs spent thousands of dollars to visit Park City Mountain, and Vail Resorts didn’t disclose the strike or its impacts.
- The union had wide support in Ski Country. The walkout was a public relations disaster of national scope for Vail Resorts, Inc., owner of Park City Mountain — in some respects cementing the company’s reputation as the most hated name in skiing. By some estimates, it cost the company as much as $400 million.
- The strike raised awareness of the impact corporate consolidation of resorts under Vail and others has had on skiing in America — on cost of skiing nowadays, on relatively remote mountain towns and their businesses and workers, and on the perception that a freewheeling culture has been lost to corporate greed.
- It was a win not only for patrollers in Park City, but for the 50,000 employees of the global conglomerate — the PistenBully drivers and maintainers, snow makers, lifties, ski instructors, burger flippers, dirty-dish bussers, toilet scrubbers, cashiers, and, in this case, ski patrollers–who work under stressful conditions for little pay or respect and without the kind of health care and basic worker rights that’s now taken for granted in every developed country but the United States, including the other countries in which Vail owns resorts: Canada, Australia, and Switzerland.
Kate Sonnick writes a “pulse-of-life” column about living in a resort town that costs about 258 percent more to live in than the average town in the United States, although that’s not her usual focus.
It’s published by the Park Record, Park City’s hometown newspaper since 1880.
Sonnick seems to personify the best of the resort town’s lifestyle: active, engaged, community-minded, woke in its most positive sense.
The title of her columns is “Betty Diaries.”
The actual origins of “Betty” as slang for a female skier, skater, surfer or rider are somewhat murky. Some say it came from the 30s pinup girl Betty Grable, or the ’50s pinup Bettie Page. Some say it came from the Archie comics’ Betty or Betty Rubble from the cartoon series “The Flintstones.” Pretty much everyone agrees that it stands for a woman who is strong, independent — a total badass.
“For me, the term Betty will always stand for something you won’t find on Google. It’s the feeling of camaraderie and female friendship that transcends time zones and comfort zones. And knowing that, even if you’re alone, you are never alone.”
This was Sonnick’s Betty Diary of a couple of weeks before members of the Park City Professional Ski Patrol walked off their jobs on Dec. 27, 2024, then returned two weeks later after many of their demands were met.
The new contract includes a $2 wage increase for all entry-level patrollers and safety staff, a key demand during negotiations, according to KPCW, Park City’s public radio station.
Patrollers with years under their belts with Park City Mountain will see average wage increases across the unit of $4 per hour, with some of the most experienced roles receiving an average increase of $7.75 per hour. The union says the deal incentivizes long-term career growth and retention and that it has achieved “wage parity with non-unionized Vail resorts.”
The contract also includes “enhanced parental leave policies and industry-leading educational opportunities.”
Sonnick values ski patrollers as a result of first-hand experience.
I ’preciate ya, as a former ski patroller/ski instructor/binding adjuster in Berchtesgaden, West Germany (Armed Forces Recreation Center), in Missoula, Mont. (National Ski Patrol), and, yes, at The Canyons before I realized that paying the mortgage was more important than babysitting the likes of a deeply disturbed 7-year-old Morgan, whose parents wanted to sleep in, then ski, and were willing to pay a small fortune for that Experience of a Lifetime™ (actual Vail slogan).
In her column, Sonnick asked:
“So why doesn’t Park City Mountain owner Vail Resorts seem to get it?”
Perhaps it was a rhetorical question.
I am pretty sure executives at Vail Resorts, Inc., lower-level resort supervisors, investors, and market analysts get it, at least the short-term bottom-line aspects of “it” — perhaps to their philosophical core.
Analyst Petr Huřťák at Yahoo Finance gets “it,” advising investors to unload their Vail stock. This was the headline: “3 Reasons to Sell MTN (Vail) and 1 Stock to Buy Instead.”
“Vail Resorts’ skier visits came in at 548,000 in the latest quarter, and over the last two years, averaged 10.2% year-on-year declines. This performance was underwhelming and implies there may be increasing competition or market saturation. It also suggests Vail Resorts might have to lower prices or invest in product improvements to grow, factors that can hinder near-term profitability. …
“Vail Resorts’ business quality ultimately falls short of our standards. … Investors with a higher risk tolerance might like the company, but we think the potential downside is too great. We’re pretty confident there are superior stocks to buy right now.”
At least one prominent investor gets “it.”
“(Vail CEO Kirsten) Lynch and (CFO Angela) Korch are principally responsible for recent value destruction. Having demonstrated zero control over the business, their names have become toxic to employees, guests, and investors. …
“The core skiing community has labeled Vail the “Evil Empire.” Vail’s marketing reductions, and decision to centralize marketing under CEO Lynch has created significant gaps, been inauthentic, and cut out the heart of each mountain. Management’s incredibly short-sighted actions have led to lost opportunities and destroyed brand value.”
Could be, however, the “it” Sonnick was referring to had nothing much to do with the short-term ups and down of the New York Stock Exchange and more to do with what Vail executives should’ve learned from watching “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”: the value of common decency, selflessness, and honesty.
That was “it” for even for a commentator on all-business TV.
Jim Lebenthal had a bad time skiing in Park City over the holiday, blamed Vail Resorts, Inc., and told his market-savvy audience watching CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report” on Jan. 2, 2025 all about it:
“If you want to be in a travel stock, if you want to run a travel and a leisure company, you darn well better give the experience that you’re advertising. Because if you don’t, you will get negative PR and you will get non-repeating customers.”
Lebenthal’s rant was part of the first wave in a public relations disaster for Vail that was national in scope. The video drew 3,900 reactions and was cited in hundreds of news stories about the strike. CNBC draws an average of 178,000 viewers in the 9 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. time slot, according to Nielsen data.
Stock of Vail Resorts, Inc. (NYSE: MTN) dropped more than 6 percent on Jan. 2, when trading resumed for the new year.
Colin McGrady, a private equity advisor and Park City property-owner, in a LinkedIn post:
Vail Resorts, let’s talk…. Look, when the *BUSINESS PRESS* — home of EBITDA (Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization is a measure of corporate profitability that excludes financing, tax and non-cash expenses) worship and shareholder supremacy — unloads on you during a labor dispute, you’ve officially scored an own goal so epic it belongs in the PR Hall of Shame …”
Since Dierdra Walsh took over almost three years ago as vice president and chief operating officer at Park City Mountain, she has been no stranger to controversies between the ski resort and Park City officials and the town’s vocal residents — all passionately concerned with maintaining their mountain lifestyle while ensuring the tourist- and outdoor recreation-based economy thrives.
Her tenure has been a continuous swirl around how to preserve a place that’s being loved to death: a decision to end free parking at the base of Park City Mountain; lift upgrades that never got off the ground; grand plans to redevelop Park City’s aging base facilities that went nowhere; and now the strike that some observers say cost Vail $400 million.
But the setback for Walsh, personally and professionally, that could cut as deep or deeper than the strike and its aftermath was a class-action lawsuit filed on Jan. 9, 2025, against Vail Resorts. Plaintiffs allege they spent thousands of dollars to visit Park City Mountain and the resort didn’t disclose the strike or its impacts.
The lawsuit echoes complaints of CNBC’s Lebenthal.
Vail staff may have even intentionally withheld information about the strike. Here are early morning tweets edited to omit the impact of the strike. They were sent minutes apart over the holiday.
The primary plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, Christopher Bisaillon, an attorney with residences in Illinois and Park City who is licensed to practice law in Illinois and Utah, is suing on behalf of anyone who purchased a Park City Mountain lift ticket from Dec. 27 through Jan. 8, during the ski patrol strike.
That could be thousands of skiers and riders, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit requires “class certification” before going forward, according to KPCW, Park City’s radio station.
In an interview on KPCW, attorney for plaintiffs Daniel Tarpey said he expects Vail’s attorneys to defend their client by focusing on a waiver skiers are required to sign when they purchase a pass. The waivers say lift tickets are non-refundable, and guests forfeit the ability to sue – which, if courts agree, would explicitly bar a class-action lawsuit.
In a remarkable op-ed published by the Park Record the day before the strike ended and re-published by virtually every ski-oriented outlet in the known universe, Walsh added fuel to the public relations flames:
“I want to apologize to everyone that we haven’t been able to open the terrain we had hoped for by now and that the line wait times were longer than usual during the peak holiday because of the ski patrol union strike.” …
“By choosing to strike during the peak holiday, the union hurt their fellow employees, skiers and snowboarders, and their neighbors.”
Besides blaming ski patrollers, Walsh said there was “relentless harassment online and in person” of resort workers who chose to cross picket lines over the holidays.
If Walsh was singling out residents of her close-knit outdoor recreation community, she might’ve been a bit off target. Many locals who ski stay home or go elsewhere between Christmas and New Year’s primarily because their Epic Passes, relatively inexpensive season passes, have provisions that restrict access during peak periods of the ski season. Also, over the years they’ve learned to dodge holiday madness.
On the other hand, thousands of vacationers come in from out of town and out of state, excited to enjoy bluebird days and perfect corduroy as implicitly promised them in slick Vail-produced marketing. In 2024, they only found a mess.
They’re the ones most likely to join the class-action suit.
Responses to Walsh’s op-ed published on the newspaper’s Facebook page reflect a consensus:
As if anticipating Walsh’s commentary, the ski patrollers sent this to their ski-patrol comrades-in-Vail as the company sought replacements:
“If you are one of these employees coming here (as replacements) to accept work, know that you are hurting your fellow patrol family, their families, and the entire ski area community that we care deeply about.”
A few hours after Walsh’s op-ed was published, the mayor and City Council of Park City, several of whom are up for re-election, uploaded this to social media:
There have been other setbacks on Walsh’s watch.
Park City denied the resort’s plan to upgrade the Silverlode lift, currently a choke point on the back side of the mountain, and the front-side Eagle lift with eight-person and six-person replacements, respectively.
The deal was well along before Walsh returned to Park City after leaving her job at Northstar, but it imploded just as she was getting her feet on the ground in 2022.
The project had been approved by Park City’s planning director. The resort had even purchased and delivered to its Mountain Village parking lot the necessary material for construction and was about to begin installation.
But the planning director’s decision was appealed to the full Planning Commission and was granted, effectively killing the upgrade.
The resort’s plan was “essentially crowding a lot more skiers into a lot less space,” according to one of the city’s residents involved in the appeal.
Vail tried to get a reversal in state district court, but lost. The case is currently pending before a higher court.
Vail Resorts said in earnings reports that it lost millions in the deal. The stuff of the lift – the whole thing — was packed up lock, stock, and barrel and shipped to a Vail-owned resort in British Columbia, Canada. Whistler-Blackcomb now has the state-of-art, high-speed, high-capacity lift, and Park City doesn’t.
The dust-up followed a grand proposal to build a hotel, retail space, restaurants, and condominiums on what’s now a parking lot adjacent to Mountain Village and the ski lifts. Additionally, developers promised 66 units of employee housing and 21 units of affordable housing, with each unit equivalent to a 900 square foot apartment.
And so far, it’s gone nowhere.
Then came the ski area’s decision to implement paid parking on the Park City side of the resort for the 2022–23 season. Implemented as a way to reduce traffic congestion in town, a few Parkites and others, especially those driving in from out of town, saw it as just another way for the ski area to generate revenue.
However, the resort was doing only what many other resorts across were doing.
If anything, all of this has solidified long-held suspicions of some Parkites toward Park City Mountain and its parent, Vail Resorts, and, possibly, intensified the ambivalence many Parkites’ feel toward the company that controls, directly or indirectly, much of what happens on the mountain, to their workers, in town, and even to its affluent residents.
In December, as the strike loomed, Walsh said there would be no impacts to mountain operations should the Park City Ski Patrol decide to strike.
Walsh was very wrong.
Because she’s in charge of all resort operations, Walsh would’ve been in possibly the best position to know even the minutest details of how a walkout would affect the resort.
Colin McGrady, the private equity adviser:
“The consequences were immediate and severe. Instead of the usual 55 patrollers on the Canyons side, a fraction remained, crippling operations. Lifts were delayed or closed, prime terrain was roped off, and lines snaked through the base area like frozen serpents. Families who had dropped serious cash on their ski vacations were left seething.
“Park City had promised contingency plans. They didn’t have any. Or if they did, they have been laughably inadequate. Perhaps they were misled by the last contract negotiation, when the patrol authorized a strike but never walked off the job. The union warned them this time was different. Vail didn’t listen.”
Walsh’s comments and those of other Vail managers over the course of contract negotiations likely further eroded the credibility of Park City Mountain management and, possibly, Walsh’s relatively close association with community-oriented nonprofits that rely heavily on Vail’s generosity through its EpicPromise™ program.
She sits on the board of the Park City Community Foundation, a widely respected nonprofit that it said distributed $5.2 million last year in grants to organizations serving greater Park City and Summit County.:
“We care for and invest in the people, place, and culture of our community, and believe that a thriving community is founded on effective nonprofit organizations.”
One aspect of the impact the strike had on skiing was documented by TownLift, a local Park City news outlet.
With a 42-inch average snowpack as of the week between Christmas and New Year’s, skiers might’ve expected more than 20 percent of the mountain to be open. After all, three-and-half feet on top of the early season snow-making should cover most of the rocks and bushes.
Julia Edwards is a Park City ski patroller who has been working at the resort for 14 years in various capacities, including as a supervisor and a union negotiator in prior years:
“This is my 14th season. I have never seen us have this much snow and so little terrain open, and I have never seen us go through a storm cycle like this without being able to open and expand new terrain.”
TownLift analyzed the ski resort’s daily early morning tweets during that period going back seven years. Those are the messages that advise skiers on what to expect on the slopes. It found that relative to snowpack depth, this year had the fewest lifts and trails that were expected to open.
(“Expected” is an educated guess because weather and snow conditions vary on the mountain through the day and the elevation, and mechanical failures, power outages, and such cannot be predicted.)
Last season, the resort had 46 percent more terrain open during the same period with 24 percent less snow — a 32-inch base then versus 42-inch base this year.
Without an insider’s view, there was no way to know how long the strike would last. Both sides seemed to have the will and resources to persevere.
Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association had a gofundme site that topped $300,000 raised from over 4,100 donors. The top donor as of Jan. 7 had given $5,000, and the money kept rolling in until it was shut down after the strike ended.
KPCW reported that if the strike lasted for 15 days, the union’s parent organization, Communications Workers of America, would begin paying members $300 per week. After day 29, the strikers would’ve received $400 per week, according to CWA’s strike manual.
The union was savvy and aggressive, organized, passionate, and had the support of the skiing community in Park City and across Utah.
If you stood on the corner of Park and Empire avenues, where you turn to go to the ski resort’s Mountain Village, when pickets with signs were out in force, you would’ve heard continuous honking of supportive drivers.
Importantly, that support included union locals in Utah, Colorado, Montana, Washington, and even patrols whose members don’t work for Vail. Patrollers from Eldora and Loveland, Colo., announced they planned to picket outside the company’s Broomfield, Colo., headquarters.
The ski patrol unions at Vail ski resorts in Park City, Breckenridge, Crested Butte and Keystone sent this letter to Vail Resorts, Inc. CEO Kirsten Lynch before a mediation session started early on New Year’s Eve:
Meanwhile, senior managers, high-level careerists from Vail Mountain in Colorado, the corporation’s flagship and founding resort, were sent to Park City as reinforcements to keep operations running. They included its ski patrol director and senior manager of health and safety. Both Park City Mountain Resort and Vail Mountain are owned by Vail Resorts, Inc.
And the resort was staffing the mountain safety division with employees from other departments, including ski school and food and beverage.
On Dec. 13, Dec. 16, Dec. 17, and Dec. 30, The Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association filed unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board against Vail alleging the company had unilaterally changed conditions of employment, was negotiating in bad faith, and was using coercive threats and actions during talks ongoing since April 2024.
The union filed one of the ULP complaints over an email Vail allegedly sent to striking employees threatening loss of housing, health care, locker room access, and day care services, according to KPCW. Union business manager Quinn Graves said Vail had deactivated the ski passes of union members and their dependent family members.
Despite what the clever headline of Sonnick’s Betty Diary says — “You’re so Vail, you probably think this town is about you” – in many ways, Vail is about Park City.
Sanitized in a Disneyesque kind of way, Park City has morphed into a 21st century reboot of the company town it was in the 1870s, when George Hearst and his investors owned the Ontario mine. Miners working for Hearst dug up tons of silver ore during Ontario’s life of operation, adding to Hearst’s already enormous wealth.
The mining magnate lived in San Francisco. His son was William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon infamously portrayed as Charles Foster Kane by Orson Welles in the 1941 classic movie “Citizen Kane.”
In those days, the town’s local businesses, schools, public services, and housing accessibility for miners and their families — many of whom were immigrants despised by racist Americans despite their willingness to do the dirtiest, most menial jobs — were wholly dependent on distant employers. They struggled to survive the sometimes bitter cold. The cost of living kept them in poverty.
There was no ladder of opportunity.
As the old saw goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.”
Then as now, the bosses didn’t care much about the welfare of their employees.
In the four decades after 1880, 1,023 miners in the United States died digging up gold, silver, copper, and iron ore.
The worst mining disaster in Park City’s history occurred on July 16, 1902, at the Daly-West mine, owned by Montana magnate Marcus Daly, and Hearst’s adjacent Ontario mine.
An accidental explosion filled shafts of both mines with fumes, asphyxiating 34 miners, including their would-be rescuers.
From The Durango (Colo.) Democrat:
“Park City, Utah, July 16 — This city and camp are today plunged in the deepest grief that they have ever experienced. The cause of their sorrow was an accident which occurred last night in the Daily-West and Ontario mines, …
“The disaster was the result of an explosion occasioned by John Burgy, a miner, going into the magazines of the Daly-West mine with a lighted candle. The act cost him his life and the lives of many other miners besides. His own body was blown to atoms. Not a fragment has been found. All the other victims are recognizable, their faces being ghastly and easily identified by relatives and friends.
“The explosion occurred at 11:20 last night and in a twinkling the most deadly gas was being generated throughout the mines. It crept through every tunnel shaft and incline and in a very short space of time scores of miners found themselves face to face with death. The work of rescuing the imperiled dead was quickly and heroically undertaken.
“The men were brought to the surface just as fast as the disabled machinery would permit. The victims had to be brought up the shaft in one compartment cage, one of the compartments having been wrecked by the explosion. Every man who went down with the first rescuing party was overcome by the deadly gas and it was with the utmost difficulty that the machinery was kept in motion.
Now as then, employees of the dominant Park City corporation — the hundreds of PistenBully drivers and maintainers, snow makers, lifties, ski instructors, burger flippers, dirty-dish bussers, toilet scrubbers, cashiers, and, in this case, ski patrollers–work long and hard often under unbelievably stressful conditions for little pay and without the kind of health care and basic worker rights that’s now taken for granted in every developed country but the United States, including the other countries in which Vail owns resorts: Canada, Australia, and Switzerland.
Like a latter-day silver queen, CEO Kirsten Lynch calls the shots out of corporate headquarters in Broomfield, Colo., a few miles north of Denver.
Vail left Vail in 2016. It had gotten too expensive. It was too remote. The downside is that now many corporate-wide, day-to-day operations are homogenized, centralized, and automated, physically disconnected from skiing and the culture that brought it forth.
Vail insiders have been paid $47M (Lynch has made $19M) in the last three years while shareholders have lost 47 percent, according to a blistering letter from an investor, Late Apex Partners, to Vail Resorts, Inc. Board of Directors.
Lynch is paid $6,288,586 annually, or about $3,000 per hour; Executive Chairman Rob Katz and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Angela Korch are paid $2,202,070 and $2,183,196, respectively; Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary David T. Shapiro makes $2,162,634; and Executive Vice President for Retail, Rental, and Hospitality Greg Sullivan is paid $975,715. Compensation includes stock options and awards and other benefits.
If you think that disparity between Vail’s army of about 50,000 employees and its top-tier executive is unconscionable — and it is — the view from a wider lens might help bring corporate reality into sharper focus.
As Vail’s chief marketing officer, before being promoted, Lynch created the Epic Pass, a relatively inexpensive season ticket good at all Vail ski resorts.
Revenue from sales of the pass skyrocketed, from $135 million to $653 million during her tenure as CMO, according to Vail-Beaver Creek Magazine.
I bought it, as did thousands of others who otherwise would’ve stopped skiing because of the sport’s rising cost. Months before the ski season starts, we give Vail a revenue injection that enables it to thrive no matter what Mother Nature does in the winter months that follow.
And so, nowadays Park City Mountain crams its slopes with people from New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida, and even Canada, Australia, Mexico, and South America.
Boy, was it crammed over the Christmas 2024 holiday.
The ski resort didn’t open much of the mountain after the strike began on Dec. 27 (for safety reasons, according to Vail; for strike-related staffing reasons, according the union) despite about a foot of fresh snow, and that created hour-plus lift lines of powder seekers with access to only bunny slopes. Hundreds of angry holiday vacationers spent thousands of dollars and vowed never to return.
Experience of a Lifetime™ was the promotional slogan used by Vail Resorts, Inc. in its fiscal year 2024 earnings report.
Exactly.
The mess was, at least partially, a result of the long-term strategy Lynch and her team devised, which reshaped and reinvigorated a ski industry losing its core customers through aging, mostly, but also because the sport had become prohibitively expensive. From the East Coast, it can be cheaper to ski in France, Switzerland, or Austria than the American West.
Vail’s grand plan has had an enormous impact on economies of idyllic mountain towns in the remotest parts of the United States and worthiest of preservation.
Here’s a primer that documents that “Vail effect” called “How Corporate Consolidation is Killing Ski Towns.”
As another old saw goes, “When Vail sneezes, Park City catches the flu and is put on life support.”
Or more accurately, “When Vail sneezes, dozens of mountain towns across the country and workers and small businesses impacted by decisions made in Broomfield catch the flu and are put on life support.”
Vail is sneezing nowadays, or just sniffling a bit. Maybe a hiccup or two.
Revenue to Vail Resorts, Inc. was down in fiscal year 2024, $230.4 million, compared to fiscal year 2023, $268.1 million; value of assets has declined from $6.32 billion in 2022 to $5.7 billion in 2024.
The company still has big plans for Park City in advance of the 2034 Olympics and remains profitable: $1.22 billion in fiscal 2024. Park City and adjacent resort Deer Valley will be venues for several events.
In fiscal year 2024, Vail repurchased about 700,000 shares of its own stock. It cost itself $150 million.
That $150 million could’ve, theoretically, gone to improve employee salaries, benefits, and working conditions.
It wasn’t a one-time maneuver or theoretical, according to this letter sent to Lynch dated Dec. 31, 2024. It was sent to her from ski-patrol unions whose members work for Vail Resorts, Inc. in Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone, and Park City.
“We remain committed to the continued success of Vail Resorts and are hopeful that we can collaborate to address these concerns in a constructive and mutually beneficial manner-both now and in the future. We recognize that the success of this company depends on the efforts of all involved. However, we believe that the $725M in stock buybacks and $863M in cash dividends over the last three fiscal years (a total of $1.59B) could be more equitably shared between the investors who passively accumulate wealth and the workforce whose labor make this financial prosperity possible.”
The main reason companies buy back their own stock is to create value for their shareholders, according to a Forbes explainer. In this case, value means a rising share price.
Here’s how it works: Whenever there’s demand for a company’s shares, the price of the stock rises. When a company buys its own shares, it’s helping to increase the price of its stock by boosting demand, thereby creating value for all shareholders.
As even another, but embellished (by me) old saw goes, “What goes around in 1870, comes around in 2024.”
(Keshlear is a longtime newspaper journalist and skier. He recently retired from the University of Utah’s College of Health as a writer, editor, and Internet content manager. The College houses The Center for Emergency Programs, which trains over 1,200 people per year, offering courses in emergency medical services, wilderness rescue, and pre-hospital training, including first aid, CPR, EMT, AEMT, and swift water and avalanche rescue–skills required of many career-oriented ski patrollers.)
