Letter: Vail Resorts employees should organize
Vail Resorts wants the narrative of the Booth Heights development to be about elite NIMBYs versus workers, but that was never what this was about. Vail Resorts is pushing this story to gain support from their employees by claiming to care about the employees’ best interests. Vail Resorts is not a mom and pop shop, it is not a local business, it is not Vail Associates. Vail Resorts is a global corporation whose only consideration is its price per share. The employees who showed support for Vail Resorts at the Town Council meeting by wearing their blue shirts are being lied to and used.
Vail Resorts employees should consider whether it would really be in their best interest to be in housing controlled by their employer, an employer that threw employees out on the street at the beginning of the pandemic when it did not make financial sense for Vail Resorts to continue to house them. But employees, who are not paid enough, say that employee housing is their only option. Instead of accepting Vail Resorts’ agenda as law, Vail Resorts employees should organize!
My husband and I spent our entire career as union labor. We have friends and neighbors in Vail who have also worked entirely as union labor. Those of us who have unionized and as a result make a living wage that allows us to afford a family in Vail — we are not the enemy of non-unionized workers. Pitting non-unionized workers against higher paid union labor has been a long-held strategy of corporations like Vail Resorts. We support local labor and believe that through labor organizations, Vail Resorts should be made to pay you the living wage you deserve!
Gina Grisafi
Vail
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