Crested Butte lift mechanics on Thursday announced a settlement with Vail Resorts that delivered the 12-member union an average raise of $6 an hour, avoiding a strike the union authorized – but did not schedule – last month.
The lift mechanic union — one of only two in the country — voted to authorize a strike last month, just as Vail Resorts ended a first-in-decades strike with its ski patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort in Utah. That patroller strike hobbled the country’s largest ski area during the holidays, riling skiers who had to wait in long lines at lifts reaching limited terrain.
Crested Butte mechanics began negotiating a labor contract with Vail Resorts in January 2024 and met about six hours a month for all of that year. Once the Park City strike ended Jan. 8, negotiations in Crested Butte started happening weekly. The union was seeking a $2 starting wage increase to $23 an hour with a stipend to pay for gear and equipment.
When Crested Butte’s lift mechanics approved a strike and started raising money online last month — they raised nearly $12,000 — “there was like a flip that switched” in negotiations with Vail Resorts, said Thomas Pearman, a five-year mechanic at Crested Butte Mountain Resort and president of the union represented by the 1,100-member United Mountain Workers.
The new contract through August 2027 delivers $3.50 an hour pay increases to new mechanics and $9 an hour for veterans with an average for the group at $6 an hour. They also got an annual tool-and-equipment stipend to pay for things like skis and safety gear. The mechanics also got Vail Resorts to help pay for wilderness first-aid training.
“In the offseason we are often the only people on the mountain and we are in some pretty remote places,” Pearman said. “Knowing that all our department will have these skills brings us some peace of mind in case something goes wrong.”
A Vail Resorts spokeswoman, in an emailed statement, said across all the company’s 43 ski areas, all maintenance workers received a merit pay increase for the 2024-25 season and the company’s new Maintenance Ascent program delivered additional pay for 66% of the company’s maintenance workers with additional training.
“As a company, we have made meaningful investments across all our maintenance teams to incentivize skill building and career paths for our unionized and non-unionized team members,” said Crested Butte Mountain Resort manager JD Crichton in an emailed statement. “With this agreement, we are pleased to make an investment in the Crested Butte lift maintenance team to ensure the team’s wages are consistent with those of lift maintenance team members working at our other mountain resorts in the Rocky Mountain region.”
When Vail Resorts settled with Park City patrollers, the company quickly offered similar pay bumps to patrollers at ski areas that require dangerous avalanche mitigation work. Maybe the same will happen for lift mechanics, Pearman said.
“We hope this makes an impact across all Vail Resorts lift maintenance departments and hopefully the stipend becomes universal and there are some kinds of raises rolled out to all lift mechanics in the company,” Pearman said.