More than 1,900 ski instructors have joined a lawsuit against Vail Resorts arguing the company violated federal labor laws by not paying them for certain tasks.
That’s only a fraction of the nearly 25,000 ski instructors the three former Beaver Creek employees who filed the lawsuit in 2020 are hoping to enroll. Those three employees last week filed a request in Colorado U.S. District Court asking a judge for an extension to sign up ski instructors and permission to text their peers in order to better reach the hard-to-track workers.
“Text messaging is the only remaining tool to overcome the deficiencies in mail and email notice,” reads the April 15 filing in Colorado U.S. District Court. “Because of well-recognized problems with mail and email delivery for transient populations like ski instructors, most courts in this district routinely approve text notice.”
The ski instructors said they have been unable to reach a large number of the 24,273 workers eligible for the lawsuit against Vail Resorts. About 13,000 of those workers never opened the opt-in notice email that went out earlier this year. A few thousand email and mailing addresses provided by Vail Resorts were not working.
The case filed in December 2020 by the Beaver Creek employees alleges Vail Resorts failed to follow the Fair Labor Standard Act by not paying employees for all the hours they worked and did not reimburse workers for required equipment.
An overlapping case in California was settled in 2022 with Vail Resorts agreeing to pay as many as 103,000 workers in 17 states – including Colorado – for hours they worked. But that $13.1 million class-action settlement was thrown out by a California appeals court in 2024 when the Beaver Creek employees objected to a lower court’s ruling that they could not intervene in the California case. They also objected to the settlement amount, arguing it was too small to adequately reimburse workers who were not properly paid.
In the statement filed this month with U.S. District Court Judge N. Reid Neureiter, the Beaver Creek employees’ attorneys suggested Vail Resorts was withholding contact information. Vail Resorts attorneys said this is “completely false.”
The company has shared “the best, most up-to-date contact information” it has for its domestic and international employees, reads the company’s statement in the April 15 filing. The real reason behind the request to text message ski instructors and extend the deadline for enrolling more people into their claim “is that they are unhappy with the number of opt-ins,” reads the Vail Resorts statement.
“There is simply no good reason why tens of thousands of people who already received two notices but did not opt in to the lawsuit should receive yet another notice,” reads the statement.