Lee Mulcahy Fired By Aspen Ski Company After Speaking Up About Wages

The Aspen Ski Company has fired an employee who protested the wages that the company paid beginning ski instructors.

Lee Mulcahy was surprised on Monday to learn that he had been fired by Aspen Ski Company. The Aspen Times reported the news on Monday, quoting a statement from Aspen Ski Company's CEO asserting that Mulcahy "no longer meets the standards required to be a ski pro with the Ski and Snowboard Schools of Aspen."

The veteran ski instructor began circulating petitions and writing op-eds last year complaining of the low wages paid to beginning ski and snowboard instructors.

"We now pay $69 a day to beginning instructors for a lesson we charge $625," he wrote in a January op-ed.

In January, the Aspen Ski Company responded to Mulcahy's public demonstrations by suspending him without pay for three weeks. The instructor told the Aspen Daily News on Monday that he had a meeting scheduled on Friday to discuss his future employment status with the company.

Mulcahy said he had been "optimistic" he would be allowed to return to work.

Comments

[artistnaspen]

11:33 PM on 02/16/2011

As tempting as it might be for me to weigh in on the foolish, unprofessional and quite possibly illegal manner in which Skico handled the Lee Mulcahy matter Roger Marolt, Johnny Boyd and many others have already adequately covered that ground. So I'll spend some time exposing another emerging controversial Skico matter which is just coming to the surface.

-Mel Blumenthal, Snowmass Sun Columnist, 02.16.2011

Johnny Body, Snowmass Sun columnist: http://www.snowmasssun.com/article/20110209/FRONTPAGE/110209972/1016&parentprofile=1042

Roger Marolt, Aspen Times columnist:
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20110204/COLUMN/110209920

[Cananna]

11:28 AM on 02/04/2011

Don't prostitutes pay about 90% of the income they generate to their pimps?

[artistnaspen]

12:40 PM on 02/03/2011

Roberty F Kennedy Jr on January 27, 2011 in Sundance on the subversion of American democracy:

“The erosion of American democracy has forced people who care about our country, and who care about civic health, into this box of civil disobedience and local action.

Last year, the Supreme Court overruled a hundred years of ironclad American precedent with the Citizens United case, and got rid of a law that was passed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 that saved democracy from the huge concentrations s of wealth …created during the Gilded Age.

For the first time since the Gilded Age, we’re seeing those kind of economic concentrations return to our country.”

[lovintheconstitution]

10:40 AM on 02/03/2011

Sorry but Aspen is a joke...over priced, huge ego, snotty and elitist people that don't have the sense that God gave a goose! I love Vail...but it's even almost unbearable there now too...might have to start venturing down to Wolf Creek...more snow, less attitude.

[altohone]

12:05 PM on 02/02/2011

No longer meeting their standard for keeping quiet as they gouge employees and customers so management can enrich itself.

Do you think they have the standards written down?

Sue em for all the dead trees!

[SteveDenver]

03:30 AM on 02/02/2011

Mulcahy has a point, but if collective bargaining failed he should have tried to unite the workers instead of writing op-eds being critical of his employer.

[N133]

11:38 PM on 02/01/2011

That's sad for you. This a-ho snowboarder won't miss you on the mountain...

[neverdeadned]

11:39 AM on 02/02/2011

This a-ho won't either, and I've been hit by skiiers and hassled by them where as I've seen snowboarders kinder and more respectful to skiiers

[InYourWorld]

03:20 PM on 02/02/2011

Must not be a very good skier if snowboarders can catch up to you....

[zombywulf]

10:04 PM on 02/01/2011

Hell, the instructor should be getting it all less lift tickets. Ski places are over priced anyway.

[MileHighCityMan]

09:01 PM on 02/01/2011

Good for Mulcahy. He is correct. Ski instructors should get paid at least 20% of the income generated from their lessons. That, and lessons are too expensive these days to begin with.

[artistnaspen]

09:21 AM on 02/16/2011

"As tempting as it might be for me to weigh in on the foolish, unprofessional and quite possibly illegal manner in which Skico handled the Lee Mulcahy matter Roger Marolt, Johnny Boyd and many others have already adequately covered that ground."

---Mel Blumenthal, Snowmass Sun Columnist, Feb 16, 2011