I used to have two mean replies to journalists complaining about the pay, depending on …

If a reporter compared their hourly rate unfavorably to a town bus driver or teacher or server with tips, I’d suggest they drive that bus, go get their credential, join the hospitality industry.

Otherwise, I’d suggest talking to the advertising director about a sales role. Sales tends to pay more, and the top seller usually is the highest paid person on staff. A superstar ad director often enough will make more than the publisher, and everyone will call that very good for us all. Only one reporter took me up.

I never meant to be uncaring saying this. Small-town journalists in particular perform an essential role, along with those teachers and bus drivers and waiters who make communities run. And newspaper sales people, for that matter.

A lot of ink gets spilled on the unfairness of it all, our comparatively humble wages, while business titans, scummy lawyers, C suite corporate types, financiers and the like make bank.

I do fine now, making both more and less than I once did working my way through a career as reporter, desk editor, the editor, publisher, group publisher and eventually today doubling up as publisher and editor.

Then again, I did fine my first season as the only GS-1 firefighter in the Santa Barbara Ranger District and possibly the hardest-working crew member, as well, despite having by far the lowest pay. I have some evidence from supervisors back then to back this up; I was a little crazy, looking back, but I had so much to learn, so much rank stupidity to overcome.

My per hour today may not be so different, accounting for inflation, as I think about it. For similar reasons. Now as then, I’m more a grinder than anything.

Had I known how much I’d like sliding on snow, there’s an extremely good chance I would have passed up winters surfing and going to school to go work at ski resorts like some of my seasonal firefighting peers deeper in the mountains. Had I done that, I’m pretty sure I would have gravitated to ski patrol.

I look at the Park City Mountain ski patrol union’s plight through this lens, which is sympathetic if not all in.

That 3,000 candidates will apply for 300 positions — at the pay scale offered — suggests something about supply and demand, along with desire to do this work. That there are other jobs that pay more, demand less, and are harder to fill is beside the point. Talk about the hardships all you like, this is one great job. Like fighting wildfire once upon a time was for me.

There are colder judgments I’m too familiar with, those good old economies of scale that weigh heavily on management scum such as I’ve been, as well. Overpay one part of the rank and file from a business perspective and a thread pulls at the rest. Costs rise, and so will prices.

Customers bitch more about the high price of skiing than they ever will about low pay for ski patrollers. Few will quit the mountain in the name of wage increases for the employees. This is only reality.

The value of high-paid leaders gets quickly more controversial. I can understand the observation that our companies, agencies and even some larger nonprofits have grown too top heavy in compensation. There’s a good argument that our society was healthier when CEOs didn’t average quite so many multiples more in earnings than line workers. I think it is pretty far out of whack, even.

Vail Resorts to the casual eye certainly seems top heavy like that. That’s not the CEO or any VP’s fault, by the way. Good for anyone getting good offers and being in position to choose between these jobs. Supply and demand is working there, too.

I know we need heroes and villains, along with black-and-white, easy, satisfying answers. But greed runs at the small scale as well as large, simply human nature whether a GS-1 or the president, just one more of the seven deadly sins testing us all.

So I watch, with my sympathies admittedly mostly on the side of the patrollers getting fair pay for their skills, but also with that colder under-thought: We each have choices. In truth there are other jobs. And for Vail Resorts patrollers, those 2,700 or so others who would gladly take your current one at your current terms. For sure there ain’t that many eager and ready to take mine.

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.

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