Cedar Point Cutting Legacy Pay?

Can’t seem to find any official press release

https://insidethemagic.net/...ions-emd1/

I saw something about this on another site. They have to pay for all those executive bonuses somehow I suppose. They already have issues with staffing at the ends of the season, this will just make it harder. Then they will cry like so many others that no one wants to work.

Executive pay has nothing to do with the pay of front-line workers.

Great move by the park!

Plagiarizing myself from P-Buzz:

As much as I have loved the park over the years, I can't imagine any potential employee who would also have to pay rent, buy food, etc. in what consistently sounds like crappy living situations finding that wage appealing enough to work there.

Unless your goal was to simply work at Cedar Point (I can see plenty finding that job fun) and not, you know, to actually make money. I've heard plenty of awesome stories of great experiences from those of you who have worked there. Only person outside of this realm who I knew worked there went to my school and headlined a couple shows in Live-E in the 90's. She loved the opportunity it gave her (went on to sing on a cruise-line and then actually stayed in the music business), but absolutely hated living there. Just used it as a stepping stone to more musical opportunities.

I suppose it's borderline appealing if you live close enough that you don't actually have to live there and all that extra expense.

Definitely not a good PR headline during the time that college students are thinking about summer jobs.

Jeff:

Executive pay has nothing to do with the pay of front-line workers.

How you figure? The company has a pot, people are paid from that pot. We like to argue that lots of things are not a zero sum game, but in the case of payouts from a corporation, that is a zero sum game. They have x amount of dollars and resources to hand out.

You think a $5 an hour bonus for seasonal employees is the difference maker in executive bonuses?

1.3 million per week, yeah I think it helps them cover those bonuses, or the projected 120million in savings for their synergies.

2022 news release on their media page for Cedar Point says 6500 seasonal, multiplied by 40 hours and week and 5 dollar for those wondering where I got the number.

What were the conditions of the bonus? I assume it's based on attendance, performance, working a certain number of hours/days. My previous experience with hourly bonuses in a seasonal/part time environment was around 1/3 of our employees actually qualifying in the end. Either way, I think you're grossly overestimating the impact of hourly pay on executive bonuses in a company with income in the billions. Purely anecdotal, but if my bonuses last year in a much smaller company had been split up amongst all of the employees in the departments in my charge, it would amount to about $75 per employee.

And has this actually been reported by a reliable source? Googling it only leads back to clickbait Disney blogs and a Sandusky Register article that reads like it was harvested from one of those clickbait blogs.

In my experience working there, they hold that bonus over your head, especially towards the end of the season. In order to get that bonus, you have to work all the way to the end of what you are contracted to work. That sounds reasonable, until you start seeing people getting fired for petty reasons closer to the end of the season. I realized that it was completely possible that they were firing people to keep from paying out as many bonuses. It seemed like the budgeting issue overrode the staffing issue.

It took three strikes to get fired. My first strike was a little passed halfway into the season when the ride I was team lead of had a small accident involving a scraped knee. I instructed one of the employees to call park operations as I consoled the family, but they did not call, and it took first aid a long time to get there. My fault, supposedly.

My second strike came a week before the ride closed for good, when a breeze hit the boat that I was parking, and it tapped (gently) into another parked boat. A gas line that the parked boat was connected to pulled loose. I told maintenance many times that week that the newly installed gas line was too short and was pulling too tightly, especially when it was windy, but of course, it was my fault that it happened because I was the one driving. While sitting in the office being written up for that, I calmly told the manager my theory about them firing people closer towards the end of the season to save bonus money. I told him that I was an easy target because my ride was scheduled to close many weeks before the season ended. I'm pretty sure that is why I didn't get a third strike.

I walked on eggshells the rest of the season. As I left the empty parking lot for the last time to drive home, I held my breath. As I drove out of the parking lot, I sighed relief.

It's possible that I'm wrong about the firings, but when it comes to reputation and integrity, appearances are just as bad as intention. I strongly believe that in many aspects of life.

Not to mention the terrible living conditions, or how poorly they treated the trapped foreign workers. Or how if you get sick, unless you are dead, you still have to work. Or how management, especially from departments that you do not work for, are actively and blatantly boastfully disrespectful to employees, with no consequences.

The job was really fun, but everything else was insanely difficult to deal with. They definitely need to pay as much as possible. It's no wonder why they are understaffed at the end of the season.

TheMillenniumRider:

How you figure?

Because math. If you half the CEO's pay and redistribute it among hourly people, it makes almost no difference. There's this enduring myth that executive pay comes at the expense of the front line people, and it just ain't true. They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, this is even more true for public companies. If the company is trying to control costs, they don't take from one to give to another, because you net haven't saved anything.

"Math" isn't binary, though. An executive could cut $0.05 from every dollar going to hourly workers and pocket $0.01, thereby saving money while still increasing executive pay at the expense of the front line people.

Jeff:

. If the company is trying to control costs

What’s funny is how controlling costs never seems to cost the shareholders or the executives. It’s always the people who create value for the business that get to endure the controlling of costs.

Controlling costs is always about the shareholders, the business exists to enrich them. I’m not sure why that’s so hard to comprehend. That said there really needs to be a balance you cut things too deep and profits will suffer in the long run, this is a customer service company and if people get a poor value they will stop coming.

Controlling costs is always about the shareholders, the business exists to enrich them.

I don’t know, I just am under the impression that if a business can’t afford to pay the workers, you know the ones who actually make the business a reality, enough to live, that the business certainly can’t afford to pay the shareholders, and probably shouldn’t exist.

Additionally, the business should focus first on providing the best possible product or experience, since that is ultimately what it sets out to do, and that if it fails at that then it will probably fail long term. Somewhere along the line everyone seems to want to run a business to extract as much wealth as possible for the shareholders and the c suite and everything else is an afterthought.

Again a publicly traded company’s number one goal is to enrich their owners that is behind every decision. I’m not saying that a company can’t chose to pay its employees more or provide more for their customers, they absolutely can, but only if doing so accomplishes their only reason for existing (making money for shareholders.). Where this system has truly become perverted is the focus on quarterly earnings at the expense of long term profits. Most of these cost cutting moves are almost exclusively aimed at this perversion. That’s the talk that needs to happen.

Totally agree with you there. The markets tend to favor growth forever, which isn't actually possible, and they totally disregard any kind of reset or change in direction that will likely lead to long-term profit, stability or growth. And that seems to be basically every company that I end up having some equity in.

TylerWS:

An executive could cut $0.05 from every dollar going to hourly workers and pocket $0.01, thereby saving money while still increasing executive pay at the expense of the front line people.

That's a total strawman. They "could" do anything, but that isn't the argument being made. The argument is that front line worker wages come at the expense of executive pay, and the two are not related.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The Bernie Bro obsession with scapegoating the rich is only marginally less worse than the other side's obsession with scapegoating brown people. While there are certainly problems inherent to our overall socioeconomic system, they can be addressed with regulation. You know, the thing that both sides are guilty of rolling back for the last four decades.

That’s a rather simplistic take. Let’s just fix it with regulation, well why haven’t we? Could it be that the mega rich don’t want that, could it be that the mega rich own the politicians and government? Sounds like the real issue isn’t regulation, it’s the rich.

I'm a Bernie guy, however, I also think there are some very rich people who do not add to the problem. I always tell people not to look to their Right or Left, but look up to find out the culprit to our country's inequality. But I don't mean all of them at the top are the problem. (I think a few past CoasterBuzz conversations changed my mind.)

However, most, if not all of them, had to pull shenanigans to get where they are, (or their ancestors). Some of those shenanigans should be regulated. The biggest problem is allowing those with money to pretty much bribe our leaders. If the leaders aren't corrupt when they are elected, the system will no doubt corrupt them while they are there. If necessary, grooming or blackmail will do the trick.

(Something something about Trump that I deleted to make sure I didn't get off topic.)

TheMillenniumRider:

Let’s just fix it with regulation, well why haven’t we?

Because, as I said, our elected folks have been in to deregulation for decades now. Several decades of chipping away at Glass-Steagall before repealing it entirely convoluted banking and investment that arguably led to the mortgage crisis. Deregulation has made it easier to do literally toxic things to the environment, and metaphorically toxic things to all manners of industry and finance. And as usual, it's a uniquely American problem, because the EU and other nations manage to pull of capitalism in a way that doesn't suck for half of the population.

It's not that it can't be fixed, it's that a willfully ignorant electorate doesn't want to empower the people who want to fix it.

Can we do the five why’s thing? We suck at RCA as a country. Look at healthcare, look at obesity, look at regulation, look at politicians, look at climate change, find the reason why we aren’t fixing it.

I disagree with willfully ignorant, I used to think that same way, but I have shifted some of that focus, the population is constantly bombarded with propaganda and blatantly wrong information, this isn’t just a social media thing, but a media as a whole thing. It takes legitimate work, and not just a quick search, to weed out all of the garbage and narrow down the mountain of **** the media puts out, to the actual truth. Can I put the blame solely on the population for that?

The same people that own the media, own the politicians, own the orange dumbass in the white house, own the products we buy, own the services we use. That is a problem, but those owners are not about to let the politicians regulate them out of their current position of control, so who is the real problem here?

Edit: Also, something else that occurred to me, something I have not been able to prove or deny, or am even sure of it happened, but if it did completely nullify the voting populations control over anything. There were rumblings some time ago about the orange dumbass rigging the election results, then the orange dumbass himself has basically said that Musk has altered the outcome of voting machines. Has anyone checked on this I don’t know. But if said this occurred than the population is powerless.