For 15 hours a day, seven days a week, Ruth Rivas worked as a housekeeper at the , a four-star hotel in Telluride, she says.
She cleaned hotel rooms and bathrooms, washed sheets and towels. Then, in the afternoon, she scrubbed the lobby and various employee areas and public spaces at the hotel.
All of her work occurred in the same complex and was directed by hotel management, she alleged in a proposed class action lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Miguel County District Court.
But every 15 days, Rivas and her fellow housekeepers received two checks. One came from Telluride Ski & Golf, which owns the hotel resort as well as the world-famous ski area down the road. The other check came from Csaba Albas, a recruiter and subcontractor, the complaint alleges.
This arrangement allows Telluride Ski & Golf, the named plaintiff in the lawsuit, to avoid paying all the overtime that Rivas and her colleagues were owed under Colorado wage and hour laws, she alleged in the legal filing.
The lawsuit does not say how much Rivas believes she is owed in unpaid overtime.
“The reason that we have this case is because I’m not just speaking for myself, I’m speaking on behalf of all these employees living with these injustices,” Rivas said in an interview in Spanish through an interpreter.
A Telluride Ski & Golf representative said the company had not seen the lawsuit and could not offer comment.
Despite being paid by two separate entities, housekeepers at the resort were effectively controlled by Telluride Ski & Golf, the lawsuit alleges. The company had the power to hire and fire workers, supervised and controlled their work schedules, determined their rate and method of pay, and maintained employment records.
mandates employers must pay 1.5 times the regular rate for any hours worked over 12 in a day, 12 consecutively or 40 in a week.
But Telluride Ski & Golf has skirted this law by splitting housekeepers’ work into two different jobs, the lawsuit states.
“Absolutely, it’s not fair,” Rivas said. “We have seen people who are U.S. citizens treated differently than Latino workers.”
This arrangement is pervasive across Colorado’s ski industry, said David Seligman, executive director of , a nonprofit organization that represents low-wage workers, including Rivas.
“This is about control without responsibility,” he said. “These ski resorts contract with fly-by-night middlemen who can exploit these workers, exercise control over them and create this layer of separation that allows them to exploit the workers without accountability.”
Subcontracting itself is not illegal, Seligman said, but “it very often correlates with exploitative practices.”
The employment model alleged in the lawsuit is known as “” and is also common in the construction and agricultural fields, experts say.
Companies use contractors and subcontractors to shed their role as direct employers and the responsibilities that come along with it. This might include paid sick leave, overtime pay, health benefits, vacation or workers’ compensation.
Rivas, meanwhile, said she was fired from her job in January 2023 and blacklisted after bringing these concerns to management.
“It seems like in this place, immigrants were not allowed to be sick or tired or have the right to make a complaint or say anything,” she said.
