On Thursday the Vegas Golden Knights announced they will be assisting game day and arena staff for potential games missed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Team owner Bill Foley announced an organization-wide effort to assist part-time and on-call workers that are currently missing shifts. Together, they are pledging a minimum of $500,000 to these efforts, including a $100,000 donation from starting goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury.
You can read Foley’s entire statement here.
More, from the Golden Knights.The Golden Knights together will support arena hourly on-call staff that would normally work Vegas Golden Knights home games, including third-party vendors, service providers, food and beverage employees, retail associates, medical staff, event personnel, production and cleaning operations.
The Golden Knights will also support all their own part-time game night employees. This includes the entire VGK Cast and Crew - including in-arena hosts, PA announcer, Vegas Vivas!, Golden Belles, Knights Guard, Knight Line, the dj, The Golden Knight, music director, camera operators, control room crew, Battle Wagon driver, Villain and Watchman - and the drivers of the ice resurfacers. Vegas Golden Knights interns who work game days across all the VGK business teams will also be assisted by these efforts.
The Vegas Golden Knights Foundation 51/49 raffle staff will be supported as well.
This comes after the Columbus Blue Jackets announced on a plan on Monday to make sure their hourly and part-time game-day staff will continue to get paid for missed games during the league’s shutdown.From the Blue Jackets:
Game Day Staff
While the goal is at some point to finish the regular season and award the Stanley Cup, we understand the postponement of regularly scheduled hockey games directly impacts the livelihood of our valued part-time staff. To help alleviate this hardship, the Blue Jackets and CBJ Arena Management will pay hourly game day employees for shifts lost for all CBJ games they were scheduled to work (that do not take place) through the end of the NHL regular season.
Currently, our Human Resources Department is contacting those affected individuals to coordinate timely payment to alleviate their unexpected loss of income.
With these latest announcements, almost every team in the NHL has outlined at least some sort of plan to help compensate their hourly employees that will be missing shifts over the next couple of weeks (and perhaps longer). That could be either directly paying hourly shifts that are missed, or putting together some sort of a plan to help make sure they get compensated.
The Winnipeg Jets and Calgary Flames initially said they would only pay employees if games were not rescheduled, but both eventually changed their stance after intense public criticism.
The Buffalo Sabres are still holding to their stance that they will only pay when events are officially cancelled.
At this point the Boston Bruins are the only team that has not come forward with some sort of plan on what -- if anything -- they will do for their employees.
Bruins All-Star forward Brad Marchand did, however, pass along a GoFundMe page to help employees. As of now, there is no word from the organization itself.
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Adam Gretz is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @AGretz.