Low Attendance Prompts Knott’s Wage Freeze : Tourism: The theme park sees no improvement after a devastating year of recession, bad weekend weather and Los Angeles riots.
Knott’s Berry Farm has frozen the wages of its 3,000 employees because of projections of continued poor attendance, officials said Monday.
The attraction, a Buena Park landmark since the 1930s, informed its workers in meetings and a subsequent letter that, for an indefinite time, no raises will be granted. The wage freeze, the first in recent memory, took effect Sunday and applies to all employees, including top management.
“The entire leisure-time industry has been hard hit” by the recession, Knott’s spokesman Stuart Zanville said. “We think there are going to be unprecedented challenges in the next year.”
The wage freeze follows the layoff of about 30 workers at Knott’s after one of the slowest summers in years for Southern California tourism. Knott’s officials blamed the economy for the Sept. 15 layoff but would not elaborate on how much attendance was down.
Although Disneyland had a so-so summer on the strength of attendance by Southern Californians, it too laid off at least 17 mid-level managers recently in a cost-cutting move.
Unlike Disneyland, however, Knott’s does not have a unionized rank-and-file work force and therefore is not restricted by labor contracts. The park’s salaried employees, most of them supervisors and managers, usually receive pay raises in March based on performance. Hourly employees, except for a number whose salaries are determined by performance appraisals in November, receive step-in-grade increases annually on their anniversary dates. A third non-salaried group, most of them backstage workers, also would have received word this month about the amount of their annual pay raises, Zanville said.
The minimum pay rate at Knott’s Berry Farm is $4.58 a hour. Like most theme parks, the attraction hires hundreds of students and other temporary employees during the peak summer and holiday periods, when attendance picks up.
Zanville said no other cost-cutting measures, such as reducing operating hours or closing for the winter, are being contemplated.
Overall, 1992 has been a disastrous year for Los Angeles and Orange County theme parks. The early part of the year was literally an attendance washout because of a series of Pacific storms that seemed to hit on weekends, when Knott’s and other theme parks count on big crowds.
Then in April came the Los Angeles riots, which cast a pall over local tourism--and made it particularly difficult to attract foreign tour groups. For a park like Knott’s, which expects an equal mix of tourists and local visitors, the effect was devastating. Not even the new Indian Trails crafts and food village could make up for the decline in attendance.
Disneyland, by contrast, appears to have had success with its “Fantasmic!” water and light show, which it trumpeted with a grand opening and a publicity tour of western cities. However, the famed park said that it, too, was hurt by the sharp drop in number of tourists.
The only park that reported strong attendance was Sea World in San Diego, which said it captured some business from vacationers who otherwise would have gone to Los Angeles and Orange County parks.
