PORTLAND, Ore. — The Tool concert at the Moda Center was just getting underway last Wednesday when the NBA announced that it was suspending its season amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The news sent shockwaves throughout the sports world, but also through the arena, where hundreds of part-time employees were just beginning their shifts for the night. Many of those employees had expected to staff the Portland Trail Blazers’ nine remaining home games and had shifts scheduled around other events at the Moda Center as well.
Now, the NBA was on pause. By the end of the week, every upcoming event at the Moda Center would be canceled or postponed.
Inside the break room on Wednesday night, employees staffing the concert were on edge as they wondered how long the shutdown would last and when they would see their next paychecks.
“I felt empty inside,” said Jamie Faue, who works as a guest services attendant at the Moda Center and Providence Park. “I felt like my whole life had been taken away from me.”
The NBA’s decision to suspend play could cost its teams tens of millions of dollars, but the employees who may be hit the hardest during the shutdown are the arena workers — from the ushers to the box office staff to the security guards to the janitors — who are paid hourly to staff games and events.
Many NBA teams and players already have announced plans to help support those workers during the league’s hiatus. Kevin Love, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Blake Griffin, Zion Williamson and Rudy Gobert have all pledged to donate money to help pay the salaries of arena workers, while the Golden State Warriors and the Charlotte Hornets are among the teams that have announced plans to provide financial assistance to their part-time employees during the league’s hiatus.
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The Blazers are putting together a plan of their own to help support their part-time employees, but details are still being worked out.
Part-time employees received an email last week informing them that a plan was in the works, but they have yet to be given a timeline for when that plan will be rolled out. The part-time employees expect to be paid as usual on Wednesday for the previous pay period, but questions remain as to how the employees will be paid in their next paychecks on April 1.
Many of the part-time employees who staff Blazers games and events at the Moda Center also work at Providence Park around Timbers and Thorns games. Following the NBA’s lead, Major League Soccer announced last week that it was suspending its season for at least 30 days, amid the coronavirus outbreak. The National Women’s Soccer League has canceled all preseason games as well. On the heels of those announcements, Timbers and Thorns owner Merritt Paulson released a statement Sunday saying that the organization would be creating a fund to support its several hundred part-time employees.
“At our clubs, we are very concerned about our most at-risk employees and will soon be announcing a fund to ensure our hourly workers continue to get paid regardless of event cancellations,” Paulson said in the statement.
Still, anxiety remains high among many of those part-time employees as they wait to see what the plans from the two teams will look like. Many of the part-time employees rely on the income they receive from staffing events at the Moda Center and Providence Park outside of the scheduled NBA, MLS and NWSL games. Other employees, such as servers at the Moda Center, rely on tips to supplement their income.
Faue, who has been searching for a full-time job for the last two years since graduating from Portland State University with a Mathematics degree, generally works 15-30 hours a week staffing events at the Moda Center and Providence Park. Those jobs are her only source of income, outside of a small amount of money that her parents give her to help her pay the $1,352 per month rent on a one-bedroom apartment in the Lloyd District.
While she has enough money saved up to pay her bills over the next 30 days, Faue, 25, said that it would be difficult to afford groceries, let alone her rent, if she wasn’t receiving a regular paycheck by the end of April.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Sunday that events or gatherings larger than 50 people be canceled for the next two months and the NBA is reportedly preparing for a mid-to-late June return as a best-case scenario.
If the leagues remain on pause by the end of April and Faue can’t find a full-time job or pay her bills with the financial assistance provided in the plans being put together by the Blazers and Timbers, she said she would likely have to move back in with her parents in the Bay Area.
“For me, the scariest part is not knowing when everything is going to come back, like how long am I going to be out of a job?” Faue said. “I went to Safeway and bought about a week’s worth of food, but not really knowing how much money I’ll have to work with after Wednesday when we get paid, it might be hard to even get food.”
Some employees that work part-time at the Moda Center and Providence Park hold separate full-time jobs, which should enable them to navigate the coming weeks more easily. Still, one employee in ticketing said that he would still lose 25-35 percent of his monthly income during the shutdown, unless the Blazers’ plan makes up for his losses.
Dean Westwood, a Premium Services concierge at the Moda Center, said that the money he earns from his work at the Moda Center is what makes “life livable, not just survivable.”
Still, Westwood said he will be able to get by while the NBA remains on hiatus because he receives disability payments due to a spinal cord injury. He is a lot more concerned about friends and colleagues, who rely fully on their work at the Moda Center to pay their bills and don’t have a safety net to fall back on.
“Is there going to be enough money for not just the roof over my head, but the nutrition that I need?” Westwood said. “I have a service dog that has to be fed and taken care of. I have disability-related costs that don’t go away just because the paycheck is going away. So, I have concerns about those things, but I wouldn’t say it’s dire for me. Not as dire as a lot of people out there. I’m really genuinely concerned for the people that I work with whose work at the Moda Center is it. There are seniors that work there who use this kind of money in all likelihood to pay for their copays on medications or whatever else they may need on their fixed incomes.”
Beyond the financial implications, part-time employees at the Moda Center and Providence Park are also coming to grips with how quickly the world has changed in just a few days.
Sports leagues and entities across the country and globe have been suspended indefinitely over the last week, the White House has advised the public to avoid groups of more than 10 and to stay away from bars and restaurants and people, especially those over 65, are being urged to stay home. On Monday, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced that she plans to ban gatherings of more than 25 people for at least a month and restrict restaurants to serving takeout and delivery food only.
Even as they deal with the financial implications of games and events at the Moda Center and Providence Park being postponed, the part-time employees who spoke to The Oregonian/OregonLive all said that the NBA and MLS had made the right call by suspending their seasons amid the pandemic.
“I’m proud of the NBA for taking the actions that they did,” Westwood said. “I think it was unquestionably the right decision. It doesn’t change the economic realities around it, but the consequences of not doing the right thing are a lot worse.”
This article was originally published by The Oregonian/OregonLive, one of more than a dozen news organizations throughout the state sharing their coverage of the novel coronavirus outbreak to help inform Oregonians about this evolving heath issue.