A group of homeless people are still waiting to get paid after working for an event at the CN Centre last week.
The Discover Dinosaurs tour came through Prince George last weekend.
As many as 26 homeless people were picked up from two shelters in the city and promised $50 a day to work the event. Minimum wage for 8 hours of work is currently $82.
Graham Best is staying at the Ketso Yoh mens shelter downtown. He says they all worked 8 to 9 hour days. “I worked on the bouncy castle for a bit. I also did mini-golf for a bit, the robotic machine, the digging castle and helped with tear down.”
Norman Coles is also staying at Ketso Yoh. He says things got a bit weird when it became time to get paid on Monday. “She says, can you guys please leave because it’s a union shop and we are not supposed to be there loading the trucks. So I thought that was a bit suspicious. She then wanted the employees to walk out and away from the CN Centre to be picked up.”
Blue Star productions, the company behind the event, contracted the non-profit ‘Helping Hands’ employment agency out of Illinois to source employees for them in Prince George.
“We provide them with an opportunity for alternative staffing.” Director of Programming for Helping Hands, Ron Valle said “Instead of hiring people, and the money goes to people or whatever, the money that they would provide would go to programs in the United States and Canada.”
Valle says that the production company, Blue Star, pays them to acquire staff for their events. Helping Hands then takes a cut of Blue Star’s money to fund their programs while passing the rest onto the event staff.
“We were hoping that people would volunteer because they wanted to help out.” Valle said “But we do provide a stipend because we understand that people need to buy lunch for the day and get to and from… so it’s not a lot of money but it’s enough to pay for the expenses of volunteering.”
Helping Hands assured My PG Now that they will be paying the men, and that the cheques are being sent to the Ketso Yoh and ASAP shelters where the men are staying.
Blue Star Productions is a for-profit business out of Minnesota. A spokesperson for the company says that hiring local staff for their travelling events is a part of their business model, although they claim that paying homeless people below minimum wage is not common practice. They also called the men “volunteers who were given a donation”.
Both groups say “they understand” how it looks to be paying some of society’s most vulnerable people below minimum wage.
Blue Star says this is the first time they’ve heard of homeless people used to staff their events so extensively, while Helping Hands maintains that their programs help homeless and low income people across North America.
This all comes after negative comments on social media panned the event, calling it a “cash grab.” Similar negative reviews are peppered across the web originating from across the USA on websites such as Yelp.
The Discover Dinosaurs Tour will be in Vancouver this weekend. Staff members at the Ketso Yoh say they’ve called down to several of the shelters in lower mainland to fill them in on the situation.