Super pay needed to staff Super Bowl events

Upward of 150 private events and parties are set to kick off on Super Bowl week, and organizers are facing a battle with an unexpected foe: the estimated 2.4 percent unemployment rate in Minneapolis.

Event organizers looking for cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders and security personnel are having difficulty filling open positions.

“It’s absolutely crazy,” said Jerome Gerber, vice president of Award Staffing, which has turned down hundreds of staffing requests. “The companies that were coming in to manage the Super Bowl and manage all these events didn’t have a proper understanding of the pay rates they were going to need to operate within the Twin Cities marketplace.”

The organizers of one large downtown event called Gerber and asked him to help them find 1,000 workers. The pay? $11 per hour.

“We told them no. It wasn’t worth the effort,” Gerber said. “We’ve turned down every job that wasn’t paying a minimum of $16 an hour simply because of the competition that week.”

Gerber’s being choosy, he said, because workers signing up for a shortterm gig will be quick to abandon the assignment if they’re offered more by another event. And, he said, they will be offered more as the Super Bowl draws near.

“Into the next 10 days, those that don’t have staff are going to start panicking and start increasing pay rates,” Gerber said.