Some seasonal employees at Yosemite National Park worked for as long as six weeks without pay this spring and summer as park supervisors scrambled to manage hiring amidst federal budget cuts, workers told NPR. The employees said they are now receiving hourly wages but have not been paid for the work they were asked to do as volunteers while they waited to be put on the federal payroll.
Some of the workers said they feel exploited.
"It's definitely taking advantage of people who love their jobs and don't want the park to suffer," said one of the employees, who said they volunteered for three weeks before being hired.
NPR spoke with four seasonal and two full-time workers employed by the National Park Service who described the situation. NPR has agreed not to publish the names of the employees because they are not permitted to speak publicly and feared retribution.
Yosemite depends on seasonal workers to perform a variety of jobs from May through October, when the park receives most of the more than 4 million visitors that typically enter the grounds. The national park, located near Mariposa, Calif., is one of the most visited in America.
At Yosemite, seasonal workers do "anything from campgrounds operations, to wilderness permitting for backpackers, to the seasonal interpretive rangers, seasonal maintenance staff," said Jesse Chakrin, the executive director of The Fund for People in Parks, a nonprofit that advocates for national parks. The National Park Service hires thousands of seasonal workers a year across America. More than 100 are typically hired annually at Yosemite early in the busy season, Chakrin said.
But 2025 was no typical year. On Feb. 14, 10 full time federal employees at Yosemite were fired when the federal government terminated about 1,000 newly hired employees throughout the National Park Service. In the weeks that followed, additional experienced workers left the park service voluntarily. Since January, the amount of permanent staff across the service has declined by 24%, according to data analyzed in July by the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit that defends parks.
Then, after staff were fired in February, some were hired back. That meant the park service's already straining Human Resources division had to take on additional work to bring those people into the workforce again, federal workers told NPR. Around late spring, when more visitors started entering the park and seasonal workers began arriving at Yosemite to start their jobs, Human Resources wasn't able to onboard all the seasonal staff, Yosemite employees said.
"We had the firing of probationary employees in February and then the rehiring, and this was a huge, huge burden on Human Resources to try to get people in and out," said Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, a nonprofit that supports workers at parks. "And seasonal hiring was delayed."
But Yosemite still needed seasonal workers. An April order from the Department of the Interior, the agency that oversees the National Park Service, said all parks should stay open as usual in 2025, with changes to operating hours requiring special approval.
Seasonal workers needed the jobs, too. Many count on their employment at the park to provide them with housing. Because some parts of Yosemite are located dozens of miles from the nearest city, accommodations at the park are typically offered to people who work there, for a fee.
"They're dependent upon their job to have a home," said Chakrin.
In other parks, seasonal employees weren't hired at all. As of July, only about 4,500 of the people expected to fill 8,000 seasonal positions across the park service were working in seasonal roles, according to the data from the National Parks Conservation Association. But in late April, supervisors at Yosemite started offering some of the prospective seasonal workers a different option. If they volunteered for at least 32 hours a week at the park, they could stay in Yosemite housing for free until the federal government was able to onboard and start paying them, emails reviewed by NPR reveal.
"My supervisors were emailing people week after week saying, 'Hey, the update is there's no updates and we understand you guys need housing and you're relying on this and we're relying on you. And we don't know what's going on, but one option is to volunteer,'" said one Yosemite worker.
NPR requested an interview with a representative at Yosemite and sent questions regarding how and when seasonal workers were hired this year. The park declined to answer the questions or speak with NPR.
"We are not conducting interviews about staffing levels," said the park's Public Affairs Officer, Scott Gediman.
Gediman recommended NPR email the National Park Service instead. No one at the service responded to NPR's questions or request for an interview.
But workers at Yosemite told NPR they estimate that more than 50 seasonal workers volunteered for the park service in Yosemite before they were paid later in the summer. Of the four people NPR spoke with who were asked to work for no pay until they could be onboarded, one declined and did not work at Yosemite this season. The other three agreed to volunteer and wait. The workers said they signed volunteer service agreements with the federal government, some of which NPR reviewed.
The three who volunteered said they were assigned a role in a different division than the one they had originally committed to work for. The park service prohibits seasonal employees from volunteering for positions "similar to their paid work" outside of the season. That sort of policy is to prevent the federal government from exploiting workers, the park service's reference manual indicates, and to ensure the park complies with federal labor laws.
"The NPS does not allow an NPS employee to serve as a volunteer in a manner that takes advantage of an employee's willingness to perform their paid work without pay," the manual states.
The federal government also assures people that they can expect competitive pay if they choose to work in public service. But seasonal workers said that's not what they received when they worked for free for weeks. Some believe the federal government did take advantage of them.
"We're here because we need housing," one said. "And there was this urgency to have a place to go, so we did it."
"Offensive" to work without pay, workers said
For weeks, before they started being paid by the park in June, the seasonal workers spent hundreds of volunteer hours doing tasks like educating visitors and maintaining trails, they told NPR.
While the employees said they were grateful to have a place to live and understood that their supervisors at Yosemite may not have had control over hiring delays at the federal level, they thought it was unfair not to be paid for their labor.
"The idea of volunteering for the job that we already don't get paid enough to do was offensive," said one of the workers.
A few weeks into the busy season, some prospective seasonal workers were hired and paid by The Great Basin Institute, a nonprofit that promotes conservation and has partnered with national parks on projects before.
"They reached out and said, 'Hey, we've got needs,'" said Peter Woodruff, the nonprofit's CEO, referring to staff at the park service. "So they turned to us for that support during a time of uncertainty."
The Institute paid fewer than 30 seasonal workers at Yosemite for a few weeks, said Woodruff. But not all seasonal workers were offered the opportunity. Of the three people NPR spoke with who volunteered, only one received payment from the Great Basin Institute in between volunteering and their employment with the federal government.
Another worker labored without pay for six weeks, from early May until the end of June, before they were onboarded, the employee told NPR. During that time, they stayed in a shared room owned by the federal government that was valued at under $500 a month, their housing agreement reviewed by NPR shows.
The park ultimately onboarded the three workers at different times, from early to late June. After they started being paid by the park, from that point forward, the workers said they earned between $19 and $23 an hour. But none were paid back for the weeks they volunteered, they said, and none were promised backpay later.
By asking volunteers to work in different jobs than the ones they were later paid to do, the park service may not have violated federal labor laws, said Kevin Owen, an employment lawyer who represents federal workers. Still, Owen said that the requests to volunteer could harm the park. Since experienced workers might be less likely to agree to work without pay, fewer of them may have accepted the proposal, he said.
"It will lead to either stories of long lines at national parks or stories of missing campers who can't be found when they otherwise should have been," Owen said.
Chakrin, the director of the parks nonprofit, said that parks are currently under strain and struggling with staffing across the West. But he has never heard of seasonal workers being asked to work without pay for weeks because a park couldn't onboard them on time.
"The unprecedented part that I have never seen is, in mass, having seasonals have onboarding dates that are delayed indefinitely and up to three pay periods," he said. "It's just a whole lot of a season when your season is six months long."
If you work for the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service or are otherwise involved with public lands and have information to share, please reach out to the reporter that investigated this story, Chiara Eisner. You can reach her through encrypted platforms by contacting her on signal at username: ceis.78 or by email at eisnerchiara@proton.me.
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