Nitehawk Cinema staff move to unionize

Workers at Nitehawk Cinema in Park Slope are looking to unionize with the United Auto Workers, the latest group of workers at a city dine-in cinema organizing since the crowds drawn by the simultaneous premieres of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” last summer overwhelmed theaters. 

A group of about 20 workers on Tuesday delivered a demand letter to one of Nitehawk's co-owners outlining workers' intent to unionize, their reasons for doing so and a request for voluntary recognition. Later in the day, management told staff through a lawyer that they wouldn’t voluntarily recognize the union, workers told The Chief on Wednesday, and the employees have since turned in their union authorization cards to the NLRB. 

Over 100 line cooks, servers, runners, porters and bartenders are in the proposed bargaining unit and 73 have signed authorization cards, workers said. They’re hoping to join UAW Local 2179, which represents more than 1,000 workers across New York and New Jersey in nearly 30 units. 

“We’re feeling really excited and we’re feeling really optimistic," Alana Liu-Moskowitz, a server at Nitehawk and member of the Nitehawk Workers Union’s organizing committee said Wednesday. She explained that workers want increased pay, improved health-care benefits, better schedules and, crucially, the ability to hold management accountable and ensure that suggestions for changes workers feel are needed don’t fall on deaf ears. 

“We’ve tried going through all of the traditional avenues that management has forwarded to us including going to all staff meetings and raising our concerns,” Liu-Moskowitz said. “We tried one-on one-meetings, we tried emails and none of those things have worked so that’s why we're unionizing.” 

Ben Sepinuck, the lead runner at Nitehawk who’s on the union’s organizing committee, told The Chief that “management loves to communicate that they want to hear from us, but the things that they hear from us never result in any action to address any of our problems and, if anything, have been met with punitive measures.” 

Nitehawk did not immediately return a request for comment. There’s a second, smaller branch of the dine-in theater in Williamsburg as well. 

‘Barbenheimer’ aftereffects  

Enthusiasm for the simultaneous releases of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer" last July built up online for months beforehand given the two hopeful blockbusters’ vastly contrasting themes. The weekend the films came out, fans dressed up in outfits that corresponded to each films’ aesthetics and flooded movie theaters across the country; dine-in theaters in New York City were no exception. 

“Barbenheimer as a phenomenon was really an inciting incident for a lot of this,” Sepinuck said. “It highlighted a lot of issues that are present in this industry in the way that these companies treat their employees."  

Nitehawk Cinema workers in front of the Park Slope theater. The workers say that management has been slow to respond to concerns. Nitehawk Workers Union

Nitehawk Workers Union

But Nitehawk Prospect Park was understaffed and not equipped to handle the flood of moviegoers that weekend — the biggest opening weekend in the theater’s 12-year existence — which “pushed all of us to our limits,” Liu-Moskowitz said. After an all-staff meeting following a shift failed to assuage workers’ concerns, a group of employees met in Prospect Park to begin organizing. 

Sabrina Leira, a member of the unit’s organizing committee and the lead server at Nitehawk, said that the stress of Barbenheimer weekend revealed many inconsistencies with how their workplace operated and argued that issues highlighted that weekend haven’t abated. “It doesn’t start and end with Barbenheimer; it’s continuing to happen,” she said. 

That weekend also proved a turning point for more than 150 workers at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Downtown Brooklyn who, less than a month later, filed to unionize with UAW Local 2179. Another group of workers at an Alamo location in lower Manhattan followed suit in September and 55 workers at a Staten Island location filed to join a different UAW local in December.  

Alamo served over 304,000 guests at its 39 locations nationwide on Barbenheimer weekend, according to the company. 

“We started union talks before Alamo went public but as soon as we saw that it drummed up conversation among the workers here and it was an inspiring thing and helped us to get people excited about unionizing at our own workplace,” Liu-Moskowitz said. The Nitehawk workers got organizing help and advice from workers from Alamo’s Brooklyn location, from The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee and from unionized workers at GrowNYC and the pizza restaurant Barboncino. 

‘Part of a much larger movement’ 

Will Bobrowski, second vice president with Local 2179, said workers at the first Alamo shop to unionize were drawn to the local because a couple employees at the theater had previously been members of the Local when they worked at Strand Book Store, where Bobrowski has worked for more than 20 years. He surmised that the overwhelmingly young workers at the city’s dine-in theaters have also been drawn to the UAW by the positive media coverage the union received during a massive autoworker strike last year and because of the union’s call for a cease-fire in the conflict in the Gaza Strip. 

“There are numerous driven people in this unit,” Bobrowski said of the Nitehawk Prospect Park workers. “We had union meetings every single week since August, except between Christmas and New Years.” 

The Nitehawk workers will vote in an election in the coming months on whether to join the UAW. Given that more than 70 percent of the bargaining unit have turned in union authorization cards, workers sense a union victory. 

"We wouldn’t have gone public if we didn’t feel really confident at this point, but it’s still been awesome just to see how smoothly things have been going and the reception that we're getting right now,” Sepinuck said. “We’re part of a much larger movement even outside of Nitehawk and we hope to keep paying this forward and keep pushing for better treatment of employees throughout the entire service industry."