Unions are sweeping across the city's movie theaters

On a recent Tuesday night, the hottest show at the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Brooklyn wasn’t Bong Joon-ho’s new sci-fi flick “Mickey 17” or the family-friendly “Paddington in Peru.” It was arguably the two dozen Alamo workers on strike outside, their voices extending a couple blocks down the Fulton Street strip. 

“Hey hey, ho ho, don’t go to the Alamo,” the group chanted, marching in a circle late into the evening. “Hey hey, ho ho, corporate greed has got to go.” 

NYC Alamo United, represented by United Auto Workers Local 2179, went on strike Feb. 21 in response to layoffs at the dine-in theater chain. But the union’s individual campaign is also emblematic of a labor movement sweeping across New York cinemas. 

Since 2020, workers at seven movie theaters — Film at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, Cinema Village, Film Forum, Alamo locations in Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn and Nitehawk Cinema’s Prospect Park branch — have unionized with either UAW Local 2179 or UAW Local 2110.

The locals are inspiring one another to fight for livable wages, more staff and increased safety standards. Workers believe this movement will continue gaining steam across New York’s set of young, left-leaning service employees, perhaps upending the industry in ways management is unaccustomed to. 

Roughly 300 combined workers at the two Alamo theaters first voted to form unions in 2023, galvanized by understaffing and health and safety challenges, said Anthony Squitire, 26, a server at the Brooklyn location and a union bargaining committee member.

“It’s constantly understaffed,” Squitire noted, stepping away from Tuesday’s picket line. “Everyone's constantly stretched thin.” 

At Nitehawk, similar concerns over safety and staffing came to a head during the blockbuster “Barbenheimer” week of July 2023. As management enjoyed a moviegoing renaissance, workers were overworked and underpaid, said Ben Sepinuck, a runner at the labyrinthine dine-in cinema in Park Slope. 

“The theater is making so much money, but the employees aren't really seeing that,” Sepinuck, 26, remembered. “Someone brought up the idea of bonuses in a staff meeting, and they literally laughed at us.”

He and his colleagues voted 51-41 to form Nitehawk Workers Union the following year, and they announced the election results through a feature in the left-wing magazine Jacobin.

Neither Nitehawk nor Alamo Drafthouse officials responded to requests for comment.

A new organizing lineage

These twenty-somethings have turned to organized labor at a time when union approval rates are at their highest point since the 1960s. And while movie theaters may not be a factory or an Amazon warehouse, workers in the arts see themselves as part of a new union lineage. 

“I think young, you know, working people feel like they've been screwed over,” said Brandon Mancilla, director of UAW’s Region 9A, which covers the New York locals. “We thought it was our duty, right, as a labor union to actually support workers who, regardless of what industry they come out of, are interested, fired up and want to win a union.” 

Combine that frustration over working conditions with the political milieu of the New York arts scene, and you get a potent mix of pro-labor sentiment. 

New types of young workers are becoming aware of unionization, said Terri Gerstein, the director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative, who credited Amazon and Starbucks workers for building momentum in the city. “My sense is there’s a broader consciousness,” she noted. 

Greater investment in workers hasn’t been an easy sell, though, even in an industry known as a bastion of lefty politics. Domestic box office revenues last year dropped by $2.6 billion, or nearly 24 percent, below pre-Covid levels in 2024, and modest projections for 2025 spurred the recent layoffs at Alamo, which is owned by Sony. Management at Alamo and Nitehawk both tried to thwart the union effort, workers say. 

Squitire, however, doesn’t see precarious finances as the type of leverage that management may believe. “I think that the idea that you can get to pre-Covid profit levels is a fantasy,” he said. “A million people died. A lot of people are permanently disabled. A lot of people don't go out anymore.”

The spread of unionization is in part about pushing back against the perceived excesses of an entertainment industry reliant on low-wage hourly work — or at least ensuring employees share the spoils. 

There’s evidence these efforts are paying off. UAW 2110 secured contracts at Film at Lincoln Center, Film Forum and Anthology Film Archives. And Squitire said striking workers at Alamo enjoyed a surprisingly productive bargaining session earlier this month as they continue to put pressure on the company for a first collective bargaining agreement. 

Success by Alamo staff in Brooklyn could provide yet more motivation for workers elsewhere. Employees at the Alamo location in Staten Island are already organizing, Mancilla said. And conditions at non-union theaters around New York are poor, Sepunick said, adding that he's heard murmurs of potential union activity. 

But these politically charged, class-conscious workers are quick to move the conversation beyond just movie theaters. Cinemas in New York are merely a “microcosm of this new labor movement,” said Sepunick, who argued that young people have spearheaded a rise in class solidarity across industries, which he expects to continue.  

Squitire agrees. “Everyone is realizing, like, ‘oh no, unions aren't just about auto workers, and it's not just about factories, and it's not just some relic from the ‘30s,’” he said. “Like, my job is bad, and a union would help me have a better job.”