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NY Post
New York Post
8 Feb 2024


NextImg:‘Victimized by Barbenheimer’: Brooklyn movie theater workers to unionize after box office phenomenon

Workers at a Brooklyn movie theater have announced their plan to unionize after they say they were “victimized by Barbenheimer” this past summer, putting in grueling hours to keep up with the box office phenomenon.

Approximately 100 full and part-time employees at Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park, including wait staff, line cooks, bartenders, porters and dishwashers, signed onto the bargaining unit, which was organized with United Auto Workers Local 2179, their union wrote on X on Tuesday.

“We have faced countless issues concerning unsafe working conditions, unfair treatment and inequitable wages, exacerbated by the whirlwind phenomena of Barbenheimer,” the union wrote in a statement.

“These problems are not new, though it has become clear that coming together as a workforce is the only way our concerns will be heard and taken seriously,” they continued.

Workers at the independent dine-in theater said that Barbenheimer was the biggest opening weekend in the cinema’s 12 years of business — a deluge that became too taxing on most staff, who already felt overwhelmed by the theater’s lackluster post-COVID protocols.

“It was a really tumultuous time,” Alana Liu Moskowitz, a server at Nitehawk Prospect Park, told Jacobin. “A lot of people were overworked, and a physical altercation happened in the kitchen because we were so understaffed.”

When staff voiced concerns about their workload, management chastised their approach, according to Moskowitz, who said she was told she was passed over for a promotion because her bosses felt she could no longer handle herself under pressure after she expressed her concerns publicly.

After hearing that two Alamo Drafthouse Cinema locations in New York voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2179, Moskowitz went to one of the theaters to ask them for their union rep’s contact information.

“I said, ‘We’ve also been victimized by Barbenheimer,'” she recalled telling the worker at the theater’s box office.

Nitehawk’s union on Tuesday delivered a demand letter to management, listing scheduling, managerial accountability and disciplinary protections as priorities. Union members are also asking for fair wages and benefits, as starting pay for servers is $10.65 before tips and only full-time employees are eligible for health insurance.

Management declined to voluntarily recognize the union Tuesday, prompting members to file union-authorization cards with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The group says they have a supermajority support for a union, estimating that around 70 percent of the theater’s 100-plus workers have signed union cards.

Nitehawk Cinema’s Williamsburg location is an independent body and not part of the union.

The Post has reached out to the Nitehawk Cinema Workers Union for comment.

Nitehawk Cinema did not immediately return The Post’s request for comment.