Workers at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Bring a Union to Brooklyn

On September 29, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s Downtown Brooklyn theater successfully voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW), becoming the first unionized Alamo theater in the country. Since this is the most profitable location among the company’s 39 theaters, and with workers at Alamo’s Lower Manhattan location scheduled to have their own union election next week, the victory in Brooklyn is potentially the beginning of a wave of unionizing at Alamo. As the workers push forward to secure a fair contract, it is worth considering the ways in which their union drive represents a larger trend in the labor movement: the coming together of “culture workers” — those employed in culturally oriented institutions such as museums and universities and entertainment outlets — with blue-collar laborers.

Alamo Drafthouse began in 1997 with a single theater in Austin, Texas, and the novel idea of serving food and drink to patrons watching movies, before expanding across the country over the next two decades. The New York City area hosts theaters in four locations: Downtown Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Staten Island, and Yonkers. Billing itself as a hub of community and counterculture, Alamo features seat-side service offering appetizers, entrees, cocktails, and an array of draft beers. And the theater chain takes pride in its eccentric programming: a mix of new releases, classics, and avant-garde films. When I visited in early September, a Kubrick film was playing in one theater with the newest Marvel movie showing in the next, and workers in the theater across the hall were cleaning up to prepare for the showing of an obscure body horror flick from the 1970s. Each location’s decor is specially curated for its market and accompanied by a themed bar to entice cinephiles to fraternize; this attracts film buffs not only as customers but also as employees.

Many of the workers who led the organizing effort in Brooklyn majored in film in college and use their time off to audition for roles or to work on their screenplays. They largely find themselves in front-of-house positions, such as concierge or server, and work alongside those in the back-of-house positions, the kitchen and janitorial staff. Because the former group is disproportionately white, queer, and college-educated and the latter made up mostly of people of color and migrants without degrees, cultural tensions threatened to upend solidarity and destroy the workers’ chances of joining a union. Underlying these demographic contrasts are differences in the functioning of the workplace itself: Front-of-house positions are tipped while back-of-house are not, and non-competitive wages for the latter led to higher turnover. The ability to overcome the rift between these workers would make or break the campaign.

“Barbenheimer was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Last year, a handful of front-of-house workers and one back-of-house employee came together and reached out to UAW Local 2179, which also represents New York City’s AMC theaters and the Strand Book Store, to set the groundwork for a union campaign. Nationally, the UAW has seen success in navigating the divide between culture workers and those in the service and manufacturing industries. In the past, these two groups were seen as having separate interests. Culture workers, artists or writers or academics, typically worked in competition with each other, limiting their exposure to union politics, and it is not unusual for blue-collar workers to perceive them as more aligned with the manager class. More recently, however, culture workers, along with wide swaths of the overall workforce, have suffered from so-called “gigification,” in which they struggle to find full-time employment and reliable sources of income. This has pushed them to be open to more radical workplace politics, such as forming unions and developing alliances with other workers.

Last year, 48,000 UAW-unionized graduate-student workers across the University of California system made history by participating in the largest strike U.S. academia has ever seen. At the same time, and on the opposite coast, New School adjunct workers, also with the UAW, broke their own record by staging the longest-running adjunct strike in American history. The commonality of these two strands of the broader workforce can be seen in two large strikes right now, UAW’s auto worker strike against Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors and SAG-AFTRA’s strike against some of the world’s largest film production companies. Because workers in both of these groups are experiencing economic precarity and uncertainty about the future of their industries, culture workers are becoming just as active in pushing back against corporate greed as their service and manufacturing counterparts.

At Alamo, a busy summer encouraged back-of-house and front-of-house workers to come together. With the meme-fueled “Barbenheimer” mania, moviegoers packed theaters to see Barbie and Oppenheimer as a doubleheader. Additional workers were quickly onboarded across the chain to accommodate the busiest month in years, but even with the new hires, workers from the concierge desk to the kitchen staff, servers, cleaners, and bartenders felt like they were working much harder than usual without any extra benefits. As Ella Hill, a back-of-house bartender, tells the Village Voice, “Barbenheimer was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

In July, workers started signing union-authorization cards. The return to business-as-usual after the summer blockbusters meant that Alamo was now overstaffed, and management reduced hours for positions across the board. The workers who were collecting signatures quickly gathered cards from approximately three-quarters of the roughly 190 workers. Nearly two-thirds of back-of-house workers joined with most of the front-of-house employees in submitting cards, signaling to the organizing committee that they had a solid chance of overcoming any lingering skepticism from their fellow workers.

More than a year after the first workers reached out to the UAW, and despite the chaos of floods in Brooklyn during the voting process, Alamo workers won union representation with 74% of the vote.

The workers who spoke with the Voice shared concerns commonly held by laborers across the service industry, such as unpredictable schedules without enough hours, lack of cross-training and opportunities for advancement, and high turnover. Several back-of-house workers also reported a summertime fruit fly infestation that management was late to solve, as well as problems with mold in the ice machine. (A spokesperson for Alamo Drafthouse did not respond to a request for comment.)

In coming forward with their concerns, many workers noted that Alamo’s progressive stance had led them to believe that the company would be more responsive to their complaints. Alamo has gone to great lengths to align itself with liberal social values, hosting Black History Month activities and a Queer Film Theory 101 series and collecting donations for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention nonprofit, during Pride Month festivities. When asked how Alamo’s public image connects with what the workers see, Jordan Baruch, a concierge, tells the Voice, “They don’t live up to their values with how they treat their workers.” Will Bobrowski, a representative from the UAW, tells the Voice in an email that along with the theater chain’s reputation, which attracts young, left-leaning workers who are ready to unionize, “Alamo’s branding combined with being a consumer-facing business means that they are particularly vulnerable to media criticism, both traditional & social.” As in recent union drives at Starbucks and Amazon, progressive posturing during Pride Month and around Black Lives Matter is butting up against these companies’ anti-union politics. And like in those union drives, workers at Alamo Drafthouse knew that these contradictions would help them in their union campaign.

The day before voting began, CEO Michael Kustermann and Founder and Executive Chairman Tim League met with workers in a last-ditch effort to derail the union drive. One worker, who wishes to remain anonymous, tells the Voice that League expressed concerns about what a union would bring to the workplace by casting doubt on the UAW’s ability to straddle the manufacturing and service industries. This source reported that the workers in that meeting pushed back by pointing out how little progress management had made in solving workers’ complaints in the past, and how it was now all “too little too late.”

Voting began the next day, on September 28. Hill tells the Voice that a decent turnout on the first day was a hopeful sign, but on the second day of voting torrential downpours across the city flooded several parts of Brooklyn. Flood waters disrupted public transit and pushed Governor Hochul to declare a state of emergency. Alamo Drafthouse decided to close the Downtown Brooklyn and Staten Island locations because of the hazardous weather, and workers worried that these conditions would negatively affect the vote. Some inquired about rescheduling, but it was too late; the vote had to continue.

Despite the chaos, more than a year after the first workers reached out to the UAW, Alamo workers won union representation with 74% of the vote — 83 “yes” votes to 29 “no.” The next day, a dozen or so workers who’d led the union effort gathered at their go-to bar, on Hoyt Street, to celebrate their success. Some were already thinking about the next steps: securing a contract at their theater, assisting their Lower Manhattan colleagues in the final days of their own union election, and building connections with workers at Alamo locations across the country.

The now-unionized workers at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse proved the possibility of bridging the divide between culture and blue-collar workers. It is not just a theoretical proposition for the broader labor movement: To succeed on the ground, workers must overcome their differences, realizing that they are all experiencing increasing economic instability, and that only by coming together in a real, practical sense can they make true gains within a working-class movement. With this victory for workers in Brooklyn, we might be witnessing yet another instance of union organizing rippling through a national chain. ❖

Jackson Todd is studying the effects of technology on labor organizing and social movements. His work has been published in the New York Daily News and People’s World.