“The war continues and there’s gonna be more fights, but we got this victory” – Interview with NYC Alamo Drafthouse Workers

Volunteers with The Worker in New York City interviewed several workers at Alamo Drafthouse, a movie theater and dining chain, a week after workers won their demand of reinstating laid off workers and ended their 2-month strike on April 14. The interview has been edited for length.

What demands were won?

“Every laid off worker is being offered their job back. Their PTO [paid time off] is being restored, as well as sick pay, insurance benefits, and seniority. There are certain aspects of it that I could only wish we got, such as back pay. The company is also restoring jobs across the country. After Colorado’s one week strike over there, they promised a couple of jobs back, and they never actually reinstated those jobs two months later. And now they’re actually reaching out to all the different locations to offer jobs back and to restore PTO in the other locations. Now that they’ve made this deal with us, they have to do it across the board to make it seem like it was something they were always going to do when we know they weren’t.”

How did the methods correspond to your victory?

“We were picketing for about three or four weeks, until we had a meeting with Alamo again in March. After that meeting fell through, there was no future date set to meet with the company. With an indefinite amount of time where we had no end day for the strike anymore, we had to start escalating. One of the things we did was picketing outside of where they drop off the food. The truck drivers know not to cross the picket line, so we managed to halt a lot of their food deliveries. Even though the Alamo was still operating with minimal employees, they weren’t getting food and they weren’t getting drinks. If things were to have persisted longer, we would have continued hitting them in their wallets more and more in these little ways until they wouldn’t have been able to take it anymore.”

“For about the entirety of the two months, fairly consistently, we were outside of one location at least every single day. Mostly it was a lot of picketing and flyering daily at either one of the venues or both of the venues or Sony was one of the places that we also did. We did a march from Sony to Washington Square Park and that definitely reached a different group of people that we hadn’t been reaching out to. One of the ways in which we escalated was going to our CEO’s home. We marched around the neighborhood and passed out about like 200 handwritten postcards that just let people know what we were doing there and let them know that their neighbor had laid off this number of people and was violating labor laws. And a lot of people in the neighborhood actually seemed receptive and most of them seemed relatively supportive.”

What role did working class unity play and how can it be developed further?

“I’d say the biggest thing is just anyone who stood in solidarity and did not cross the picket line. That’s the primary thing. There’s a lot of people who donated money and a lot of other people who came to join on the picket line which are immensely important and helpful to keep a movement going and to make you feel like you’re not alone in it. But the direct impact of people not going and not crossing the picket line is what hurt the business more than anything. And also obviously them not having employees to fully operate.”

“It comes to recognizing that we’re given so many of these divisions, like race, sex, and all these other different things, but we have to have class solidarity, have that ability to recognize you’re being screwed over by the same people, regardless of your sex or race, and they’re trying to make us blame each other and point the finger here and there. This is the messaging they’re giving to different groups of people to make us blame the wrong things and have wrong targets so that we don’t focus on who the actual enemy is. That’s how we lose each other, and by dismantling that, that’s how we can be unified.”

How do you think your victory will impact other workers? What do you want them to take away from it?

“What I hope is that people see this and realize that we all have the right to fight for safety and fair working conditions. I also hope it makes people less afraid to go on strike and to fight for what they feel is right. I think sometimes people want to be too prepared and have everything planned out before they do it. The reality is, is no matter how much you plan for something like this, there are always going to be things thrown your way that you don’t expect, which you just have to kind of go with and figure out, adjust the game plan and keep going. There is a lot to be said for preparedness, but don’t wait too long. Sometimes you just have to make the call and do what needs to be done for the better for everyone. I hope people just realize it’s not as scary as it seems. You just have to stick together and stand in solidarity.”

“We’re in a point of capitalism where we’re expected to spend more money without being paid more money, and luxuries are becoming more and more plentiful while less accessible. We’re fighting for our ability to live and have goods. They’re literally trying to remove joy from lower class people because lower class people aren’t seen as people, they’re seen as machines. But what’s the upper class going to benefit when people are dead? I don’t understand what their end goal is, because at the end of the day, if you have such a miserable place, eventually, something’s going to break. Eventually, you get a revolution. Eventually, you get violence. Surely, they would recognize that.”

Union leadership often stop strikes before workers win their demands by recommending workers to vote to stop striking. Did you encounter this in this struggle?

“At no point did I feel like they were doing anything aside from supporting us to go on if that’s what we chose to do. The end of the strike basically was that they came to the table with a deal, and our bargaining committee and union reps came forward with this proposal, they recommended it to the entire unit, and we had a vote, and 89% voted to end the strike and accept the terms of the deal, and 11% voted to keep going and to try to get a different deal. The union reps were very certain that some of the other demands that we were asking for would have taken a lot more pressure that we potentially would not have been able to maintain if we were to continue.”

“It didn’t seem like they ever really dwindled on what we were fighting for. With the strike ending recently though, I guess it is kind of like what you just mentioned because they were like we recommend everyone to vote on this deal to end the strike, this is the first deal we feel comfortable with. Even though we could have fought for more stuff, such as the backpay, or even just like a raise for wages, there is that aspect of realism to understand this is what we’re going to get, and this is a big deal. Yes, we can fight for more, and the strike could go on longer. At the end of the day, we can still vote no. And had we voted no, then leadership would have still pressed forward with us and said, all right, onward. But with them saying this is a good deal, we thought we can take this. The war continues and there’s gonna be more fights but we got this one, we got this victory.”

How can labor struggles and the Palestine solidarity movement be combined?

“It all comes down to certain people in certain positions of power constantly trying to benefit themselves. The motivations come from the same people from the same places, by the same capital. And it comes down to dehumanizing us for the benefit of upper-class wealth and privilege that ultimately is still self-defeating, is still self-destroying. Like, these governments aren’t ever going to win. That’s the end. Eventually, they will have to leave, because of natural human intervention to eventually stand up for themselves. Again, that’s what I was saying about revolution. Eventually, there is an end point where government collapses and people die. And something new has to be built again. And we can only hope that [what] we’ll rebuild again is something better.”

Image: Alamo workers picketing at the beginning of their strike, NYC Alamo United social media

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