Fair Pay Feels Good In A Place Like This

Half an hour into the Nitehawk Workers Union’s winter rally, 50 or so people had gathered across the street from the Nitehawk Prospect Park Theater to chant, hold signs, and shiver on a Friday too cold for the season. Most of them were your usual labor supporters—members of the UAW and Teamsters Local 804 were there, as was Congressional candidate Brad Lander. But during one early speech, a man ran across the street and nervously asked me what was going on. After explaining that they were service workers at the theater, rallying for better conditions, he looked crestfallen. “I go there for the movies,” he said. “I didn’t know that anything was wrong.”

Nitehawk is an independent theater in a tony section of Brooklyn, the kind of cinema that screens both Hoppers and a series devoted to the works of women cinematographers. It also operates on the full-service food model: You sit down, place an order on a piece of paper, and, as you take in the film, a fried chicken sandwich and a drink appear at the personal table attached to your seat, brought by a server moving as silently and swiftly as possible. “As the business model goes, it’s a logical extension of what movie theaters have always done, which is make the majority of their money off of concessions,” said Ben Sepinuck, a member of the Nitehawk Workers Union organizing committee. And it makes some intuitive sense for an industry clamoring to get people in the theater: Sure, you can stream Frankenstein at home, but can you enjoy it while in a lay-back chair with popcorn and cocktails on demand?

Nitehawk workers began organizing at the Prospect Park location in the summer of 2023 (its sister location, a few neighborhoods away, isn’t unionized). “A lot of restaurants in Brooklyn were unionizing at the time,” Sepinuck said, and workers saw themselves in the larger labor movement in the service industry. Like in a restaurant, the servers at theaters like Nitehawk are responsible for greeting guests, taking orders, running food, and collecting checks. But unlike at a restaurant, they have to do this around an experience guests don’t want interrupted.