Landmark Theaters Employee Union

One year ago the Kendall Square Cinema staff voted 17-1 to join UFCW Local 791.  Today, we
still do not have a contract. However, with 65% of the staff involved in the vote still working at the Kendall, new employees taking part in the process, negotiations continuing at a regular pace,  plus our new drum-beating, song-singing, BFFs at the Shattuck …we’re still going strong.

Maybe if we had reached this point without support of patrons, local activist groups and all the well wishes from you all who read this site, or maybe if another Landmark hadn’t voted to join a union, we could be dismissed as just a bunch of disgruntled
ruffians and scalawags.

That’s not the case, give or take a scalawag.

Over the past three years, three Landmarks held union elections.  While we’ve all worked together, all three discussed unionizing before contacting each other. Theatres in Minneapolis, Cambridge and Berkeley are reacting to cultural shift taking place in the service industry.  We don’t live in a vacuum.   Look at Borders and Starbucks.  Check out what Chicago is doing.  And the current minimum wage increases being debated.

And to everyone else who has been asking about organizing, why not?  What do you have to loose?  Just a $7.00 an hour job that may or may not give you a raise, where you are an “at-will” employee who can be fired at the
drop of a hat (literally, they could fire you for dropping your hat there's nothing you can do about it).

Corporations wouldn’t pay over time if they didn’t have to, they
would insist that minimum wage would drive them out of business and they would contend
that only the delicate hands of children can perform this function or that.  There are exceptions, but even they are under
enormous pressure to keep wages as low as possible.  Costco has to explain
themselves to their shareholders for deviating from the status quo.

Unions have made work conditions better for all of us.  Now, many of the gains so many struggled to attain
are being chipped away. Big box stores, while a far cry from factory work, are still keeping people in poverty while
making ridiculous profits.

A year of meetings and conference calls and occasional
frustration are well worth the crash course in labor law and contract
negotiation, the many new friends made in the process, and the experience of adding
in a small way to our best chance of creating jobs that will actually allow
people to support themselves or maybe even go to a doctor.

It would also be nice to start paying the UFCW back for all their
time and work. I can’t stress enough how
much they have done for us and we have yet to pay them a cent in dues. 

Thanks all! 

“Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.
Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.”
  -  Eugene V. Debs