Every night, after the last show ended at the AMC theater in Santa Monica, Maria Alvarez arrived at work.
She and her husband had a key to let themselves in. It was after midnight, and the building was empty. Together, they cleaned all seven auditoriums. They vacuumed the carpets and mopped the floors. They cleaned the bathrooms and restocked the toilet paper. They polished the escalators and scrubbed the glass concession cases.
They finished after sunrise. On weekends, when the theaters were especially dirty, they stayed later, until 9:30 a.m. Alvarez worked seven days a week. There were no days off, no sick days, no holidays.
“The day my son passed away, I asked for the day, and they did not want to give it to me,” she said through tears during a labor hearing in 2017.
Alvarez cleaned theaters for two and a half years. She was paid $300 a week — or about $5 an hour.
The major chains — AMC, Regal Entertainment and Cinemark — no longer rely on teenage ushers to keep the floors from getting sticky. Instead, they have turned to a vast immigrant workforce, often hired through layers of subcontractors. That arrangement makes it almost impossible for janitors to make a living wage.
Alvarez got hurt on the job, and a doctor recommended a lighter workload. When she made that request in April 2015, she was fired. The following year, she filed a California Labor Commission claim for unpaid wages, including overtime. The hearing officer awarded her $80,000 in back pay and penalties. But Alvarez could not collect. She did not work directly for AMC or its janitorial contractor, ACS Enterprises, which shielded them from liability. Instead, she worked for a couple — Alfredo Dominguez and Caritina Diaz — who had not even shown up to the hearing.
Even Dominguez and Diaz didn’t consider her an actual employee. In their minds, she was a contractor of a contractor of a contractor of AMC Theatres. AMC and ACS did send an attorney to fight her wage claim. In the end, the companies agreed to pay her $3,500 to go away.
There is so much more in the full article which can be read here:Over the last eight months, Variety has investigated wage complaints from movie theater janitors across the country, reviewing class-action lawsuits, state labor commission records and investigations by the U.S. Department of Labor. A clear pattern emerged: AMC and other theater chains keep their costs down by relying on janitorial contractors that use subcontracted labor. Those janitors typically have no wage or job protections, toiling on one of the lowest rungs of the U.S. labor market.
It is customary for janitors to work all night long. Some workers told Variety that they had seen parents bring their young children to work, letting them sleep on the floor or in the theater seats. To make the job go faster, some janitors use leaf blowers to clear popcorn and wrappers out of the aisles. But the blowers leave dust on the speakers and screens, and most theaters have banned them. Instead, janitors typically go row by row with backpack vacuums. They wipe salt off the seats and clean soda stains out of the cup holders.
“This is so much like agricultural workers. They’re literally walking down rows the way agricultural workers do,” says Brandt Milstein, an attorney who filed a class-action suit in Colorado on behalf of Cinemark janitors.
The theater chains are largely immune from legal repercussions. Because they do not directly employ janitors, they are typically excluded from class-action wage cases. But some in the janitorial business say the chains are fully aware of what’s going on and are ultimately responsible.
https://variety.com/2019/biz/features/movie-theater-janitor-exploitation-1203170717/
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