How Movie Theaters Are Exploiting Their Janitors – Seriously, AMC, Regal, Cinemark, People boycotting Concessions.

Major chain companies across the United States have exploited immigrant workers for years, and in the new Variety article posted yesterday. Shows you the heartbreaking stories of such workers.

As someone who spent three summers working at an AMC and there were a few times where I was one of the last to leave during the theatre’s operating hours when I saw the cleaning crew. It’s been more than 10 years so the details are fuzzy, but from what I recall it’s definitely possible that they were immigrants. For what it’s worth they seemed to have uniforms (not AMC uniforms, or at least not like ours), but after reading the article that might not mean anything at all.

My naive college attending brain assumed they must have been paid pretty well to do the real cleaning overnight while we just did some basic sweeping and took the trash out. Pretty sad to read that that was almost certainly not the case.

Were also hearing stories of many managers of such retailers, backing up the Variety Article. Some sharing details like this one on Reddit “I was a manager for Regal for years, everything in here is 100% accurate. When it came to bidding for overnight janitorial work, it was a race to the bottom based on price. They would go with the sketchiest contractors imaginable that would use multiple layer of subcontractors who would bring in all manner of day laborers most of whom were probably not legally eligible to work in this country. They would absolutely bring their kids and have them help sweep, I would lock up some nights at 1am and be back to open for 9am and they’d still be there with the backpack vacuums and brooms. It was incredibly shady and in retrospect I feel bad for not reporting some of the stuff I saw.”

Stay tuned as more information comes out, as this is a developing story.