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Every night, after the last show at the AMC Theater in Santa Monica, Maria Alvarez came to work.
She and her husband had a key to let in. It was after midnight and the building was empty. Together, they cleaned up the seven auditoriums. They vacuumed the carpets and mopped the floors. They cleaned the bathrooms and replenished the toilet paper. They polished the escalators and cleaned the glbad concession cases.
They finished after sunrise. On weekends, when theaters were particularly dirty, they stayed up until 9:30 am Alvarez worked seven days a week. There was no leave, no sick leave, no vacation.
"The day my son died, I asked for the day and they did not want to give it to me," she said through tears at a hearing about childbirth in 2017.
Alvarez cleaned the theaters for two and a half years. She was paid $ 300 a week, about $ 5 an hour.
Filmmakers often talk about the magic that can only happen in a movie theater. While ticket sales stalled and Netflix took off, the industry became increasingly protective of the "theatrical experience".
But the maintenance of this experience depends on workers like Alvarez, who are clearly underpaid, overworked and easily usable.
The big chains – AMC, Regal Entertainment and Cinemark – no longer rely on young ushers to prevent the soil from remaining sticky. Instead, they turned to a large migrant labor force, often hired through layers of subcontractors. This arrangement makes it almost impossible for concierges to make a living.
Alvarez was injured at work and a doctor recommended a lighter workload. When she made this request in April 2015, she was fired. The following year, she filed a complaint with the California Labor Commission for unpaid wages, including overtime. The Hearing Officer awarded him $ 80,000 in back pay and penalties. But Alvarez was not able to collect. She did not work directly for AMC or its cleaning company, ACS Enterprises, which shielded them from liability. Instead, she was working for a couple – Alfredo Dominguez and Caritina Diaz – who did not even show up at the hearing.
Even Dominguez and Diaz did not consider her a real employee. In their minds, she was a contractor of a contractor of AMC Theaters. AMC and ACS have sent a lawyer to defend his salary claim. In the end, the companies agreed to pay him $ 3,500.
In the last eight months, Variety investigated complaints of salaries from movie theater custodians across the country, reviewed clbad actions, State Labor Board records, and US Department of Labor investigations. A clear trend has emerged: AMC and other theater chains are reducing their costs by relying on cleaning and cleaning companies using outsourced labor. These janitors generally have no wage or job protection and work on one of the lowest levels of the US labor market.
It is customary for janitors to work all night. Some workers said Variety that they had seen parents bring their young children to work, leaving them sleeping on the floor or in the theater seats. To get the job done faster, some janitors use leaf blowers to clear popcorn and aisle wrappers. But the fans leave dust on the speakers and screens and most theaters have banned them. Instead, concierges usually go line by line with backpack vacuums. They wipe salt from the seats and soda stains on the cupholders.
"It looks so much like farm workers. They literally walk behind the scenes as farm workers do, "said Brandt Milstein, a lawyer who brought a clbad action in Colorado on behalf of the Cinemark concierges.
Theater channels are largely immune to legal repercussions. Since they do not directly employ janitors, they are generally excluded from clbad action pay cases. But some members of the janitorial sector say that channels are fully aware of what is happening and are ultimately responsible.
"Theater companies are very cheap," says a manager of a cleaning and maintenance company who did not want to be identified to protect his business relationships. "A lot of these guys, they do not care if you use slave work."
Based in Leawood, Kansas, AMC is the largest theater chain in the country with 637 locations. According to interviews and documents obtained by Variety, AMC employed more than 100 companies to provide concierge services. But several years ago, the company adopted a "national partnership model," which was eventually reduced to two national suppliers: ACS, based in Pomona, California, and KBM, based in Hendersonville , in Tennessee.
The chain has leveraged its size and pricing power to save money. Brian Mullady was the director of procurement at AMC at the time. On his LinkedIn resume, he says consolidation has saved the company $ 8 million a year, or 26 percent of cleaning and maintenance costs.
Regal, the second largest US channel with 558 sites, has attempted a similar consolidation but found that service providers could not properly handle their employees, said Christopher Blevins, the company's former vice president of operations. Instead, Regal has 15 District Managers who typically look for competitive offers for cleaning and maintenance.
From an email obtained by Variety, AMC does not bid. Instead, he tells his national contractors what he will pay according to an internal formula. Mullady, who did not respond to requests for comment, sent the email in 2016.
"We have a template in place that sets prices for all of our contracted sites," he wrote. "We do not go through a bidding process, all prices are determined by AMC."
CMA spokesman Ryan Noonan said in a statement that cleaning and maintenance service providers are contractually bound to abide by federal and state labor laws.
In response to other questions, he adds, "I think your story is not about AMC, but ACS, which works with several theater operators."
ACS was founded in 2003 by brothers Jose and Raul Alvarado. According to his LinkedIn profile, Jose Alvarado started in the company as an engineer for AMC theaters. ACS provides concierges as well as a wide range of engineering services. According to the company's website, it works with 20 smaller channels, including Pacific Theaters, Arclight and Regency, in addition to the three major channels.
ACS has not responded to requests for comment, nor has Regal or Cinemark. Its competitors believe that ACS serves the majority of CMA sites nationwide. According to Jose Nuñez, director of operations of the company, the company claims to have only 16 to 18 employees. Concierges are all considered subcontractors.
"When a theater chain approaches us for a concierge service, we will pbad it on to an entrepreneur," said Nuñez during the hearing before the Alvarez Labor Commission. "We will be this intermediary between the necessary work and an entrepreneur capable of providing it."
Buperto Brigido has been a CAS concierge for 11 years. He worked seven days a week, eight to ten hours a day, cleaning himself a theater of 12 rooms. He was paid between $ 700 and $ 900 every two weeks.
At one point, he asked the owner Raul Alvarado for a salary increase.
"He said that AMC was not paying more," Brigido said. Variety, adding that his requests for sick leave and sick leave were also refused. "He said that AMC was paying nothing of what I was talking about."
Rob Winters, the owner of Winters Janitorial, later known as Coast to Coast, was the pioneer of this business model. Founded in 1996, the company was the first to sign contracts with theaters nationwide.
"Before me, everything was done internally with the children," he said. Variety.
Winters was based in Kansas City and worked for AMC, Regal and other channels. According to Doug Schlueter, the company's vice-president of sales, the company had between 500 and 600 sites, including hotels and restaurants. Others have heard that Winters has about 400 theaters. Winters claim that the figure was much lower, about 100.
The rivals say that Winters managed to outsource. By eliminating the costs of worker compensation and payroll taxes, he could have lowered prices. Like ACS, he saw himself as an intermediary, connecting theaters to janitors without using them.
"I did not hire anyone directly," he says. "I do not know what they did, other than cleaning or not. I would keep my percentage and that's what I ran.
Winters has been the subject of repeated investigations by the United States Department of Labor. In 2013, a federal investigator met with Winters at his office in Arlington, Texas, and informed him that the government thought the janitors were employees and that he owed him $ 286,000. Pay arrears.
"When asked why they wrongly clbadified these employees as independent contractors, Mr. Winters responded that it was because of the way their competitors operate," wrote a DOL investigator. Winters argued that there was no direct supervision of the workers. He refused to pay.
In 2014, the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, a syndicate-based watchdog group in Los Angeles, launched a survey of Winters practices. The survey resulted in a quote of 1.8 million US dollars for unpaid wages to 43 employees. Winters is not allowed to do business in California.
In August 2016, he declared bankruptcy in Texas. His employees have never been paid.
Winters still cleans theaters, specializing in carpets, although he's no longer a major player. It was not an investigation that led him. He claims that he was forced into bankruptcy by competition from companies relying on undocumented workers.
"There were people working for a salary that I could not compete with," he says. "When you try to play directly, it makes things difficult."
At the time of the federal investigation, the Ministry of Labor was also examining other cleaning and cleaning companies that worked in theaters, including ACS; Simply Ogden, Utah; and One Stop Personal Services in Frisco, Texas.
Even when the investigators found violations, the penalties were minor. In the theaters of the Rio Grande Valley in 2017, investigators found that One Stop had not paid $ 240,379 to 19 janitors. The company denied the allegations and refused to pay.
In 2011, a survey of a subcontractor of ACS revealed that the company owed $ 65,987 in salary arrears to 32 employees. Many employees reported that they actually worked for ACS, although ACS denied it. The investigators found that ACS was a common employer and they agreed to make sure the contractor would pay.
Investigators also examined ACS contractors in New York and the Pacific Northwest, although none of these investigations were successful.
In 2018, Buperto Brigido and three other concierges filed a clbad action against AMC and ACS in Los Angeles. The lawsuit, which is pending, alleges that ACS and AMC are common employers and potentially owe millions of dollars in salary arrears to underpaid concierges across California.
Some janitorial companies think that outsourcing is not worth the legal risks. APCS365, of Northbrook, Illinois, has gone from a business model to direct hiring of all janitors.
"It was not an easy change," said CEO Marina Kohen, noting that costs had increased by 25 percent. "But you get a better responsibility."
In the retail sector, advocates lobbied companies such as Target and Best Buy to adopt a "responsible subcontractor" policy, which imposes protections on workers. Some argue that theater chains should adopt a similar policy.
After Barr Winters was expelled from California, ACS took over many of his accounts, including L.A. Live's Regal Theater in downtown Los Angeles. The working conditions have remained substantially the same, explains Georgina Hernandez, who was a janitor there. She worked seven days a week, sometimes 10 to 11 hours a day, and she was paid $ 400 a week. She left after two years and took office cleaning work.
"I do not know what hell looks like, but I think it would be like that," she says. Variety. "Sometimes I cried because my feet could not stand it anymore. My back could not stand it anymore. I did not know how to finish the job I had to do. "
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