For those of you fearing the plight of movie theater employees, sleep easy now. Employees at Shattuck Cinemas in Berkekey are beginning the process of unionizing.

Workers at the downtown Shattuck Cinemas, owned by Landmark Theaters, who earn just above minimum wage with no health benefits, will have their say about whether they form a union.

The National Labor Relations Board has scheduled a vote for June 16, according to Harjit Singh Gill, organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World.

Twenty-two of the 28 workers petitioned the NLRB for the election.

Winning the vote “means the workers will be able to sit down at the negotiating table and make demands,” Gill said, noting that the right to form a union is just the beginning and that negotiating a contract will be the hard part.

I’m not sure where to begin with this one. For starters, I would hardly call working for a movie theater skilled labor, so replacement workers would be easy to come by. But visible protests could drive traffic from Shattuck Cinemas to the few other local theaters, and given the history of Berkeley to support organized labor, a strike could become a very costly endeavor for the theater.

The most interesting part about this is that Shattuck Cinemas is a part of Landmark Cinemas, a company renowned for its showings of independent, artistic, and restored classic films. It isn’t exactly the cash cow that AMC is. Landmark is also owned by Mark Cuban, but he has yet to comment on the matter.