A Union At Medieval Times? Indeed, M’Lord.
Employees at the chain's New Jersey castle have launched a union campaign aimed at improving pay and safety at a surprisingly dangerous job.
Working at the famous dinner-theater chain Medieval Times comes with some unique occupational hazards. For instance, sometimes a guest who has emptied one too many goblets of booze starts banging the Middle Ages-style plates and bowls together.
Clanging the heavy dinnerware can spook the horses in the arena, endangering the knights as they joust for the queen's honor. It often falls to the queen herself — a mic'd-up actor on a throne above the pit — or her chancellor, Lord Cedric, to gently admonish the overzealous crowd, all while keeping in character: Please, m'lord, don't bang the plates.
"You can hear it backstage sometimes, it's so loud," said Purnell Thompson, a stablehand at the Lyndhurst, New Jersey, location. "We've had people thrown off their horses from the horses getting spooked. There's only so much you can do to keep them under control at that point."
Safety concerns are a big reason Thompson and other Medieval Times employees in Lyndhurst are trying to form the chain's first union, workers told HuffPost. They have been organizing their location with the American Guild of Variety Artists, an AFL-CIO union that represents performers at theaters, theme parks and touring shows, including the Radio City Rockettes and entertainers at Disneyland.
The knights, squires, show cast and stablehands of Lyndhurst will vote July 15 on whether or not to unionize under an election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. Around 40 workers would be included in the union. (Food and administrative workers appear to be employed under a separate corporate entity and would not be part of the bargaining unit.)
HuffPost spoke to three workers supportive of the organizing effort, who said they want to be treated like the professional entertainers they are. They said the pay at Medieval Times tends to lag behind comparable industry work, with many performers starting around the New Jersey minimum wage of $13 per hour and working years before reaching $20. And they believe some workers end up with crucial tasks, such as handling horses, without sufficient training.
Every two-hour show at Medieval Times requires careful planning and rehearsal. The knights are essentially stuntmen, leaping from horses and smashing wooden lances on one another's shields as they joust. The show includes complex dressage movements, as well as a falconer who handles a bird as it flies through the arena over the crowd. Performers often do two and sometimes three shows a day.
"They treat it like a normal job, and it isn't," one worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said of the company. "Today [managers] will call us a sports team; tomorrow they'll call us a theater. But we are treated like a business, like a normal 9-to-5 job."
With limited security at the shows, performers are the ones left to enforce boundaries and police the crowd — including when guests reach out to touch the falcon as it flies overhead, endangering the bird and themselves. And workers say the rotating cast of queens is subjected to unwanted touching during pre- and post-show meet-and-greets with fans, especially with so many bachelor parties on the weekends.
"If you mix children, alcohol and animals, it can be a very interesting situation if you don't have enough eyes on it," explained another worker. "Not having enough event staff, that puts a lot of people at risk."
The employee recounted a well-known incident during a rowdy Saturday night show when a drunken woman in the crowd made her way up to the throne and tried to grab the microphone attached to the queen's face, requiring the queen to fend the woman off on her own. A police officer was in the castle on duty, the worker said, but he was trying to keep watch on the entire crowd.
The worker wants to see a greater security presence, especially on weekends.
"It feels like the customer experience so greatly outweighs not only our employee experience but our safety and our well-being," the employee said.
Thompson, 25, said he and his co-workers are passionate about their jobs and wound up at Medieval Times because they love their craft. He has spent much of his life around horses and helps tend to the two dozen at his castle, each with its own personality. Most guests don't understand the amount of preparation that goes into a show, he said.
Three issues he hopes the union can force the company to address are safety, pay and "respect."
"They treat a lot of the professionally trained actors like anybody can do this job," Thompson said. "They treat a lot of the stablehands like we're fully replaceable and they consider it an entry-level job. I've worked entry-level animal care jobs. This is not that. You can get hurt or die doing this."
