The end of the year-long industrial dispute at Brixton’s Ritzy Cinema has turned out to be the worst Pyrrhic victory for its workforce: they’ve got the London Living Wage of £8.80 but only at the cost of 20 out of the 93 staff losing their jobs. The union that represents cinema staff and backed them has called the announcement by Picturehouse cinemas — which owns the Ritzy — “a kick in the teeth”.

It’s a lot worse than that: more like a kick in the balls. You might’ve thought bringing in “union bashers” and riding roughshod over workers was something confined to dinosaur industries in the 1980s, but it seems that such behaviours are still going strong in the plush, popcorn-smelling darkness where we go to forget about our own daily economic woes and bask in the light from the silver screen.

That’s what makes the Ritzy story quite so appalling: its genre-busting plotline. I well remember the Picturehouse cinemas when they started up: like the Screens on the Green and the Hill that came before them, these were intended to be hip venues, showing arthouse cinema to a young and diverse crowd. The ambience of the Picturehouse cinemas is designed to make the punters feel as if they’re part of a big happy, raggedy family of enthusiasts, all keen on frothy coffee, flapjacks and the intense screen presence of Michael Fassbender. The reality is that since the chain was swallowed by the mighty Cineworld, this image has simply been a selling-point to be ruthlessly exploited in the pursuit of higher profits.

Cineworld is the largest cinema chain in Europe, with revenues in excess of £400 million; you might’ve thought it was in the interests of its board and shareholders to keep things sweet in Brixton. After all, if the punters wake up and smell the crap coffee of corporate greed, perhaps we won’t be so keen on contributing to those revenues. I say “we” because up until recently I was a regular visitor to both the Ritzy and the Clapham Picturehouse. Any business that shafts its workforce so egregiously is one worth boycotting, but it’s especially galling when it’s one that purveys the sort of culture that aims, in part, to call those very perverted mercenary values into question.

There used to be a concept in our society of “cultural capital”, the idea that a value could be assigned to such things as music, literature and film distinct from their mere monetary exchange value. No more does any of this obtain: instead businesses such as Picturehouse cynically use a semblance of cultural capital as a form of marketing, while taking the money and running.

If I seriously believed that the vast Cineworld chain would go under if it paid all its existing London employees the London Living Wage, I might have a scintilla of sympathy for their position, but I don’t. The truth is that the bean-counters are trying to cut costs and boost profits by attacking their own employees, employees who often take this part-time employment precisely because they themselves are aspirant purveyors of cultural capital — wannabe musicians, writers, actors and film-makers.

Enough is enough: until the Picturehouse management resile from these redundancies I shan’t be darkening their darkness. I suggest that any Standard readers who really care about London’s cinematic culture do the same.