Broadway Corporations like Disney Make Millions as Stagehands Strike to Save Homes, Jobs

[marmar]

from the Wip, via AlterNet:



Broadway Corporations like Disney Make Millions as Stagehands Strike to Save Homes, Jobs

By Nancy Van Ness, The Wip. Posted November 20, 2007.

While the commercial media obsess about tourists who can't see The Grinch, striking stagehands struggle to have their voices heard.




I cross 42nd Street and walk up Times Square. It is a cold, windy, rainy day but I had promised to come. I continue past the army recruiting center and the police headquarters; police are out in force. I notice the New York Times building on the east side of the Square at 43rd. The huge Clear Channel signs, some of the most prominent of those that are bright day and night cast a glow that makes the square seem like daytime 24 hours a day while flashing images. Across the way are the Disney buildings and Reuters. I walk over to the Broadway side of the Square, go up to 44th and then to Shubert Alley and over to 45th, giving high fives and thumbs up to striking stage hands as they parade up and down between police barriers in front of the theaters.

I stop briefly to speak with a woman as bundled up as I was against the weather, just to encourage her. Standing in front of the theater's huge sign advertising A Chorus Line, she says they just want to hang on to what they have.

I head to a theater where, ironically, the show is about RCA's theft of the rights to the invention of television from its inventor. It is never comfortable or convenient to man the picket lines and today is really nasty, but I had told the stage hands there I would be back today, so here I am.

I have come to see if I can get a true picture of what is going on. The endless media reports about the family from Seattle or somewhere else who had come to see The Grinch and how disappointed the children were because the stage hands had shut the show down had become intolerable to me.

Where is the story about the children whose parent is a stage hand, who will lose their house if the proposed 38% cut in jobs and pay is forced on the union? Where are our values? How can anyone's vacation and a holiday show be more important than hard working middle class families who risk losing their income and their homes? ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/68440/