Strikers slap Wall Street
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In New York, strikers from WGA East chose Wall Street –- at least as close as they could get –- for today’s picketing. Their message, according to union official Ann B. Toback, was that while big media companies tell the investment community that new media is a growing profit source for them, they tell writers that there isn’t yet any revenue to share with them.
The picket line was set up at the edge of Battery Park, a subway stop away from Wall Street, because the union couldn’t get a permit to march at the iconic bronze sculpture of a rampant bull, close to the New York Stock Exchange. They planned to conduct leafleting at lunchtime near the NYSE.
Actor-writers Michael Imperioli (“The Sopranos”) and Tina Fey (“30 Rock”), playwright Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) and screenwriter Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton,” the Jason Bourne series) were among about 80 picketers on the line a little before noon on an overcast morning.
The picketers had to compete with the racket of a jackhammer wielded by a nearby street-repair crew. Sample sign: “We can’t BEAR studio BULL.”
The giant pink inflatable pig, on loan from the Laborers Union International and looking a little worse for wear after several days of strike duty, sagged slightly against a nearby subway entrance.
-- Thomas S. Mulligan