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

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

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?

We are not going to see or hear that story for the simple reason that the owners of the media are the owners of Broadway, both its shows and the real estate; they just don't want us to know it. Few Americans are aware of some basic facts:

The largest grossing entity on Broadway is Disney, whose three Broadway shows the week of November 4, 2007, the last week before the strike, grossed a total of $2,205,016. Disney owns ABC.

The highest grossing show that week, which has remained at the top, earning over a million dollars a week for many weeks, was Wicked, with $1,335,757. It is produced by Universal Pictures, a subsidiary of the same company that owns NBC.

(Data about the receipts of top shows can be found here.)

The New York Times is an official partner of the League of Theater Owners and Producers, the same entity that is trying to break the stagehands' union. Its final offer would reduce their jobs and pay by 38%. (The cynicism of The Times is so blatant it's ludicrous. On November 15th they declared that the current French transit strike was "provoked" by France's president, whereas they place the blame for the darkening of Broadway on the workers. The Times has no financial interest in French transit; it does in Broadway shows and real estate.)

The Union, Local One of the Theatrical Stage Employees Union, has been negotiating with the League since July and has been working without a contract for some time. They report that the League is actually making further demands, not fewer, as negotiations have lurched forward. They were finally forced to either endorse a contract that would hurt its members badly or go out on strike.

It is not in the interest of the New York Times, ABC, NBC, Reuters, or other corporate media to tell us the facts about this situation. Big corporations own Broadway and the media. They do not want to the public to know the real story and as press, they have the means of keeping people in the dark. Even people who may have known that Disney owns ABC or that the Times is a big investor in the area find it very hard to connect all the dots. And the corporate media wants to keep it that way.

See more stories tagged with: labor, workplace, broadway

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »