Dispatches From The Picket Lines: Transportation Workers Rally With Striking Actors At NBCU In Manhattan

This is Day 83 of the SAG-AFTRA strike. 

The language was salty but the mood was upbeat at a union rally in Midtown Manhattan by striking actors and their supporters from the 150,000-member Transportation Workers Union.

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With talks between the actors union and the production studios paused until Wednesday, the crowd at SAG-AFTRA’s solidarity picket with the TWU filled two lanes of the street outside NBCUniversal headquarters and made a sometimes NSFW din that could be heard for blocks.

Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, one of the rally speakers, dropped an F-bomb in remarks calling for all working Americans to receive a livable wage and health care. “And since our corrupt Congress won’t give that to us, we got a f*ckin’ union,” he said to cheers.

But it was TWU chief John Samuelson who really let fly, railing at “p*ick bosses” in a pugilistic speech that compared contract negotiations to fist fighting.

“And this is how you win a fight,” Samuelson said. “You keep throwing punches viciously, relentlessly, endlessly until you land one that decks the boss. That’s how you do it.”

SAG-AFTRA leaders in New York called off their usual daily pickets at three other locations to boost turnout at a rally that was attended by actors, writers, stagehands and rank-and-file TWU members — a workforce ranging from flight attendants and bus drivers to New York’s Citi Bike ride-share maintenance crews.

With the writers strike over and the actors strike in its 83rd day, SAG-AFTRA’s New York local executive director, Rebecca Damon, told the crowd, “I would much rather our staff was visiting you on a film set.” But the strike would continue, Damon said, “until we have the deal — a deal that SAG-AFTRA members deserve.”

On the podium with Damon were actors including Stephen Lang, Jill Hennessy, Megan Boone, Kathleen Chalfant and Bill Irwin. Lang took a turn at the microphone and welcomed “all you makers of good trouble,” a phrase popularized by the late Georgia congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. He also congratulated the Writers Guild for its “great success” in winning a contract after 148 days on strike.

“Well done, scribes,” Lang said, adding, “It’s our turn at the table now, and we want to get back to work.”

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