New York City’s annual Labor Day Parade is typically a time to celebrate the labor movement in the city that helped kick it off — but this year’s event came amid a months-long strike by writers and performers that shows no signs of ending soon.
Thousands of union workers from across professions marched up Fifth Avenue Saturday morning in the country’s oldest Labor Day tradition. This year’s parade grand marshal was Nancy Hagans, president of the New York Nurses Association, which led a successful strike to improve staffing ratios at Montefiore and Mount Sinai hospitals in January.
But their allies in the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild are still entrenched in a months-long work stoppage where many say the future of their industry hangs in the balance.
“Without us, [studio executives] would not have jobs. There would be no content for them to produce. So it’s ridiculous for them to stick their heads in the sand,” said Christine Bruno, a SAG/AFTRA member who was at the parade. “We’re workers. We deserve a fair wage. We deserve protections.”
Actors and writers say they’re facing an existential crisis as streaming services have upended the entertainment industry’s business model. Also at issue is the increased reliance on artificial intelligence and computer generated imagery in producing television shows and movies — technology that some fear could supplant human performers.
“We absolutely do not deserve for our images and our likenesses to be used in perpetuity without fair compensation,” Bruno said.
SAG-AFTRA member Christine Bruno who participated in the Saturday march.
Shannon Haddock is a stage performer who belongs to the Actors’ Equity Association. While that union is not on strike, she said she wanted to show solidarity with her comrades in SAG-AFTRA and the WGA.
She evoked the nation’s reliance on entertainment during the thick of the COVID pandemic, when most of the U.S. was on lockdown and had little else to do but watch TV.
“I think we all need to stand in solidarity with them because that was what got us through,” Haddock said. “People think entertainment is just some fluffy thing that we really don’t need. We really couldn’t have done without it when we were suffering through the pandemic.”
The annual parade stepped off at 10 a.m. following a Labor Mass Saturday morning at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Union members marched up Fifth Avenue from 44th Street to the grandstand at 64th Street.
New York City is believed to have had the first ever Labor Parade — before there was a national holiday — on September 5, 1882 when thousands of tradespeople took an unsanctioned day off to demand better pay and shorter hours, among other things. They marched from City Hall to an uptown park where they threw an enormous picnic.
Labor Day was declared a national holiday by President Grover Cleveland in 1894.
New York Public Radio has a contract with SAG-AFTRA, but our staff belongs to a different branch than the actors and is not involved in either strike.
