Working Class Street Theater: Ageless And In Action…
A scenes from last year’s Medicare Advantage “Die-In” outside City Hall Park. Photos by Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee have been unable to take away traditional Medicare from the municipal workers who’ve earned it because retirees keep beating them in court — and on the streets.
For over a year, municipal retirees in New York City have been holding rallies reminiscent of some of the most effective street theater actions since Mother Jones and the “March of the Mill Children in 1903.
They’ve held a…
*City Hall Die-In — where retirees denied for-profit healthcare where promptly sent to the Grim Reaper for a quick exit on Broadway;
Delivered a…
*Wall of Broken Hearts — some 1,800-strong to an obdurate Mayor Adams for Valentine’s Day;
Wished Eric Adams…
*A Healthy and Happy New Year — hoping he wouldn’t endanger theirs once he got into Gracie Mansion;
And had a great time…
*Haunting Hizzoner again this past Halloween just to let the mayor and city council know Medicare Advantage is still a “scam” and “scaring them to death.”
“We are members of all different municipal unions — we’re all unionists,” Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee [CROC] organizer Sarah Shapiro tells Work-Bites. “We’re all politically active; we’ve all been involved [in labor struggles]. We started going towards major political activism and what that meant besides emailing and phone calling and writing and stuff like that — was to get on the streets and rally.”
SPURRED INTO ACTION
It all started in the spring of 2021, at a time when retirees say they didn’t know city powerbrokers where “all sitting behind closed doors and deciding to move us all into a privatized Medicare Advantage plan.”
Steadfastly refusing to be forced into a privatized for-profit scheme they insist will ultimately cost more, delay care and deny services, municipal retirees started forming new groups including CROC and the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees in direct opposition to the Medicare Advantage push.
Fellow CROC organizer Martha Bordman says the street theater actions they’ve assembled so far have been informative and “create momentum.”
Julie Schwartzberg standing tall against efforts to push NYC retirees into privatized for-profit healthcare.
“It gets people riled up,” Bordman tells Work-Bites. “It gets people excited — it gets people to feel they’re not in this by themselves and that there are other people feeling the same way. This is about retirees who spent their lives working for the city getting their benefits taken away or changed.”
GETTING THE MESSAGE
When we last checked, NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams reported she and her colleagues were still “trying to get clarity” about the issue. But the street theater action retirees held outside City Hall on Oct. 27 seemed to clear up the matter for at least some members of the New York City Council.
“We must choose people over profit every day,” Councilmember Alexa Avilés [D-38th District] said at the “Monster Mash” rally. “Do we sell [retirees] out for a buck? Hell no, is what I say.”
Still, it’s not easy asking an elderly person with less than perfect health to climb into a Halloween costume in order to capture the attention of their elected officials.
As any union organizer will tell you, filling the streets with hundreds of enthusiastic people — and do it consistently — is no mean feat. The street theater actions New York City municipal retirees opposed to Medicare Advantage are doing are all the more remarkable because of the age and overall health of many of the committed trade unionists involved.
“Most of my retirees are not healthy retirees,” Marianne Pizzitola, president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees and Fire Department EMS Retirees Association, points out. “We keep trying to get them to do more events and they keep telling us they can’t come out or they’re afraid to come out. There’s a grave fear about taking a subway or sanding on a street corner in the city.”
And then there are those retirees who are simply too sick to advocate for themselves.
“We have to get some kind of attention,” Shapiro says. “We’re talking about serious matters — reading testimonials from seniors who are scared to death to undergo cancer treatments because someone is gonna change their insurance and they’re not gong to be able to see their doctors. We have people with Alzheimer’s — how are they supposed to deal with this? We believe in street activism.”
Union Made Street Theater
From the Paterson Silk Strike Pageant and Bread & Roses Strike of 1912 to modern-day battles involving the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and United Farm Workers — elements of street theater have been integral to some of the most important labor battles in U.S. history.
As mentioned above, legendary labor icon Mary Harris “Mother” Jones marched dozens of kids — some of them maimed in factory accidents — to President Teddy Roosevelt’s summer home on Long Island to protest the lack of child labor laws. Their actions included music, speeches and “skits.”
Today, with social media screens devouring so much of everyone’s attention, street theater actions like the ones New York City municipal retirees are conducting right now, may be more potent than ever.
Street theater actions can be fun — but they’re serious business.
“We’re in an age where our attention is being vied for at an unbelievable degree,” Barrie Cline, art instructor at the Harry Van Arsdale, Jr. School of Labor Studies in New York City, tells Work-Bites. “These actions make it more engaging for those in them — and more memorable and impactful for people on the street.”
“Empathy,” Cline adds, “is a little complicated with screens. Whereas, “Real bodies in action together create a more-than-the sum-of-the-parts feeling.”
In addition to also creating "multiple pressure points in a public dialogue,” Cline says street theater actions, because of their collaborative and engaging nature, can actually help to sustain and nurture vital labor campaigns and the people powering them.
“To some extant art can be sort of a Trojan horse,” Cline says. “You can create visuals and props and even sort of say, well, we’re just creating art here, and maybe people feel less afraid. People get excited when there is creativity involved and they can have a role in building something that’s impactful.”
The energy generated by these street theater actions have already proven infectious — drawing the participation of members from Plumbers Local 1, United Federation of Fire Officers [UFOA], NYC Laborers Local 924, Professional Staff Congress-CUNY and other unions.
The forces behind the Medicare Advantage push, however, are attempting to marginalize defiant municipal retirees — firefighters and law enforcement people among them — as nothing but a “small group of vocal dissidents” and a bunch of “hotheads.”
But it’s important to remember the old American Federation of Labor [AFL] wasn’t too crazy about the Bread and Roses Strike either.
“All of the people I work with are very committed unionists,” Bordman says. “They have always been big believers in unions and members of labor unions. We are not having fun being angry at our labor unions for this. We don’t want to say bad things about our unions. But right now, we have to say what’s going on. We just have to state the facts: we’re being thrown under the bus.”