Dramatically escalating a bitter labor battle that has already brought Hollywood to a virtual standstill, thousands of striking film and television actors took to the streets Friday to fight for better pay and job protections in an industry that has been upended by the rise of streaming, according to The L-A Times.
On picket lines outside more than a dozen studios and production facilities in Los Angeles and New York, including the Warner Bros., Walt Disney and Sony lots as well as the headquarters of Netflix and Amazon Studios, actors held aloft signs and chanted in unison alongside Writers Guild of America members who walked off the job in May.
As temperatures rose throughout the morning in Los Angeles, so did the number of picketers from SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union.
Sonja Roden, 50, who has appeared as a background actor on shows such as “Westworld” and “Castle,” was among those who gathered outside the Disney lot in Burbank. While the union’s starry A-listers often grab the spotlight, Roden emphasized that the majority of her fellow SAG-AFTRA members are just trying to make a living wage.
“A lot of people don’t realize that the people who make the millions are a very small percentage of the actors in the industry,” she said. “The rest of us are literally living paycheck to paycheck. And we need to be paid fairly. We’re working sometimes 10- to 16-hour days and barely making minimum wage.”
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