Now Playing Off Broadway: A Wall Street Morality Play

A straggly crew of protesters gathered at Rockefeller Center this afternoon to act out a familiar theme: Fat cat versus worker.

A man dressed in a pinstriped cat costume, holding two garbage bags of paper money, played Bruce Wasserstein, C.E.O. of Lazard, a finance firm with $141.4 billion under management. Radika Munna played herself.

Munna was fired in November from her cafeteria job at an Atria Senior Living, a chain of assisted-living centers owned by Lazard Alternative Investments.

"Who has no healthcare?" a mock game-host in a blue polyester suit shouted. A handful of event organizers shouted back answers: "Radika!"

Then the host asked: "Who lives in a home nicknamed the 'palace?'" And the organizers responded: "Wasserstein!"

The prompt for the not-so-subtle street theater was the recent announcement of Wasserstein's $41 million pay package for 2007, plus his five-year contract of at least $100 million in base salary and restricted stock awards.

Several midtown workers paused to take flyers from the protesters, but most kept walking in the 20-degree weather.

The Service Employees International Union, which represents nearly 2 million service workers, used the occasion to highlight the gap between Wall Street-style salaries and the pay for workers in companies like Atria that are owned by private-equity funds.

"The problems at Atria are not subtle," said Jennifer Kelly, a spokesperson for SEIU.

Wasserstein didn't fire Munna. He doesn't even run the company that fired Munna--at least not anymore. Lazard Alternative Investments operates separately from its publicly traded namesake, and has done so since 2005.

Protest organizers dismissed such hairsplitting. They contended that the affiliation between the Lazard entities remains, and the event fits into a larger campaign by labor unions to petition not just company management or factory owners, but the financiers who ultimately control each company.

"Bruce Wasserstein could pick up the phone tomorrow and provide better pay for the workers," Kelly said.

A spokesperson for Lazard declined to comment.

by Mary Bridges

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