A similar scene had unfolded Friday uptown at the Museum of Modern Art, where museum workers staged a vocal protest about their lack of a contract -- this time with drums -- to a mostly apathetic crowd of tourists. "I don't really think anyone cares," said one jewelry vendor, who regularly sets up her stand across the street. "Sometimes they get in arguments with [people] because they're making so much noise. But there's no sympathy."

Says MOMA protester Michael Regan, who has been striking since late April for higher pay and job security: "A lot of people have the attitude, 'I am an innocent bystander, why should I be affected?' Unions aren't what they were and people simply aren't aware."

Indeed, the Verizon strike -- involving 87,200 workers who walked off the job first thing Sunday demanding better working conditions and more job security -- has hardly been the subject of heated dinner party debates. After all, basic phone service hasn't been disrupted, and customers across the East Coast have barely begun to feel the pinch of finding no one available to do repairs, establish new service or look up a number for them when they call 411. And when it comes to basic solidarity with unions, well, Americans just don't seem that fired up about labor issues.

Americans still clamor for good working conditions, and corporations still tend to be characterized as big, nasty beasts out to squash worker bees. But, on the whole, Americans have come to accept layoffs, downsizing and other corporate malfeasances as facts of life. To many, the accepted solution to bad working conditions is to quit, not protest and put the public out. And, if people's own lives are not terribly disrupted, the only way a strike gets their attention is through careful media orchestration.

"In each struggle, unions have to get the message out as to what the problems are," says Judy Stepan-Norris, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine. "It's not an easy thing to do." And she's not sure that Verizon workers have managed to create a compelling story to win vast public support.

In fact, the demands of the striking members of Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers are hardly captivating to a public that has shown itself uninterested in organized labor. The unions are negotiating with Verizon for assurances that they will be able to organize employees without management interference at Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest mobile phone provider, and they want limits on forced overtime for telephone operators and customer service representatives among other demands.

The issues may be important to the workers at Verizon, but they hardly have the kind of galvanizing force that, say, Cesar Chavez's exposé of inhuman working conditions and criminally low pay on America's farms did in the 1970s. Chavez had a story to tell -- and it was one that Americans felt they had to act on, making his 1975 grape boycott a historical win for organized labor.

Though the issues they are fighting for may be much less dramatic, Verizon workers believe the strike will garner public support for their cause. "The people who work for a living understand," says James Joyce, a computer technician at Verizon, which formed last month by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE. "I love my job. We all love our jobs. We want to stay here."

So, many an American will ask, why are you striking?