The two women stared each other down, slowly walking in a circle as they matched each other step for step. One, dressed in black from her cowboy hat and fake mustache down to her shoes, wore a paper badge labeled “99% Sheriff.” The other, a white cowboy hat, black Zorro-esque eye mask, and the label “1% Outlaw.” Suddenly, a line of people walked between them, breaking their concentration for a split second. Classes were out, and law students needed the entrance to their building back.

The actors quickly fell back into character and resumed their telling of a story of greed and inequality—the story of the “99%” versus the “1%”. But the women were not actors, and the story was not fiction. Rather, the “99%” represented the many caregivers at a Milford, CT, nursing home who are currently locked out by HealthBridge, a company run by Daniel Straus, or “the 1%.” Straus, an NYU Law School Trustee, endows the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice with annual gifts of $1.25 million and owns six nursing homes in Connecticut, as well as many more in other states.

Yesterday afternoon, the workers, who are represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare 1199NE, paid the NYU Law School a visit and put on a mock manhunt to illustrate the injustice being done by a man who financed a school for justice. As supportive professors and students, including members of GSOC and the Student Labor Action Project, gathered first in Washington Square Park and then in front of the entrance to the Law School, workers chanted “Down with Straus!” and held up signs renaming Straus’ namesake school the “Institute of Injustice.”

When the workers’ contract expired in early 2011, HealthBridge tried to put wage cuts, increased health insurance costs, and decreased staffing levels into a new contract, but the workers refused to accept those terms. After months of negotiations that lead nowhere, the company locked out caregivers at the West River Health Care Center in the middle of December, less than two weeks before Christmas. Now, over a month and a half later, the workers are still on the picket line.

“We were locked out on December 13. December 17, they cut off our health insurance. I’m getting unemployment for the first time ever in my life. I have a family to support, I have kids in college, I have a mortgage. I pray I don’t get sick and I pray that nobody in my family gets sick,” said Noreen Gates, who has worked at the West River Health Care Center for twenty years.

This lockout is just one of many recent attempts by corporations to destroy unions, and this new trend is setting a bad precedent. “If everyone else can do it, they can get away with it too,” explained Cindy Bain, who has been a caregiver at West River for fourteen years.

This is not the only instance of a Daniel Straus-owned company mistreating its workers. In September 2010, caregivers at New Jersey’s Somerset Valley Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, which is owned by Straus’ Care One, voted to form a union, but the company refused to accept the results of the election and instead fired a small group of workers. Last August, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of the workers, but Care One still has yet to recognize the union.

“Daniel Straus claims to have all these ethics and morals that were passed down to him from his parents,” said Gates. “Well, you know what? I don’t see any of his ethics or morals anywhere.”

While the symbolic duel between the 99% and the 1% ended with the 1% being dragged off in invisible handcuffs after about an hour, the real battle seems likely to continue for quite awhile, and the workers have no plans to give in anytime soon. “They said if we give up our pension, they’ll let us back to work,” she continued. “They feel that if they lock us out at Christmas time and in the cold, that we’ll be scared and crying. But you know what? We’ve got hand warmers. We’re fine outside in the cold.”