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Big Rigs Amidst Glitz, Glamour in Tinsel Town
Fresh from their protest appearance outside the Academy Award telecast in Los Angeles on March 23, NABET-CWA members staged raucous rallies in three other major cities eight days later in a further show of determination to win a new contract with ABC-TV, part of the giant Disney Co. conglomerate. The rallies in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco on March 31 marked the one-year anniversary NABET-CWA members have been without a contract at ABC.
In Los Angeles on March 23, amidst the glitz, glamor and limousines, huge semi-trucks and trailers driven by volunteers from CWA Local 9400 mingled with a sea of 4,000 red balloons carrying the reminder that “It’s Our Work” as 250 noisy and angry NABET-CWA members demonstrated outside the Shrine Auditorium, site of the 70th annual Academy Awards ceremony.
Gena Stinnett, president of NABET-CWA Local 57 in Hollywood, said the demonstrators and truckers were united in their protest against management tactics that have dragged the negotiations out over a year, as well as management’s last-minute decision to exclude NABET-CWA technicians from handling the Oscar telecast.
Stinnett said ABC and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences conspired to keep NABET-CWA crews off the project, fearing a surprise strike during the show — which has an enormous worldwide viewing audience.
“The network suits got overly jumpy after the incident in Houston,” she says, referring to a one-day grievance strike by NABET-CWA members during the third round of a Professional Golfers Association tour event. Caught unprepared and flat-footed, the network execs were forced to cancel live coverage and substitute taped coverage from the 1995 tournament on that date.
For the 1998 Oscars, the Academy hired its own production crew, represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts, or as some call it, IATSE.
NABET has provided the crews for Oscar telecasts for the last 20 years.
“Our message was simple,” Stinnett said. “We’re on the street to protest the network’s action against us and to bring attention to Disney-ABC’s outrageous demands for a 67-percent cut in our pension contribution, a 300-percent increase in daily hire employment while cutting daily hire wages, along with Disney-ABC’s attacks on our health care benefits and job security.”
Meanwhile, NABET-CWA members and their supporters were back in protest form again in late March with rallies in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. In New York, the protestors were joined by CWA President Morton Bahr and marched from ABC headquarters on West 66th Street to Rockefeller Center, headquarters of GE/NBC — where the NABET-CWA contract expires next March 31.
NABET-CWA Network Coordinator John Krieger reported in early April that management may be finally getting the message. Both Bob Iger, ABC president, and Jeffrey Ruthizer, vice president for labor relations at ABC, made overtures to resume bargaining — for the first time in more than four months.
Krieger says that the union bargaining committee will meet beginning May 4 in San Diego to evaluate management’s latest communications and be available for meetings with management and federal mediators soon afterward.
“We return to bargaining with the best intentions and continued determination to win the kind of agreement NABET-CWA members need and deserve,” Krieger said.
In another development, John Bowers, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, advised CWA President Morton Bahr that the 85,000-member union’s executive council had voted to withdraw its scheduled July 1999 convention from the Buena Vista Palace, a hotel at Disney Village, as a show of support for the NABET-CWA workers locked into a contract struggle with ABC. Bowers said the union made the decision despite the possible cost of $71,000 in penalties for canceling the contract with Disney.
“Like NABET-CWA, the ILA is fighting another Disney-owned company — the Disney Cruise Line — for recently awarding a stevedoring contract to an avowed anti-union, anti-ILA operator in Florida,” Bowers told Bahr.
In Los Angeles on March 23, amidst the glitz, glamor and limousines, huge semi-trucks and trailers driven by volunteers from CWA Local 9400 mingled with a sea of 4,000 red balloons carrying the reminder that “It’s Our Work” as 250 noisy and angry NABET-CWA members demonstrated outside the Shrine Auditorium, site of the 70th annual Academy Awards ceremony.
Gena Stinnett, president of NABET-CWA Local 57 in Hollywood, said the demonstrators and truckers were united in their protest against management tactics that have dragged the negotiations out over a year, as well as management’s last-minute decision to exclude NABET-CWA technicians from handling the Oscar telecast.
Stinnett said ABC and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences conspired to keep NABET-CWA crews off the project, fearing a surprise strike during the show — which has an enormous worldwide viewing audience.
“The network suits got overly jumpy after the incident in Houston,” she says, referring to a one-day grievance strike by NABET-CWA members during the third round of a Professional Golfers Association tour event. Caught unprepared and flat-footed, the network execs were forced to cancel live coverage and substitute taped coverage from the 1995 tournament on that date.
For the 1998 Oscars, the Academy hired its own production crew, represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts, or as some call it, IATSE.
NABET has provided the crews for Oscar telecasts for the last 20 years.
“Our message was simple,” Stinnett said. “We’re on the street to protest the network’s action against us and to bring attention to Disney-ABC’s outrageous demands for a 67-percent cut in our pension contribution, a 300-percent increase in daily hire employment while cutting daily hire wages, along with Disney-ABC’s attacks on our health care benefits and job security.”
Meanwhile, NABET-CWA members and their supporters were back in protest form again in late March with rallies in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. In New York, the protestors were joined by CWA President Morton Bahr and marched from ABC headquarters on West 66th Street to Rockefeller Center, headquarters of GE/NBC — where the NABET-CWA contract expires next March 31.
NABET-CWA Network Coordinator John Krieger reported in early April that management may be finally getting the message. Both Bob Iger, ABC president, and Jeffrey Ruthizer, vice president for labor relations at ABC, made overtures to resume bargaining — for the first time in more than four months.
Krieger says that the union bargaining committee will meet beginning May 4 in San Diego to evaluate management’s latest communications and be available for meetings with management and federal mediators soon afterward.
“We return to bargaining with the best intentions and continued determination to win the kind of agreement NABET-CWA members need and deserve,” Krieger said.
In another development, John Bowers, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, advised CWA President Morton Bahr that the 85,000-member union’s executive council had voted to withdraw its scheduled July 1999 convention from the Buena Vista Palace, a hotel at Disney Village, as a show of support for the NABET-CWA workers locked into a contract struggle with ABC. Bowers said the union made the decision despite the possible cost of $71,000 in penalties for canceling the contract with Disney.
“Like NABET-CWA, the ILA is fighting another Disney-owned company — the Disney Cruise Line — for recently awarding a stevedoring contract to an avowed anti-union, anti-ILA operator in Florida,” Bowers told Bahr.