Another Voice Enters the Contract Talks

Next month, negotiators for two major broadcast unions--the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians--will resume contract talks with ABC.

But now there’s a new element that wasn’t present in previous negotiations: Capital Cities Communications, the new owners of ABC. Cap Cities had a reputation of being tough on unions at its publications division when John B. Sias ran that arm of the company.

Sias now heads ABC. What that change and Cap Cities’ reputation portend for the new contract talks is difficult to assess right now, although AFL-CIO spokesman Murray Seegar said Cap Cities has shown a “split personality” when it comes to its broadcast holdings:

“Its relations with the performing and engineering unions have been pretty good,” Seegar said. “No one can understand why. Only the newspaper and printers guilds have had any real problems with them.”

Despite this favorable assessment of Cap Cities’ dealings with broadcast unions, a thorny question brought on by Cap Cities’ takeover of ABC still faces negotiators for the merged companies and NABET:

Will the union’s new contract cover only those ABC stations previously represented by NABET? Or will it also cover those Cap Cities stations that, while now part of the merged company, had no union representation before the Jan. 3 takeover?

Cap Cities/ABC now owns eight TV stations, including KABC-TV in Los Angeles, and nine radio stations. It has temporary waivers to continue operating seven other radio stations, but must sell them by May, 1987, under Federal Communications Commission rules.

Now that the station lineup is known, said NABET spokesman Tom Kennedy said his union’s position is that if technical and engineering employees at Cap Cities/ABC stations “are not represented by a union, they fall into our bailiwick.”

Management disagrees, he said, and it will have to be worked out at the bargaining table next Tuesday, when the Cap Cities/ABC and union negotiators open their first major meeting since the takeover.

NABET, whose old contract expired almost a year ago, said it represents 3,200 members at ABC and ABC-owned radio and TV stations. The majority of members are engineering and technical personnel, but also include news writers, most of them here and in Chicago.

AFTRA’s talks--the union is jointly negotiating with all three networks on a new contract--concern performers in daytime soap operas and game shows, late-night and early morning shows, and on-air journalists, from reporters to anchors.

But in the new-contract talks, AFTRA isn’t taking a position that it has the right to represent those on-air staffers at Cap Cities stations who aren’t members of the union.

Dick Moore, an AFTRA spokesman, said his union “would have to organize the (non-AFTRA) stations first, and see if they wanted us to represent them,” and that hasn’t been done.

NABET’s Kennedy, on the other hand, said his union contends that no station-by-station organizing is needed--that under the new contract, it seeks all employees who fall under NABET’s current jurisdiction would have to join the union.

ABC’s new owners also dispute that, he said, and the matter may have to go to arbitration, and should the union lose, “we would have to organize each (non-union) station.”

The issue wasn’t raised during last year’s talks because of uncertainty over which radio and television stations would constitute the Cap Cities/ABC broadcast holdings, he said, but now that that is settled, “I’m hoping they’ll get off the dime.”

He said there was “a good series of negotiations” with ABC’s former management last year, and that he believes the talks will continue with the new administration.

NABET’s last strike against a network was at NBC in 1976, while AFTRA’s most recent strike was against all three networks in 1967.