CBS’ ROONEY STILL WON’T GO TO WORK

Andy Rooney, who once made a humorous documentary called “Mr. Rooney Goes to Work,” didn’t go to work Tuesday. Mr. Rooney stayed home, and his CBS News pay stopped because he refused to labor while a Writers Guild strike against the company continues.

But the bushy-browed essayist of the highly rated “60 Minutes” said he had no plans to leave the network. “I’m not going to quit, no,” he said in a phone interview. “If they throw me out with the writers, I’ll have to go with them.”

He referred to CBS news writers who are among 525 guild members now in the sixth week of a strike against CBS and ABC. Job security and temporary hiring are key issues in the dispute. Rooney has vowed not to appear on “60 Minutes” during the walkout.

He did appear in one segment that aired a week after the strike began, but that had been taped before the walkout. He has not appeared on the newsmagazine program since then.

Don Hewitt, executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said there are no plans at present to replace Rooney, who has worked on the program since 1978.

On Monday, CBS News President Howard Stringer said Rooney had refused to report for work as requested, and, “while we respect Andy’s decision to support the Writers Guild in its strike, we will not continue to pay his salary while he refuses to work.”

Rooney currently earns $416,000 annually. (That is $16,000 more than the annual sum CBS has agreed to pay someone else who has stopped working there--former board Chairman Thomas H. Wyman, ousted last September in a boardroom fight. According to a new CBS proxy statement, Wyman’s $400,000 salary continues until he dies.)

Rooney, who in his syndicated newspaper column last year criticized the decision of CBS executives to ax the low-rated, two-hour version of the “CBS Morning News,” said he now would await developments “and just write away as always on various projects.”

Citing a number of calls he’d gotten from reporters after Stringer’s action, Rooney, 67, offered one example of his writing, a prepared statement that began:

“As a writer and observer, I’m not at ease in the position of being observed. I’d be pleased if reporters spent less time calling me and more time finding out what the differences are between CBS and the Writers Guild, so the matter could be resolved.”

In the statement, he also said it appears that CBS fears the involvement of a federal mediator in its talks with the guild--a statement that CBS emphatically denied--and he needled the network for refusing his request last week to attend a negotiating session as an observer.

CBS’ chief negotiator, Noel Berman, did say that Rooney’s presence “would be ill-advised and (would) have a chilling effect,” according to CBS spokesman George Schweitzer. But Schweitzer emphasized that the statement applied to any outside party seeking to observe the meeting.

Hewitt denied a report that he was miffed at Rooney’s no-show stance.

“Naw, I’m not angry,” the producer said. He said that he was puzzled, however, at why the veteran reporter had not gone out into the cold to march with pickets instead of remaining in his office across the street from the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street here.

Hewitt said he wasn’t seeking a replacement for Rooney, but if the latter’s absence continues, “I may have to.” But he said he only would do that if Rooney “forces me to.”

Although the veteran writer is temporarily absent from CBS, he has an appearance coming up Thursday on ABC’s magazine program “Our World,” in which he discusses what it was like, as a correspondent with the service newspaper Stars and Stripes, to be with the press corps during the liberation of Paris from the Germans in the summer of 1944. An ABC spokeswoman said Rooney taped that interview at his CBS office prior to the March 2 beginning of the Writers Guild strike.

Rooney, who has won six Writers Guild awards and three Emmy Awards during his 25-year career at CBS News, contended in his statement that Hewitt and CBS News chief Stringer “are both on my side and can’t admit it. . . . They’re interested in news programming, not money.”

He contended that Hewitt--who reportedly earns $2 million annually--”would work for one-tenth of what he’s paid, and Howard Stringer does work for one-tenth of what Don Hewitt is paid.”

Saying he hoped their friendship with him would survive, he praised Hewitt and Stringer as “good guys, even though they’ve hollered at me a lot in the past few weeks.” Then he added:

“As for CBS stopping my salary, it means I’ll no longer be eating in the CBS cafeteria. Fortunately, we bought a new jar of peanut butter last week.”