TV STRIKES: A LONG-RUNNING SERIES? : Striking Technicians Ask for New Referee to Mediate Their Dispute With NBC

The negotiating committee for striking workers at NBC called Friday for a new, nationally respected mediator to referee their 47-day-old dispute.

The seven-member committee of the National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians told a news conference in Burbank that it was making the proposal in an effort to protect itself from what it termed a concerted disinformation campaign on the part of NBC, designed to undermine the credibility of the committee in general and its chief negotiator, Thomas F. Kennedy, in particular.

“I don’t see how we can get the negotiations to move if we are faced with a persistent stream of propaganda put out by NBC to make us look ineffectual with our own union members,” Kennedy said.

At NBC headquarters in New York, spokeswoman McClain Ramsey said that the company will respond “early next week” to the union’s proposal that one of five people replace the Federal Mediation Service in trying to end the strike.

“We’ll obviously be giving it our fullest consideration, and will be exploring appropriate ways of resolving this dispute,” she said.

The NABET negotiating committee’s proposal came in the wake of a petition being circulated among union members this week calling for Kennedy to be replaced as chief negotiator by James P. Nolan, the union’s international president. About 170 of the 2,800 NBC employees represented by NABET have signed the document.

“He (Kennedy) is just too confrontational,” said Diane Schrader, a KNBC news writer who collected signatures during a NABET press conference in Burbank on Thursday. “Kennedy has let his emotions take over (during past negotiating sessions) and made some inflammatory and rude comments” that have made the other side appear more reasonable.

“Probably, sometimes, I am intransigent when dealing with someone who doesn’t want to negotiate a contract,” Kennedy said Friday.

The first open dissension in NABET’s ranks began to surface two weeks ago when union members began circulating a petition requesting that they vote on the NBC-proposed contract that sparked the current walkout on June 29. The negotiating committee rejected the request.

Carrie Biggs Adams, president of NABET Local 53 in Burbank, dismissed the petition drive by accusing its organizers of parroting attacks leveled by NBC against the union’s negotiating committee.

“When you discover that what they are saying is almost a verbatim quote (of what NBC alleged in a recent letter sent to its employees), it looks a bit strange,” Adams said. But she placed ultimate blame on NBC for the attempt to divide NABET members by trying to negotiate directly with the employees instead of their legally elected union representatives.

NBC and union officials last met July 23 in New York. No progress was made then and the federal mediator who brought the two sides together called off the session.

About 700 management and other non-union employees have been filling in during the strike.

Staff Writer Jay Sharbutt contributed to this story from New York.