TV STRIKES: A LONG-RUNNING SERIES? : Unions Want Job Security as Layoffs Mount, While Networks Seek More Cost Cuts

It’s been a stormy year for the networks. Strikes against CBS and ABC lasted seven and eight weeks respectively. An NBC walkout now is in its seventh week. It’s possible that CBS could be struck again.

Last month, the Directors Guild of America almost called the first walkout in its history against the three networks. At the last minute it reached a tentative agreement with NBC on a new contract for staff directors.

But no guild agreements have yet been made with CBS and ABC. Talks about that began here Thursday. Union officials say they expect that the hardest bargaining will be with CBS negotiators--who face other contract talks Aug. 31. That’s when they meet in Phoenix with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). A top union officer expressed hope for peace, but said that CBS’ proposed pact “puts us on a clash path.”

IBEW, with 1,600 members at CBS, is one of two major technical unions in the industry. The other is the National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, whose 2,800 members at NBC have been on strike since June 29.

While not talking walkout, IBEW--which last struck CBS for eight weeks in 1972--has told its members that CBS has presented the union with “the most seriously damaging proposals to our future that we have ever faced. . . .”

“The company has left no stone unturned in its endeavor to decimate the seniority list, give your network to others, and what work would be left could be done by part-time,” non-union workers, the union said in a memo.

So it goes on the network labor front, where the winter of discontent threatens to become an all-season affair this year. The strikes, near-strikes and warlike talk generally stem from two factors:

--Union demands for job security at a time when the networks, having retrenched, trimmed budgets and pink-slipped hundreds, seek yet more ways of reducing expenses under orders from new, cost-conscious managements.

--Management demands for more “flexibility” by the unions because of what the networks describe as a harsh new economic climate of rising program costs, declining shares of audience and stiff competition from cable TV, independent TV stations and videocassettes.

Many union members blame the strife on the bottom-line brigade that came in with the takeovers or change of managements at the networks; they note that General Electric now owns NBC, Capital Cities now owns ABC, and CBS now is run by the hard-nosed, budget-cutting Laurence A. Tisch.

The union feeling is most bitterly expressed by NABET chief negotiator Thomas F. Kennedy, who, in an Aug. 4 letter to NBC President Robert Wright, said, “You can’t spell GREED without GE.”

His union’s members--camera operators, technicians, news writers and news producers--struck NBC when the company put into effect a two-year contract that the union’s negotiators had rejected.

(The pact has never been voted on by the membership, although NABET locals in Burbank and Chicago last week unsuccessfully sought a rank-and-file vote.)

NBC labor lawyer Day Krolik III contended that while the unions may feel that the networks have been taken over by heartless conglomerates, they don’t seem to understand that the networks are in a new, difficult era.

“The networks realize that in this day and age, with the industry changing so drastically and so rapidly, that they just can’t afford to be uncompetitive anymore,” he said in an interview.

“They can’t afford to have certain inefficiencies as the result of their labor agreements. So we are frankly being more assertive at the bargaining table. And I think that’s led to a greater chance of strikes than we’ve had in the past.”

The year’s first walkout came in March when 525 off-camera news staffers in the Writers Guild of America struck CBS and ABC.

Mona Mangen, the guild’s chief officer here, conceded that the networks traditionally considered her union the weakest and least prone to strike of all the labor organizations in broadcasting.

“I think they never dreamed we would strike, and then, once we struck, they thought everyone would fall apart and come running back in,” she said. “But after it was over, we found that only two members had crossed the line.”

A major issue in the guild’s strike was CBS’ proposals on hiring temporary employees. The same issue applies in NABET’s strike of NBC.

But another big item in the NBC walkout concerns what union officials call the company’s demand that the contract apply to NBC, its stations and news bureaus only as long as the company continues to own and operate them.

Were all or part of NBC to be sold, the union says, there is no “successor clause” in the contract that would make the buyer liable for the NABET agreement. It wants that clause put in.

John Dunlop, a Harvard professor and secretary of labor during the Ford Administration, said that many but not all labor-management agreements include the successor clause.

However, he said, the clause “has come to be particularly important in the eyes of the unions with all these mergers, takeovers and divide-distribute kind of processes that have been going on in recent times.”

What concerns some NABET members is whether GE--which took over NBC only last year and which last month said it was selling NBC’s money-losing radio network--will some day sell the rest of the company or part of it.

As one striker who requested anonymity put it, “They bought it, they’ll strip it and then they’ll sell it.”

Rumors that an NBC sale is imminent periodically surface, but “there’s absolutely not a shred of truth to that,” said GE spokesman Jack Batty. “NBC is one of GE’s 14 key businesses and will remain so.”

Nicholas Heyman, a securities analyst at Drexel Burnham Lambert who tracks GE’s activities, agreed. He said he believes the company will keep NBC for the long run.

For one thing, he said, NBC President Wright--the former head of General Electric Credit Corp.--wouldn’t have agreed to take over NBC “if his sole job was to do a fire-sale deal in a couple of years.”

And, Heyman said, GE wants NBC to become heavily involved in producing its own shows in 1990. That is the expiration year for a federal consent decree that now puts a 3 1/2-hour-a-week limit on NBC’s prime-time broadcasts of programs that it has made and owns.

In-house production can prove tremendously lucrative, he noted, and “that’s what GE wants. They want that because they see it as a cash cow,” with the profits put to work in other divisions of GE.

Three walkouts against the networks and the possibility of another may seem a lot for one year. However, one respected industry observer, former NBC board chairman Julian Goodman, doesn’t consider it all that much.

“I don’t think it’s an unusual amount of labor unrest,” said Goodman, who was NBC’s chief in 1976 when NABET struck the company and stayed out for seven weeks.

What is significant, he said, is that union contracts are expiring at a time when both the network business and its management has changed.

“I think it probably will be more adversarial in the future. The networks are going to be tougher negotiators, and I think the unions are going to find new and different ways of handling their cases. . . . I think it’s a tough business and it’s going to get tougher.”