NABET Extends Picket Line at Presidential Press Site

SANTA BARBARA — Technicians and news staffers on strike against NBC extended their picket line at the hotel housing the temporary White House press center here Thursday, dissuading ABC and CBS camera and sound crews from covering the daily briefing.

The striking National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians enlarged their picket line, said Chris Hanson, secretary of NABET Local 53, because NBC personnel began entering the Sheraton-Santa Barbara Hotel through a different door than the designated one at which pickets were posted.

NBC, which has been struck since June 29 by 2,800 NABET members, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, contending that the union had violated its agreement to picket only a single designated gate.

An ABC crew, made up of members of NABET, remained outside the hotel with the NBC pickets Thursday morning. CBS technicians, although members of another union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, also honored the picket line and stayed out of the briefing.

Reporters, however, covered the briefing by White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater.

Dayne Adams, an NBC engineer and member of the executive board of Local 53, who was on picket duty outside the hotel, said the ABC crew’s refusal to cross the line was especially significant.

“In addition to covering the briefing for their own network,” Adams said, “the ABC crew was handling the transmission pool used to send feeds out of here for other users. Nothing that the others shot could be fed to Los Angeles or the East by normal methods.”

There were alternatives, however.

On Thursday, it was learned, CBS used its own satellite--normally used only as backup for the network pool--to send its tape from the Sheraton. NBC used its own backup microwave system. And ABC subsequently moved its editing equipment out of the Sheraton to a neighboring hotel.

Nonetheless, ABC White House correspondent Sam Donaldson called the expanded picketing “a terrible inconvenience and expense for us.”

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “But whatever happened . . . has made my job as a correspondent very difficult and I resent it.”

What happened, Adams said, was that on Tuesday a non-union NBC employee was seen entering the Sheraton complex through a different gate than the one specifically designated as the only one to be used by NBC employees.

“That single gate had been set aside for NBC,” Adams said, “so that our pickets could set up a line there. That person’s use of a different entrance tainted all the gates to the Sheraton. If they were going to go in just anywhere to avoid our picket line, we had to expand the line to make sure all the gates were covered.”

Jay Rodriguez, NBC’s West Coast vice president for information, said all NBC crews had been instructed to go in and out the designated door, but “supposedly one individual was observed going through another gate, for whatever reasons, although that person denies going through that gate.”

In any event, Rodriguez said, “One person doesn’t taint the gate.”

NABET, he contended, “is trying to create issues rather than to resolve the strike at the negotiating table.”

The extension of the picket line also prompted Teamsters and independent truck drivers to unload supplies outside the hotel, saying that they, too, were honoring the line.

ABC producer David Kaplan said the picket line enlargement had not yet affected news coverage because tape of the briefing was available from a local network affiliate and because union crew members could interview Fitzwater and other officials outside the hotel.

The NABET technicians, producers, writers and editors walked out in a dispute over job security provisions in a new contract.