ARCHBISHOP ACTS AS PEACEMAKER IN NABET STRIKE

Because of peace-making efforts by the Catholic Archbishop of New York, Cardinal John J. O’Connor, talks will resume Tuesday in Washington between NBC and union negotiators in a new bid to end a 7 1/2-week-old strike against NBC, the union said Friday.

The announcement by the National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians came after the cardinal met here Thursday with NBC President Robert C. Wright and AFL-CIO Treasurer Thomas A. Donahue.

However, trouble loomed elsewhere on the entertainment/labor front as an official of the Directors Guild of America said his negotiating team has urged the guild’s national board to reject contract proposals by CBS and ABC.

The next step will be decided on Sept. 19 when the board meets here, said Max Schindler, who last week headed two days of guild talks with CBS and ABC in New York on new contracts for staff directors at those networks.

On July 14, the Directors Guild narrowly averted a walkout at NBC--already struck by 2,800 members of NABET--when it reached a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract with the network.

But that accord has not been ratified yet by guild members. With the union’s negotiators recommending against CBS and ABC offers, the national board now must resolve what form a membership vote should take.

“Normally, the process would be for all our members at all the networks to vote on the three contracts as a package,” Schindler said.

But now, a decision must be made whether to continue that practice or let guild members at each network vote separately on contracts offered them by their respective companies, he said.

The proposed contracts, he said, cover about 1,000 staff directors, assistant directors, stage managers and free-lancers who have worked at a network facility in the past year.

Guild members voting here and in Los Angeles on July 1-2 overwhelmingly rejected the first proposals made by the three networks. The guild’s previous contract with the networks expired on June 30 but members have continued working during negotiations.

Key issues still in dispute with CBS and ABC involve seniority and jurisdiction, items that had been resolved in the tentative NBC agreement, Schindler said.

The NBC offer is better than the two other networks’ proposals, he said, “but there are a lot of members who don’t think this NBC deal is such a great deal. So that has to be taken into consideration.”

On the NABET front, Wright and Donahue accepted an invitation from Cardinal O’Connor and met with him for 90 minutes Thursday to discuss ways of resolving the NBC strike that began on June 29. (A church spokesman declined to say who sought the prelate’s intervention. However, another source said: “friends of NABET were helpful.”)

Afterward, the prelate said in a statement that both sides had proposed a resumption of discussions by NBC and NABET under the auspices of a federal mediator in Washington “at the earliest possible time.”

“I personally find this very gratifying,” O’Connor said.

Spokesmen for the union and NBC later said the talks would be held Tuesday afternoon. The meeting will be the first bargaining by the two sides since an unsuccessful session with a federal mediator here on July 23.

John Krieger, a NABET spokesman, said a union-management meeting previously scheduled to be held here Monday had been canceled. That session had been arranged only to discuss the pending sale of three NBC radio networks to Westwood One Inc.

Tuesday’s talks will doubtlessly touch on the radio deal, he said, “but the main purpose of the discussion is to try to resolve the strike.”

The walkout began when NBC implemented a two-year contract that union negotiators previously had rejected. Major issues in the strike include NBC’s proposals on temporary hiring.