PRESIDENT OF NBC SPIKES RUMORS OF MAJOR JOB CUTS

Although there will be more job cuts among union members who just ended a long strike at NBC, most of the reductions the network is planning probably will come through attrition, NBC President Robert C. Wright said Monday.

The 2,800-member National Assn. of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians on Saturday ended its nearly 17-week-old strike against NBC when two small units that had been holding out finally voted to ratify an NBC contract offer that went into effect immediately.

“I’m happy it’s over,” Wright said in a brief interview after attending, but not participating in, a press conference that NBC News held here for visiting TV writers. “It shouldn’t have lasted for so long.”

Asked when NBC will start calling the union’s members back, Wright replied that “we’d like to think that by the end of this week we’ll have a number of people in, and certainly the rest by the beginning of next week.”

He took pains to disparage continuing speculation that more major job cuts are ahead at NBC, which, citing a need to be more efficient, cut 400 jobs last year and on Oct. 15 said it was trimming 200 more from its rolls.

The latter cuts involve only NABET members, 100 of whom worked for the NBC Radio network, which recently was sold to Westwood One of Los Angeles.

There will “probably be some additional jobs” cut, Wright said, referring to those held by the union’s members, “but I think we can handle a lot of that through attrition.”

Although there have been reports by the union that NBC plans to reduce its NABET work force by a total of 500, Wright said no specific figure has been set either for that or for job reductions elsewhere in the company.

Wright said he hopes to accomplish those non-NABET reductions through attrition too--that is, not filling vacancies that occur through resignations and retirements. The company will have a staff of 7,300 when the current cuts are finished.

He emphatically denied a claim made by a union official several weeks ago that NBC’s management ranks will be trimmed 30% in two waves of 15% each. “I have no idea where they got that information,” he said. “It’s totally erroneous.”

The NABET strike began June 29 after NBC imposed a contract that union negotiators had rejected. The walkout was the longest in the union’s history with the network.

Wright said he thinks there’ll be relative peace with the union from now on.

“I think the challenge we have is to avoid a strike 29 months from now,” he said, referring to the March 31, 1990 expiration of the NBC contract that the union’s members ratified. “I feel pretty confident we’ll be able to do that. Let’s see what happens.”

NBC News President Lawrence Grossman also expressed relief Monday that the strike had ended. About 350 of the strikers were off-camera news staffers at both the national and local level.

“It’s been a very long and agonizing four months” that was “incredibly tough on our colleagues” on the picket lines, he said, adding: “We can’t wait to get them back.”