‘Living’ Pact Is a Peaceful Option

Motion picture and television writers will decide Wednesday whether they are as daring as tobacco workers and some others who gave up their right to strike in an experimental search for peaceful ways of negotiating union contracts.

Strikes in themselves are not much of a problem for most workers or employers--less than 3% of all union contract negotiations end up in a strike or lockout these days.

However, members of the Writers Guild of America have been different. Over the years, they endured the hardships of several strikes to win contract improvements or avoid cutbacks.

Each time they negotiated a contract in the past decade, they went on strike to squeeze contract gains out of super-rich film industry moguls--in 1981, 1985 and 1988.

The militant unity of the industry’s workers throughout the bitter 22-week walkout in 1988 was impressive, but the strike also was devastating to strikers and the industry.

The union’s executive secretary, Bryan Walton, decided it was time to seek a way to stop the guild’s seemingly endless warfare with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Walton first met privately with Nicholas Counter III, the chief industry negotiator, to discuss the possibility. Counter was intrigued.

Some guild members were deeply offended by the secrecy of that meeting, but other union and industry people quickly joined the discussions that resulted in what might be called a “living contract” proposal.

The unusual proposal extends the 1988 contract to 1995 and includes pledges of no strikes or lockouts, annual 4.5% increases in writers’ minimum fees, no benefits rollbacks, and creation of an unusual Contract Adjustment Committee, on which the success of the entire experiment rests.

The contract is “living” because the joint committee can negotiate at any time to change any provision, from the writers’ fees to their share of steadily increasing revenue from video cassettes and the booming foreign market. Changes must win approval of union members and producers.

A living contract can quickly reflect the phenomenally rapid technological and marketing changes going on in the industry. Now, problems arising from the changes are just put aside, festering, until they are fought over all at once when the contract expires.

The experiment will probably win the writers’ approval Wednesday, but an impressive coalition of former guild presidents is campaigning against it, complaining that profit-oriented corporate executives will be more greedy than ever if they can negotiate without a strike threat to encourage them to be fair.

Often corporate executives make contract concessions only under threat of economic war. But the hope of the experiment is that it will break old patterns of antagonistic behavior, making it easier for each side to recognize the legitimate needs of the other by creating a cooperative atmosphere without the strike threat that traditionally hangs over the bargaining table.

Strikes are labor’s weapons of last resort. They have long helped writers and other workers make gains, but the cost can be enormous.

Nowadays, more and more unions and employers are pursuing imaginative ways of reducing labor-management conflict, such as giving workers a real voice in corporate decisions and in the way they do their jobs.

It is time for the writers’ guild and their employers to also try a new way of dividing the wealth they produce without bashing one another, or even threatening to do so. The living contract just might prove to be that way.

If the experiment fails and writers gain less than they did by brandishing the strike weapon, they can return to their economic wars in 1995. Even when contract negotiations end peacefully, strike threats can be costly. That’s why workers at the Philip Morris tobacco plant in Richmond, Va., agreed to a no-strike clause in their pact in 1979 in return for job guarantees and other benefits.

The mutual trust that developed between the company and the Bakery, Confectionery and Tobacco Workers Local 203T helped boost entry-level wages of semiskilled production workers to an impressive $16.75 an hour and allows contract changes by mutual agreement.

Before the new cooperative era, the tobacco workers, like the writers, were in constant turmoil. Strike threats were automatic at contract time.

The company would build huge inventories to help it weather a possible walkout, jamming every available space with cigarettes produced by running the factories seven days a week in advance of the strike deadline, recalls Local President C.H. Pearce.

Then, when agreement was reached without a strike, workers were laid off until the inventory was depleted. Contract gains were reduced because of high strike-preparation costs.

The harsh adversarial relations between employees and Philip Morris did give the union workers better wages and benefits than workers in non-union companies. But the labor-management cooperation that developed since 1979 has produced even greater gains for the workers.

It is important for the writers to know that the tobacco workers’ no-strike contract has one major advantage over the proposed writers’ pact. If Philip Morris and the union fail to reach agreement on contract changes, they submit their differences to binding arbitration.

The first thing the proposed Contract Adjustment Committee should adopt is arbitration as an alternative to the valuable strike weapon the writers will have to surrender.

But even without initial binding arbitration, the writers and producers should adopt the innovative proposal and take a chance that guaranteed peace at least until 1995 will help both sides and perhaps set a pattern in and out of the motion picture and television industry.