ABC Lockout Ends; Workers Agree to Return

ABC Inc. lifted its 11-week lockout of a union of broadcast engineers, producers and technicians Friday after an intervention by Labor Secretary Alexis Herman helped pave over a last-minute glitch in negotiations. The result appeared to be a victory for the company in the increasingly bitter fight.

About 2,400 members of the National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, or NABET, including 600 in Los Angeles, are expected to begin returning to work Monday, according to officials for the union and the company. ABC is a subsidiary of Burbank-based Walt Disney Co.

As part of the settlement, the union also agreed to submit what ABC called its “final” contract proposal to its members for ratification within two weeks.

“After 11 weeks, our folks are going back inside,” said Tom Donahue, a Washington-based spokesman for the union. ABC President Robert A. Iger hailed what he called “the closing of what has been a difficult period for all concerned.”

But the settlement may not have come soon enough to stem a tide of disaffection with union leadership within Local 57, which represents Los Angeles-based employees at ABC and KABC radio and television. Angered in part by the union leadership’s refusal to allow an early vote on the network’s latest contract proposal, three bargaining units within the local--including those representing news writers, radio talk show coordinators and engineers--have begun procedures aimed at dissociating themselves from NABET.

The first vote, taken Wednesday by 16 radio engineers, was inconclusive, according to employees, because the eligibility of seven of the voters was challenged by the union or the company. A ruling by the National Labor Relations Board on those challenges is not expected for several weeks.

NABET members at ABC worked without a contract between March 31, 1997, when the last labor pact expired, and Nov. 2, when the union called a one-day strike to protest changes to its health insurance coverage and the company responded by locking members out of work.

That day the network said it would not readmit NABET members to work unless the union agreed to give at least 72 hours’ notice of any further work stoppage--and 14 days in the case of live remote broadcasts.

NABET agreed to those terms earlier this week, but the settlement was delayed by a disagreement over the fate of six NABET members fired by ABC for alleged misconduct after the lockout began.

ABC originally had insisted that arbitration over those workers’ dismissals be deferred until after the contract was ratified, a position the union argued would penalize them for any delay in the vote.

The hurdle was cleared Thursday, union sources said, when ABC agreed to submit the cases to immediate arbitration. The breakthrough came after Secretary Herman mediated a phone conversation between Iger and Morton Bahr, national president of the Communications Workers of America, NABET’s parent union.

The contract to be voted on later this month offers wage increases of 3.5% or less in each of the next four years while eliminating or reducing some union staffing guarantees and protections against technology-inspired job losses.