Almost a year ago, union contracts governing about 100 video editors, engineers, and broadcast directors at Seattle’s three major local television stations expired. One station, KOMO TV, resolved the matter quickly, reaching a new agreement with its employees from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 46 (IBEW) on March 21.
Another station, KING TV, is now in mediation with its IBEW workers.
But at the third television station, KIRO TV, things are going in a very different—and increasingly acrimonious—direction.
Owned by the large national media conglomerate Cox Enterprises, KIRO has been demanding that its IBEW employees give up their freedom to engage in basic union activities such as striking, talking to the media about their grievances, and negotiating for better compensation. Since the union first went public with its concerns about KIRO’s hard line [“Labor Pains,” March 30], things have deteriorated further, according to union representative Angela Marshall—to the point that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has become involved.
“We’re still in the same place,” Marshall complains of the standoff.
Meanwhile, her union went to the NLRB over an attempt earlier this year by KIRO to put nonunion employees in union jobs—a move that Marshall said was accompanied by offers of raises for certain employees if they left the union, and threats of job loss if they did not. The 36 IBEW members at KIRO earn between $25.30 and $32.86 an hour.
KIRO general manager Eric Lerner did not respond to a request for comment on Marshall’s allegations and the status of negotiations.
But the NLRB sided with the union in an August 1 decision clarifying that certain KIRO employees, known as “Ignite operators”—people who work a machine called Ignite that “resembles the cockpit of an aircraft” and is used to control the production of a newscast—must be union employees. (In an interesting look into the larger forces driving this particular conflict, the NLRB noted that the Ignite machine easily does tasks that previously required many camera operators, audio operators, and graphics producers to accomplish—and the machine led to the loss of about a dozen union jobs at KIRO.)
As for the allegations that KIRO tried to strong-arm these union-affiliated Ignite operators into leaving their union: In April, union officials told the national labor board that “high level KIRO managers intimidated employee witnesses and told them that they had 24 hours to either quit the union or they would lose their jobs.”
But the NLRB didn’t see it the way the union did; the charges were found to be without merit. The union is “very much in disagreement” with the NLRB’s dismissal of the charges, Marshall said, and is appealing.
In addition to all of this, the union filed a formal grievance with KIRO management on April 11 over what Marshall said was “their assignment of nonunion employees to union editing work.” That complaint is now heading for arbitration on September 22.
“The viewers of Seattle expect better,” Marshall said of KIRO’s behavior over the last year. The union has collected thousands of online signatures in support of its fight and posted an article about its plight on an IBEW website.
But the question remains: Is it willing to go further?
Marshall said a strike is no one’s “first option,” but she didn’t take the possibility off the table.
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Even the names these unions use sound like gangs.
The Stranger = Scab newspaper
*is proud to be a scab …. or would be if those careers were in her field of skills* What’s wrong with scabs? Scabs cover gaping wounds to stop them from bleeding to death.
#3 and #1
a) A scab is just a worker who betrays another worker, serving only the wealthy in the process. Workers who break strikes never make life better for working people, either in the long-run OR the short run. The misery experienced by working people in the Reagan Eighties bears this out.
b) You just compared union names to the names of GANGS?
What’s so gangsta about a name like “The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers”?
Do you actually approve of management trying to force union workers to give up their union membership(the only protection from workplace abuse or injustice that any working person has)is ACCEPTABLE?
And a strike or other industrial action cannot seriously be compared to “a bleeding wound”. The actual bleeding wound is the continuous bloody economic assault on the wages, safety, dignity and security of working people in this country since 1980. Unions are guilty of nothing but trying to protect workers from being screwed.
Then again, anyone who believes in the delusions of Ayn Rand, as you clearly do, doesn’t give a damn about people who actually work for a living…NONE of whom benefit from “small government” or “the invisible hand of the market” or the right of the boss to do whatever the hell she or he wants to do to her employees.
The economic values you defend are the values of the playground bully.
@4 Workers who want to work don’t support the wealthy, they support their families, period.
Anti-union dood, profits are merely stolen wages from those who actually make things and provide real services. Whose side are you on? Those who only manipulate the legal and financial systems with their crony connections to extract the value of the real workers? Or the people who actual build and produce shit?
But that concept is probably too big for you Koch Suckers to grasp.
@6 Um …. you do realize that without people running things in corporations, no one would be able to get a paycheck. Morons wanted to keep breeding so we have so many people, now in order to keep all those workers organized so the company makes money is to have someone specialize. Also, profits are what’s left after wages, not before. If you would rather drug cartels controlled businesses, move to Mexico.
Not necessarily. It is possible for large firms to be collectively owned and run democratically…
You should read about the Mondragon Cooperatives…they demonstrate exactly how such collective enterprises can be run, and run well.
You call yourself a liberal, but your liberalism doesn’t extend to people who work for a living and who do the only thing workers CAN do to defend their rights…organize into unions.
And the problem can’t be reduced to people having too many kids. Life is never that simple, and it’s arrogant to reduce everything to what disconnected individuals do.
Truly “green” values involve recognizing that the world can’t be run, indefinitely, for the short-term self-interest of the wealthy.
Also…if you put it on people having “too many kids”…you’re basically attacking the working class for daring to reproduce. Are you SURE you want to go there?
@8 Funny thing about black and white, it’s not natural nor really possible, humans (like all living things) don’t always fit into labels.
My “liberalism” is really just that a majority of my ideals fit into that category and do not come close to the “conservative” ideology. Organizing into unions only defends the rights of the few workers who actually like that union, not the ones who don’t like that union. Therefore, unionizing is forcing people to take a career other than what they want, no matter how it’s spun, and that’s not liberal at all because you are taking away a right to choose. Unions are REALLY bigoted toward non-union workers, we are a threat to them, a huge one, because we don’t pay their leaders to sit around most of the time thinking about what mixed drink they want to order. Sorry, I’m for freedom of choice, and unions go against that.
@10 …. yes, I do want to go there. I hear all this complaining about negative impacts on the “working class” while the majority of the US is working class, it’s not the working class you are defending, it’s the union class, the working class already control the votes, and most of us don’t like unions at all.