The Playgoer: Countdown to Lockout

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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Countdown to Lockout

Two views:

"We are forced to implement because Local One will not pursue meaningful change."
-Charlotte St. Martin, President of the League of American Theatres and Producers.

"We negotiate our own contracts, and we're perfectly willing to sit down with the league any time they are willing to negotiate."
-Bruce Cohen, spokesman for Local One chapter of the IATSE stagehands union.

Excuse my pro-union bias, but... Doesn't the "meaningful" in "meaningful change" pretty much mean "profitable"?

1 comment:

Tony Adams said...

Perhaps, reading from a far, I'm not understanding the full story. What I'm hearing is the main sticking point is load-ins.

The producers only want to pay people when they actually need them to work.

The union wants to be guaranteed that if someone is needed for one day they are paid for the entire time of load-in.

Normally I'm pro-union, but if the fight is about the right to be paid to sit there, it smacks of everything that is bad about unions, which to many negates everything that is good about organized labor.

Is this the case?