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Seattle TV Members Fight for Free Speech, Bargaining Rights

April 15, 2011

Local 46 member Cecilia Evans at work at Seattle's KING

The irony wasn’t lost on the The Stranger, one of two remaining newspapers in Seattle after the 2009 shutdown of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In a March 30 story, the paper reported that IBEW members at two city TV stations—that had been following the labor battles in Wisconsin and across the nation—were having their own collective bargaining battles behind closed doors.

Seattle Local 46’s contract covering engineers at KING expired last October. The contract with KIRO, covering editors, technical directors, engineers and others expired one month earlier.

While both stations have been organized for over 30 years, Business Representative and former shop steward  Angela Marshall, who worked as a technical director and director at KIRO, says that both stations are attempting to impose conditions that would curtail the ability of workers to defend their gains in the future. She says:

What we get from both stations is a constant argument about their need for “more flexibility.” But what they really want is not to be forced  to answer to a union about their decisions.

At KIRO, owned by Cox Enterprises, managers want to gut language on past practice and remove rights to effects bargaining.  But, just as importantly, they want Local 46 members to commit to a clause that would bar workers from hand-billing and informational picketing. Says Marshall:

This is a free speech issue. We haven’t even passed out any fliers yet about the current contract negotiations. But these are the kinds of things we often depend upon in bargaining.

While many of the bargaining unit members at KIRO have between 20 and 40 years of service, the station has recently hired some new workers.“They are really involved in fighting for a decent contract,” says Marshall. 

KIRO is offering no wage increases in the first and second years of the contract and only a 2 percent increase in the third year. Union members would agree to wage concessions without giving up collective bargaining rights, but managers have rejected that compromise.

At KING, owned by the Belo Corp., managers are seeking the right to implement a wage freeze and/or furloughs in the middle of the contract. The company also wants to make unilateral changes in paid time off, including vacations, sick leave and holidays.

Workers’ discontent at the two stations is also driven by comparing their situations to those of fellow broadcasting members at Seattle’s KOMO, who organized over the past six years.They settled a contract on March 21 that included yearly wage increases of three percent with no restrictions on union rights.