Stagehands End Walkout on Broadway

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON of the New York Times

Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Published: November 29, 2007

The league representing Broadway’s theater owners and producers and the union representing its stagehands announced a settlement last night, bringing to an end a strike that had shuttered most of Broadway for 19 days, disrupted the plans of thousands of theatergoers and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues.
The accord ended the second strike on Broadway in five years but the longest since a 25-day musicians’ strike in 1975. A musicians’ strike in 2003 lasted just four days.

The announcement came around 10:30 last night, capping a third day of marathon negotiations, and was met by cheering stagehands, with nearly 100 gathering outside the law offices where the negotiations had been taking place.

Leaving around 10:45 p.m., Charlotte St. Martin, the executive director of the League of American Theaters and Producers, announced: “Performances begin tomorrow night.”

In a statement issued later, she said, “the contract is a good compromise that serves our industry.”

About five minutes after Ms. St. Martin left the building, senior union officials, including James J. Claffey Jr., the president of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the stagehands’ union, came outside to louder applause, holding their fingers in the air to represent Local 1.

“You represented yourselves and your families and your union proud,” Mr. Claffey said to the stagehands who had gathered. The membership of the union is scheduled to vote on the settlement in 10 days. Local 1 officials would not comment on the chances of ratification, but officials on the union negotiating committee seemed happy with the terms of the five-year contract.

“It’s equitable for everyone involved,” said Kevin McGarty, a business manager for Local 1. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a statement last night, called the agreement “great news not just for everyone who earns their living on or around Broadway, but for everyone who lives in, works in, or visits New York City.”

About 350 of the 2,200 active members of the union participated in the walkout, which began Nov. 10.

The strike, the first in the union’s 121-year history, darkened 31 theaters, shuttering 27 shows and one Duran Duran concert, which moved elsewhere. Eight shows remained open on Broadway in theaters that maintained separate contracts with the union, though a ninth — “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical” — was reopened Friday after a judge granted an injunction forcing the theater to let the show run.

Broadway lost out on millions, posting ticket sales of $7.2 million for the two weeks that ended on Sunday. Last season, Broadway grossed $42 million for the two comparable weeks.

The city comptroller’s office reported that the strike was costing the city $2 million a day, which would mean almost $40 million in lost revenue over the two and a half weeks of the strike.

Many shows will resume performances tonight but it is up to the individual productions to decide if a day is enough to get back onstage. There are a variety of logistical obstacles to opening up a show that has been dark for two and a half weeks, from restarting complicated machinery to doing the dry cleaning, all of which may take longer than a day for some of the bigger shows.

At the center of this dispute were work rules in the stagehands’ contract that the producers’ league considered costly and inefficient. The league wanted changes to several rules, including those governing how many stagehands must come to work every day that a show is being loaded into a theater; minimum lengths of time for which stagehands can be called to work; and the kinds of tasks stagehands are allowed to perform during certain work calls.

From the beginning, Mr. Claffey said the union would be open to changes in return for benefits of equal value. But the league, pushed by a more aggressive generation of producers, was determined to cut labor costs.

For months the sides bargained, and some changes were made, if not the major ones the producers originally sought. And in the last few days, the negotiations came down to how much the union thought these changes were worth.

The sides met for three long days at the law offices of Proskauer Rose, the firm representing the league, where they calculated the value of each other’s offers and went back and forth in old-fashioned horse trading to arrive at a series of wage increases that both sides could live with.

Neither side released details of the settlement.

But among the changes the league was able to achieve, according to officials involved in the talks, was a daily minimum of 17 stagehands on the load-in, the lengthy and costly period when a production is loaded into a theater. In the recently expired contract, producers would set a number of stagehands needed for a load-in — say, 35 — and all of them would have to stay every day for the entirety of the load-in, an arrangement that producers said often left large groups of stagehands with nothing to do.

(Page 2 of 2)

The league was also able to gain an extra hour on the continuity call, the hour before or after a performance when stagehands perform duties related to that performance. In the old contract, any work that took longer than one hour required a minimum four-hour work call. In the tentative deal, stagehands can be called for two hours before a performance or for an hour before and after, though they would earn double for the hour after the show.

In return for these changes and others, union members would get yearly raises well above the 3.5 percent that the league had been offering.

The league was determined for these negotiations to be different from past talks, raising a $20 million fund to weather a work stoppage, declaring a deadline and floating the possibility that it would lock the stagehands out.

The talks, which were at times acrimonious, broke down in early October, with both sides presenting what they called final offers. On Oct. 12, the stagehands voted unanimously to give union officials authority to call a strike; four days later, the league announced it was imposing parts of its final offer on the stagehands, and the scene was set.

On Nov. 8, Thomas C. Short, the president of Local 1’s parent union, gave Local 1 strike authority and the next day he ordered the stagehands to walk out. The strike began at 10 a.m. on Nov. 10, a Saturday.

The mayor offered to provide a mediator and a neutral place to talk, an offer that the union repeatedly declined.

The latest round of talks came about after a series of back-channel conversations between league members and union officials. The two sides met until just before dawn on Monday, recessed until that evening and went for a second all-night session that ended after dawn on Tuesday. Then, after what union officials called a “rain delay,” the final day of talks began yesterday morning with the contentious financial issues still to be resolved.

Asked about the protracted length of the negotiations, Mr. McGarty said: “There were a lot of issues that had to be ironed out one at a time.”

The league seemed happy with the outcome, or at least happy that the strike was finally over. “Everyone was thrilled,” said Alecia Parker, an executive producer of the musical “Chicago” and a member of the league’s negotiating committee. “Everyone was shaking hands.”