Mediators Offer Aid to Both Sides in Broadway Strike

In a move that could bolster negotiations between the Broadway stagehands' union and the producers' league, federal mediation experts are monitoring the situation and have extended offers to help with talks during daily telephone calls to both parties. The talks were suspended late Sunday night with no future dates set.

Neither the League of American Theaters and Producers nor the stagehands' union, Local One, has accepted the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service's offer, and both parties must unanimously agree for the mediators to sit at the negotiating table, a regional mediation director who oversees New York, John Sweeney, said. The federal agency serves as a mediator rather than as an enforcement agency, and does not impose solutions on either party.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, employers or a union must provide written notice to the other party and the mediation agency 60 days before the collective bargaining agreement is to expire if either party plans to propose modifications to the contract.

The agency's current involvement in the negotiations comprises daily status checks via telephone to each party individually, a spokesman for the agency, John Arnold, said. If the parties agree to the offer, what is discussed will be confidential, he added.

The agency is involved in 5,500 collective bargaining agreements annually, out of about 20,000 total contract disputes nationwide, and it is able to settle about 86% each fiscal year, Mr. Arnold said. Mediators from the agency were in constant contact — though not at the negotiating table — with General Motors and the Union of Automobile Workers during the autoworkers' strike in the fall, and they are currently involved in the Writer's Guild of America strike in Hollywood.

A mediator and arbitrator with the private alternative dispute resolution firm JAMS, Marvin Johnson, said the role of a neutral party is essentially to bring a freshness to talks once they reach a stalemate.

"People from the outside look at it differently. You can be creative — maybe they've overlooked something," Mr. Johnson, who has worked on labor and employment negotiations for nearly 30 years and has been following the Broadway strike, said.

"The mediators from the government don't have an interest in favoring one side or the other. The interest is to try to get them to resolve it, not to resolve it in a way that favors one side or another," he added.

The union is not interested in the federal official's offer, a spokesman said. "Local One's attitude is we can negotiate our own contract," the spokesman, Bruce Cohen, said. "We've got the best lawyers in the world of labor."

The negotiation attorney for the league, Bernard Plum, said he could not comment when asked if the federal agency was in touch with him, and if the league was interested in its offer.

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg again offered city services to help mediate the talks. In the past, the league has said it is interested in working with the city to negotiate, while the union has declined such offers.

After a full weekend of negotiations, talks broke off when the producers informed Local One that the specifics of its offer, which were not made public, were not sufficient. New negotiation dates have not been set, and the union ordered picket lines to go back up in front of 31 theaters on Broadway. The league has canceled all affected performances through November 25.