Three Weeks Into Strike, Broadway Stagehands, Producers Resume Talks

As the Broadway strike enters its third week, negotiations between the stagehands' union, Local One, and the theater producers' league will focus on stagehands' wages and the producers' contributions to the union's health and pension benefits, according to a source close to the negotiations. When talks prematurely ended two weekends ago, the parties had nearly reached an unspecified agreement about work rules, which was one of the main disagreements going into the negotiations.

The union's international president, Thomas Short, will not be at the negotiating table for this round, which started Sunday morning, in a move that will make it a "more direct negotiation," the source said. Of the union's 2,000 active members, only between 350 and 500 work on the Broadway shows.

The two parties last met on November 18, when they negotiated for nearly 24 hours over two days. Reflecting on what the two sides could have learned from the previous round, a spokesman for the union, Bruce Cohen, said the stagehands are ready and willing to stay on the picket line, and will do whatever it takes to make a "fair and equitable deal."

A spokesman for the League of American Theaters and Producers said he would not comment on the negotiations.

While the parties resolved most of the hiring issues about load-ins, or how many stagehands could work while a show moves into a theater, at the heart of the current negotiations is the league's stance that producers should have more flexibility in hiring stagehands and what they are assigned to do during actual rehearsals and the running of a show. The stagehands maintain they should be hired for daily work, and paid separately for work they do outside the jobs for which they were originally hired. The producers claim that the stagehands could make $150,000 a year including benefits and overtime, but the union says that the figure extrapolates from weekly figures that could only be attained by working 52 weeks a year on a long-running show, and many jobs do not last that long. Instead, the union says that head stagehands earn $88,500 annually with benefits for eight performances a week.

Federal mediators from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service will not be at the negotiations table, despite the fact its regional mediators are in daily contact with both parties to offer their help.