Broadway Strike Finally Ends
According to the New York Times: The 19-day strike by stagehands that had closed most Broadway theaters ended late Wednesday night as a tentative agreement was struck. Union members were instructed Wednesday evening to take down their picket lines and report to the Local 1 offices on West 46th Street in anticipation of an announcement, which came at about 10:30 p.m.
The negotiations between the League of American Theaters and Producers and Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees had begun at 10 a.m., the third marathon session of the week.
According to several people from both sides involved in the negotiations, the dispute over work rules for the stagehands which had been at the core of the talks from the beginning had been resolved. The main sticking point was hammering out a financial package of raises and other compensation.
The league had been pushing hard to change some of the work rules that its members considered unreasonable and anachronistic, such as those governing how many stagehands must be present during the long process when a show is loaded into a theater. But James J. Claffey Jr., the president of Local 1, had insisted that any changes in the rules, which the union felt had been hard-won over many decades of bargaining, must be accompanied by benefits of equal value.
