| Topic Name: |
CNN 25-Year Trivia |
| Message Name: |
Yeah, one thing I learned the hard way |
| Date Posted: |
05/19/2005 |
| In Reply To: |
The dirty little secret was that CNN was paying WOLD $25/hour for those technicians ("peons"), a very handsome rate at the time, but WOLD was paying them $6 - $7/hour and pocketing the rest. For a while CNN was making editors work 10-hour shifts but only paying them for eight. When the HR guy in Atlanta got wind of this illegal practice he got on the next plane to L.A. and put a stop to it.
Late at night people used to go up to Simply Blues, and when the elevator would stop on the CNN floor, people would see the logo and say, "Oh, CNN ... Ted Turner ... Atlanta". That's all they knew about CNN at the time. A few hours later, you would see those same people coming back down the elevator, but this time they were shit-faced. The Sunset-Vine tower is now vacant and I'm told it was condemned due to electrical problems.
I never had CNN at home because I could not justify the luxury of cable on my salary. How ironic that I could not afford to consume the very product that I worked on every day. The only reason CNN dealt with WOLD and all those fly-by-night contractors was that Ted was loathe to deal with unions. Even when CNN started turning a profit in the mid-'80s they still paid shit and treated the techs like peons. Ted Turner now owns half the state of Montana.
Now, who hurled the scanner radio? |
| Message: |
was not to mention union in Georgia. I was in favor of it in 1981/82 mainly because we had no work rules. I mean we had no breaks. When you arrived you were a "VJ" and that means you did camera, floor, prompter, and playback. I used to do 4 hours straight in playback. If you had to go to the bathroom, you better be able to do it during a commercial break. We had no shift differential either - you got the same pay for overnight as you did for days. Management just made up schedules and you worked them or else. They had people coming in all over the clock instead of standard shifts. I had a playback schedule where I came in at 1 AM and worked until 10 AM! It was nuts. The union thing was not really about pay, but about bringing some order and fairness to the employees. I had worked my way up to day shift when the union failed. The day after, management set out to fix everyone's wagon that supported NABET. They called me in and told me I was going to overnights. That was my punishment. I begged them not to do that to me, since I could not sleep on that schedule. They did me a BIG favor - they only moved me to nights, where I worked for the next 2 years. Big union supporters were driven out of the company or their careers with CNN were over.
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