by Rod Benson
Benson is an intern at CJR.

Inside NBC's new editorial pool for producers, newswriters, and directors, it's a normal working day: one person is reading Remembrance of Things Past; another is writing a book; seven or eight people sit around chatting, waiting for something to do. Pool members -- half of whom are over fifty and all but one of whom are over forty -- say they want to work but are systematically being underemployed in what they see as an effort to force them to quit. NBC, they say, is intent on replacing them with cheap young recruits, but is barred from doing so in most cases by seniority clauses in union contracts.

"It's not a pool, it's a gulag," says Calvin Siemer, vice-president of NABET, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, which represents newswriters and some producers, as well as many technical employees, at NBC. The pool's location adds, to its members' sense of isolation. While most of NBC News operates out of the third and fourth floors of Rockefeller Center, the "pool room" is located on the seventeenth floor, down the hall from Saturday Night Live.

NBC says every attempt is being made to utilize the twenty-two pool members, most of whom found themselves out of their jobs when the network's news shows were ordered to cut back and reshuffle their staffs last fall. Several others assigned to the pool had been employed by Skycom, NBC's syndicated news service for affiliates, before it was relocated to North Carolina and became the NBC News Channel. Network officials defend the pool as a flexible and creative solution to a staffing problem. "During the war, the pool was really cooking," says Don Browne, vice-president for news. (Pool members concede that there was more to do during the gulf conflict, and that a few members are getting fairly regular work even now.) "Let's put this in context," says Peggy Hubble, director of the NBC News press office. "This is not something unique to NBC News. These are people who have jobs in a time when many people don't have jobs."

Two former pool members have received permanent assignments, and Browne says he is frustrated that other pool members aren't applying for jobs opening up on new NBC shows like A Closer Look, Expose, and Real Life with Jane Pauley. Pool members, for their part, say that when they apply for these jobs they are turned away. And they cite several instances in which the network has brought on "per diems" or used young research assistants as newswriters or field producers while veterans in the pool treaded water.

"They seem to think they can hire people off the street and have them perform the job of experienced newspeople," says Bernard Brown, a sixty-three-year-old pool member who won an Emmy in 1989 when he was senior producer of Weekend Nightly News. (Other pool members asked that their names not be printed.) In a March 5 Washington Post story, NBC News president Robert Wright was paraphrased as saying that television stations could cut costs by replacing highly paid, experienced hands with "hungry twenty-three-year-olds." Betty Hudson, senior vice-president for corporate communications, says that the comment was taken out of context and that her boss had been referring to a hypothetical situation, not network policy. Wright was expressing his "frustration" at seeing so many resumes from bright young people and not being able to hire them "even when in many cases they could probably do a better job than more experienced people," she says. The day after the Post story appeared, Wright issued a memo to all NBC employees reiterating the network's policy against discrimination, including age discrimination.

Despite network assurances that it wants to use pool members, all twenty-two were among those offered buyouts by NBC in March. In the meantime, some pool members say they are being given "demeaning" assignments, such as answering phones or delivering mail, as an inducement to leave.

NABET has filed a grievance with an impartial arbitrator, charging NBC with discrimination based on age and union activity (six pool members are pursuing a longstanding suit accusing NBC of failing to pay for overtime). "Nothing can prevent the company from creating a pool," says Siemer, "but they can't create it in a discriminatory manner." For now, pool members estimate that seven or eight of them will accept the buyout. Too young to retire early, too old to start somewhere else, the rest figure they'll stick it out with NBC as long as they can.

"If nothing else," says one, "it's a chance to catch up on my reading."

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