The Golf Channel’s audio and video production teams walked off the job this Sunday to protest working conditions. The walk off affected three tournaments’ coverage, including the Bahamas Great Exuma Classic, the Diamond Resorts Invitational in Orlando, and the Sony Open in Hawaii.
The AP reports that the Golf Channel has been negotiating contracts with International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which is a union that represents the golf production crew.
“Golf Channel has been working on negotiating an agreement for nine months with a union that represents our live tournament technicians,” The Golf Channel said in a publicly released statement. “Those efforts have not yet yielded a resolution, and we look forward to reaching a mutually agreeable contract. However, some technicians have chosen to walk off the job today. We have contingency plans in place, and will continue to deliver coverage.”
Over 30 members of the union protested just outside of Waialae Country Club in Honolulu.
It’s a pretty bold move to fly all the way to Hawaii only to picket outside of the country club you’re supposed to be working at. That takes some serious guts. Some might even call that the quintessential American fighting spirit. Especially in Hawaii, when tensions are already running so high.
In fact, if you travel to Hawaii on the same weekend that the island thinks it’s about to get incinerated by a North Korean nuke, it’s your moral prerogative to protest work. You think our Founding Fathers would have wanted us working in the middle of the threat of a nuclear holocaust?
Certainly not. They would have wanted us picketing on a beautiful island during our potential last minutes, throwing back some cold ones. If the Golf Channel production team thought they were living on borrowed time, they spent it in the absolute best way possible.