Planet Money - The secret entrance that sidesteps Hollywood picket lines

Episode Date: August 26, 2023

Across Hollywood right now, writers and actors are picketing in front of studio lots. They're walking back and forth, holding up signs demanding concessions on things like pay, how many writers work on projects, and the use of AI in TV and movies.But, on some of these lots, there are these strange alternate entrances where there are no picketers. Here drivers can come and go as they please without ever encountering any sign of a strike.Behold the neutral gate. An entrance intended for people who work at these lots but don't work for production companies that are involved with these particular strikes. (Usually that means things like game shows or TV commercials.)But, as one group of picketers recently experienced, it's hard to know if these entrances are, in fact, only being used by neutral parties or if the entrances might be being abused.On today's episode, the question of whether one Hollywood production was taking advantage of the neutral gate, and what the fight over a driveway can teach us about the broader labor battles in Hollywood and across the country.This episode was hosted by Dave Blanchard and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, with reporting from Kenny Malone. It was produced by James Sneed and engineered by James Willetts. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Keith Romer. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Two notes before we start. This episode is about unions going on strike. Full disclosure, we are members of the SAG-AFTRA union, part of which is on strike. But broadcasters are covered by a different contract, so we are not on strike. Also, somebody swears in this episode. This is Planet Money from NPR. Back in May, members of the Writers Guild of America walked off the job. They were trying to get TV and film studios that they work for to make concessions on things like pay and how many writers work on projects and not using AI to replace them.

On day 93 of that strike, we headed to Los Angeles. strike, we headed to Los Angeles. About 15 riders are holding signs, walking back and forth in front of this giant filming lot called Television City. How do you tell the difference between a friendly honk and an unfriendly honk? When somebody yells out and shouts at us, get back to work. That's pretty clear. Yeah. That is TV writer Bill Wolkoff. In the before times, he wrote on the new Star Trek show. But now he's one of the strike captains here at Television City, in charge of organizing the picketers, making sure they're out blocking the entrance to the studio when they're allowed to be, and that they get out of the way of cars when they have to.

As Bill talks to us, a car starts to pull out of the studio parking lot. You can see there's a black convertible that's trying to leave the lot right now. And as long as we have pedestrians with picket signs moving back and forth, cars can't come or go, and it slows down the company a little bit. This, of course, is kind of your standard operating picket line. Union members going back and forth at the entrance to a company they're in a labor dispute with. They're trying to make it as difficult as possible for that company to keep up business as usual until their demands are met. But we had come here to see this weird other entrance to the studio that we'd heard about.

We walk around the corner. About 500 yards away, there's a totally separate gate to get into Television City. there's a totally separate gate to get into Television City. And folks who want to come in here can come in without having to cross a picket line because strikers can't picket here. But only some people are actually allowed to use this entrance. This gate is for productions that are not part of the strike, ones made by companies that aren't involved in this dispute, things like game shows, commercials. Bill points to a sign that the Television city folks put up to clarify the rules. Well, the sign there that the studio by law has to

put up identifies which shows may not traffic through this gate. These are the shows that, according to the rules of strike warfare, shall not pass through the unpicketed gate. These ones are being produced by companies that the WGA is striking against. Real time with Bill Maher, Late Late Show, Hacks, Bold and the Beautiful, Young and the Restless. The idea is that any neutral parties, they don't have to enter the battlefield of this strike. They get their own neutral gate. And that makes some sense. A picket is supposed to slow down production for the businesses that are being picketed, to make potential picket crossers think twice about going to work, or to be inconvenienced if they do decide to go to work.

So why should someone who's totally unrelated to that dispute have to get bogged down by it? When you're standing there watching cars and trucks go in and out of the lot, figuring out who is who can get a little complicated. Television City truck is about to drive into the neutral gate here. The truck Bill is pointing to, it just says Television City on the side. But there isn't really any way for Bill to tell what exactly this truck is here for. for Bill to tell what exactly this truck is here for. If they were bringing equipment or props or set pieces to one of the soap operas that is shooting at Television City, that would be a violation of the neutral game.

But we'll never be able to prove that because you can't see inside that truck. And this is why we'd come to LA and why we were talking to Bill. Because Bill had become obsessed with proving that one of these TV shows was cheating. Was trying to get around his picket line by sneaking through a neutral gate. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. And I'm Dave Blanchard. Today on the show, how we ended up with this strange system that controls where strikers can and can't picket. And Bill Wolkoff's fight to overcome it, at least at one neutral gate, to expand the number of places his writers were allowed to picket. It's a story worthy of the soap operas that film a television city.

It has spycraft, allies turned antagonists, and because this is Planet Money, some obscure labor movement history involving sailors. Okay, so funny story about this show and real life. This episode was originally co-reported with the great Kenny Malone. But Kenny is all of a sudden on parental leave. So number one, congratulations, Kenny. Mazel tov, buddy. And number two, you will hear Kenny in some of the next part of the show.

Just roll with it. Okay, so let's reset. The neutral gate system that strike captain Bill Wolkoff found so frustrating, that is not a new system. In fact, the rules that govern it have been around for decades. To walk us through that history, we reached out to someone who's an expert on those rules and brought her into our DC studios. And I don't have to push any of these buttons. I would encourage you to push as few buttons as humanly possible inside of the studio as a general rule.

Wilma Liebman is an expert on labor law, not on NPR studio technology. She used to be the chair of the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB is the federal agency that's basically the judicial body for labor cases. And Wilma explains that in the 1940s, unions were incredibly powerful. About one in three private sector workers were in a union. And there was this wave of strikes across all sorts of industries at the time. And Wilma says one of the big tactics unions used in those strikes was what's called a secondary boycott. Here is what that might have looked like. Let's take an auto manufacturer.

There's a strike there. So, of course, the workers would picket the auto plant and try to shut that down. But then there are all these secondary businesses that are somehow connected to the carmaker, where the union might also want to show up and picket. Maybe the car workers' union goes to the car company's bank. And says, unless you get the auto company to agree to our demands, we're going to put up a picket line around your place.

And you can see how the battlefield of this strike could expand pretty quickly. The union could picket at a tire plant because they're providing tires for the carmaker. Or they could show up and picket a car dealership because they are actually selling the cars on behalf of the carmaker. And the hope for the union with all of this is that the secondary companies are like,

hey, carmaker, can you please figure out your worker problems and get these picketers off my sidewalk? You know, settle this damn thing. Just give them what they want. This secondary boycotting strategy, Wilma says, was very effective. Because remember what the unions are trying to do with their strike. They're trying to make it so expensive for the company to not meet their demands that the company will have to come to the table. the economic battlefield to cause financial pain from more directions, which, unsurprisingly, did not go over so well with, you know, banks, carmakers, businesses in general, or with the Republican-controlled Congress at the time. In 1947, that Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which weakened union power in a bunch of different ways, including an almost total ban on this whole secondary boycotting practice. Right. The new rule basically said

you can only picket your primary employer, which sounds simple enough, except it was almost immediately an ambiguous mess. Case in point, a 1950 case known as Moore-Drydock. And what it involved was the employees of a ship that had a dispute with the shipping company. Okay, so the employees of a ship. So what are they? They're sailors. These are sailors. They're sailors. So these are angry sailors. They're angry sailors. The specific ship these sailors had beef with, its name was the SS Fofo. and their beef was that the Fofo's owner had hired a bunch of non-union workers. The angry unionized sailors, they want to picket the SS Fofo. Problem is, the Fofo was having some work done on it at the Moore dry dock company.

So the question was, if the sailors just show up and picket in front of this Moore dry dock place, does that break the new law? Does that count as a secondary boycott? The dry dock case ended up in front of the National Labor Relations Board and? What the board took out of this case is, and this is a little dry, it came up with. Pun intended or no? Oh. Okay, not intended, clearly.

Not intended. There you go. But what the board did was come up with four tests. Four conditions. Basically to determine when and where someone is allowed to picket in a case like this, like the SSFOFO. So condition number one, the physical thing you're picketing has to actually be on the premises. your picketing has to actually be on the premises. Number two, the employer your picketing has to actively be doing business during your picket. Number three, you have to make clear that your picket is only against your employer. And most importantly for our purposes, number four. The picketing is limited to places reasonably close to the location of the disputed ship. And this is what leads to the gate system.

The neutral gate system. The sailors were allowed to picket the SS Fofo while it was at the dry dock, but they had to be careful. They couldn't accidentally picket some other ship at the dry dock. And you can see pretty easily how 73 years later, this ruling kind of morphs into the situation at Television City. You've got striking writers in dispute with some of the production companies filming at Television City, but not all of them. But the whole neutral gate system only works if both sides play by the rules. And Bill Wolkoff, the strike captain at Television City, he suspected that the other side was not playing by the rules.

That people working for some of those shows that weren't supposed to be using this gate were using it. He remembers the very first day he saw the neutral gate. I saw the shiny gate that cars were just coming and going from willy-nilly as if there was no strike going on. And Bill's attention was drawn to the drivers of some of the fancier cars using the gate. There are really good-looking actor types going through these neutral gates right now. And I found it hard to believe that all of those cars were, you know, neutral parties. It was just a hunch. Yes, probably some of those really good looking actor types and some of the fancy cars they were driving were probably neutral parties in all of this.

But remember, if even one of them wasn't. If they're going through a neutral gate, they are avoiding the picket line. And that's cheating. That means it's not neutral anymore. And we lawfully should be able to picket it. That means it's not neutral anymore, and we lawfully should be able to picket it. All Bill had to do was catch someone using the neutral gate who was not allowed to use it. I'll be honest, it was a little bit like Ahab seeing the white whale for the first time.

It felt like a challenge immediately. Is that what you're saying? You're like, this is my quest now. Oh, yeah. I am going to monitor the—I don't know if I can swear at this, but. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to monitor the fuck out of this gate. After the break, strike captain Ahab sets out to catch his sneaky white whale. U.S. Treasuries are risk-free, default-free, super tradable,

and they enable the United States to borrow tons of money anytime from almost anyone. It's the biggest superpower economically that the U.S. has. We're using the money to essentially fund our daily lives. A look under the hood at what makes U.S. treasuries so powerful. That's in our most recent bonus episode for Planet Money Plus supporters. Strike Captain Bill had a hunch that some show was sneakily using the neutral gate. And if he could prove it, the writers could flip the gate. They could start to picket there.

They could actually gain some territory in the fight with the studios. But how to prove it? The writers weren't allowed to picket at the neutral gate, but they were allowed to sit at the gate and monitor it. So the union sent a few writers to be observers. You know, like a stakeout, take pictures, write down license plate numbers in this log they were keeping. Classic detective stuff. One day, one of Bill's monitors was sitting there at the neutral gate when a truck pulled up. Before he drove through, the driver gave the observer a tip. The truck driver said to my neutral gate observer,

my bosses just told me to go through the neutral gate. And I work for Young and the Restless. Bill was right. There was a cheating show. The Young and the Restless was not allowed to use the neutral gate. Bill was

furious. This was worse than the time that Nick did Victoria dirty. You betrayed me. Or like when Phyllis and Nick finally broke up. You have no appreciation for how hard that would be. Oh my god, don't even say that to me. Or like when Summer suspects that Diane killed her mom. Then you will get exactly what you deserve for ripping my mother out of all of our lives. There's like 50 years of these moments, so we could be doing this all day. I mean, there are worse ways to spend a day. That sounds like the dream.

But yes, now Bill knew what show was allegedly sneaking through the neutral gate to film. I said, wow, that's huge. To be clear, this was not Bill's smoking gun. Not yet. It's not like the Teamsters truck had like a giant Young and the Restless logo on the outside. No. Proof would require catching someone much more closely tied to the show going through the gate. You know, someone whose name actually showed up in the credits. And Bill had a pretty good idea what he was looking for. Hot people. Just gotta catch a young and the restless actor

going through the neutral gate. But almost immediately, Bill realized that he and the other gate monitors had a pretty major blind spot. Most of them were not huge soap opera buffs. Yeah, they saw lots of people come and go through the gate who looked like soap opera stars, but Bill couldn't tell, I don't know, the actor who plays Tucker McCall from, say, the one who plays Victor Newman. And honestly, neither can we. We had to Google Young and the Restless Names just to write that last sentence. If it was Days of Our Lives, I would have had us covered.

More like Daves of Our Lives. But then one day, Bill noticed someone standing on the picket line, a Writers Guild member he'd never seen before. This writer introduced herself and told me that she was a former Young and the Restless writer. And I said, wow, this is fantastic. Did you contain your glee at that moment? I tried to. Inside inside I was containing it,

but my face was saying, you are my new best friend, let's never part because I need you right now so badly. And he seemed pleased that I was willing to volunteer to participate. Sarah Bebell worked and wrote for Young and the Restless for 13 years, and she agreed to take some shifts monitoring the gate.

But at first, she didn't see anything either. All sorts of cars were coming and going. But no one young or restless enough to fit the bill. Days went by like this. Weeks. Until finally... Like it was like right like over here. Sarah points to the driveway out of the lot at the neutral gate.

I saw, you know, a white pickup truck. A nice pickup truck? Yeah, it was a nice pickup truck, yes. She thought she recognized the truck. It came a little bit closer, and then she saw the driver's face. And a very recognizable face, you know she saw the driver's face. And a very recognizable face, you know. He's a very handsome guy.

He does not look like your average Joe. The people on soaps are pretty much the best-looking people on Earth. So he was very recognizable, and I was like, oh my God, there he goes. There's Mark Grossman. Mark Grossman, who, according to IMDb, has played the character Adam Neumann in 1,008 episodes of The Young and the Restless. And his character has gone through a lot. I have lost nearly three years of my life, then almost immediately got shot. Now, my memory's back. But I don't feel connected to anybody except for that little boy.

And he just, you know, pulled out, made a right turn. And you had enough time to snap a photo. I had enough time to snap a photo. At least of the truck and the license plate. Sorry, Mark, if you're listening to this, I do not mean to make you the bad guy. You were just trying to get home or to lunch or wherever you were going, I'm sure. Sarah sent the picture of the truck over to Bill. I went back through the logs and I found other instances of Mark going through. or to lunch or wherever you were going, I'm sure. Sarah sent the picture of the truck over to Bill.

I went back through the logs and I found other instances of Mark going through. I said, oh, he went through this time. Oh, he went through that time because we had a month and a half of logs. We did reach out to Mark Grossman and he declined to comment for the story. But to his credit, he did happen to deliver some fancy sodas

to the picketers the morning we visited. Hot and nice. The Young and the Restless also declined to comment for this story, and Television City didn't respond to our attempts to reach them. But either way, Bill had the evidence he was looking for. His union's lawyer told him, Congrats. As far as I'm concerned, you've shown that this neutral gate isn't neutral anymore. We had proven it. We had proven that this neutral gate was being abused. And tomorrow, we were going to be able to picket it. Bill and his team had done it. Thanks to their weeks-long

stakeout, they'd managed to flip the gate from neutral to one they could picket at. And now they had one more place where they could try to gum up the studio machinery. The next day, the writers set up shop at the newly flipped gate. Bill took me to that formerly neutral gate at Television City. So, and that's a flipped gate over there, right? So we could go over there. There are like 15 people there all chatting and holding signs. As you can see, this is a very clear picket line. So anybody entering the studio through this gate has to cross a picket line. The drivers who come through this gate, they are now confronted directly by the fact that there is a

strike going on. This is no longer neutral territory. And if you ask Bill what it actually means that he managed to flip that one gate, you kind of get two answers. First, there's the answer that sounds a bit more idealistic. The neutral gate for Bill was like a hill he'd given everything to try and conquer. This is the battleground that me and the other captains that I'm working with have been tasked with. So it's important to us. And flipping this gate probably won't be the thing that gets the studios back to the table, but even if it moves the needle just a smidge, then it's a victory to me. But then Bill's second answer is more pragmatic. It's about the actual effect of what he'd accomplished. There was a marked increase

in angry drivers driving into our picket lines. It's a daily occurrence. Frustrated employees who don't want to be inconvenienced at two separate gates. And we'll see how this affects my career, but I'm fine if the people in this studio are super annoyed with me. Annoyance. That is the big tactic that Bill can use in this much larger war of economic attrition going on between the Hollywood unions and the studios. Annoy enough people at enough different picket lines, and maybe you end up closer to getting the deal you want. money at npr.org. A voice memo is also always appreciated. You can also send your questions to our Instagram or Facebook at Planet Money. Today's episode was produced by James Sneed. It was mixed by James Willits and Debbie Daughtry. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Keith Romer. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to our very own Kenny

Malone and his recently expanded family. Congrats, Kenny. Thanks also to Megan Amram and Jeremy Benny. I'm Dave Blanchard. And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.