The Early Years

Horse drawn line truck in San Francisco, early 1900s

1. DIVIDE & CONQUER

Workers were organizing on Pacific Gas and Electric Co. from the day the company came into existence.

In fact, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers had already organized seven separate locals on California Gas and Electric when that company merged with San Francisco Gas and Electric to form PG&E in 1905. It was an era when almost anything seemed possible for San Francisco’s workers and their unions.

In 1901, San Francisco voters elected Eugene Schmitz of the Union Labor Party as mayor, primarily because Schmitz promised to halt the use of police to break strikes. Another Union Labor Party candidate became mayor in 1909: P. H. McCarthy, president of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council.

But these impressive victories at the ballot box did not insure justice for working people in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. In 1907, Patrick Calhoun, head of United Railroads, imported strikebreakers and armed them with pistols to break a strike by the Street Carmen’s Union. That conflict resulted in the deaths of at least 25 people and another 2000 injured.

Business escalated its attack on organized labor in the second decade of the century when the Chamber of Commerce (with PG&E as one of its principal members) launched an open shop drive. The IBEW was a chief victim of this anti-labor campaign. The IBEW had become seriously divided in 1908 when a group of members known as the Reid faction seceded and formed a separate union. In 1910 the Reid faction, operating as the Pacific District Council, renewed the union contract with PG&E. It included wage increases, a closed shop and an expense allowance for keep of a horse and wagon.

In 1912, the merger of numerous unions, including the Reid faction of the IBEW, produced the Light and Power Council of California. But by this time PG&E was more interested in the open shop drive than in renewing union contracts. On May 7, 1913, the Reid faction struck PG&E. The International office of the IBEW sided with the other IBEW faction, known as the McNulty faction.

The strike was less than three weeks old when the McNulty faction and PG&E signed an agreement that contained less favorable terms than the previous contract. The new contract also specifically barred the hiring of members of the Reid faction.

However, the Reid faction continued its strike, drawing support from a number of local labor councils, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a militant union organizer named Tom Mooney who had also assisted the street carmen’s strike. But the American Federation of Labor convention in November of 1913 failed to support the Reid faction’s strike and on January 14, 1914, the strike collapsed.

Already PG&E was becoming well-practiced in the art of divide and conquer.

The start of World War I in Europe in 1914 had serious consequences for the US labor movement. America’s workers in the beginning generally opposed the war, viewing it as a capitalist war over markets in which innocent workers on both sides were the victims. Business leaders, however, tended to favor US intervention and in 1916 they sponsored numerous “Preparedness Day” parades around the country.

In San Francisco, the Preparedness Day Parade was organized by Thornwell Mullally, former counsel for the United Railroads and the man who had helped put down the 1907 street carmen strike. Business leaders hoped to whip up pro-war sentiment and use it to bolster their open shop ambitions.

Workers, not surprisingly, stayed away from the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade, held on July 22, 1916. As a contingent of marchers passed by PG&E headquarters on Market Street, a bomb exploded nearby, killing 10 people. Perjured testimony was used to convict union activists Tom Mooney and Warren Billings of murder, despite the fact that photographic evidence positively placed them far from the scene of the crime at the time of the bombing. To this day some unionists believe that PG&E itself was probably behind the bombing, while others believe that anarchists were more likely responsible.

Whoever was responsible, Tom Mooney, the union organizer who had assisted PG&E strikers, and Warren Billings were the ones unjustly railroaded to prison.

The year after World War I, 1919, brought with it an explosion of labor activism. American workers staged 3,630 strikes involving more than 4 million workers. Industry and government reacted swiftly and violently to this unprecedented series of labor uprisings. Industrial leaders organized the “American Plan”, an effort to identify the open shop with Americanism while identifying unions with the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The Industrial Association of San Francisco, which led the open shop drive on the Pacific Coast, had a secret agreement that required employers to cease doing business with any businessmen who signed union agreements.

The US government jumped feet first into the anti-labor crusade. It had already wiped out the leadership structure of the IWW in massive raids conducted in September of 1917. In 1919, US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer organized a “General Intelligence Division” and put a young FBI agent named J. Edgar Hoover in charge.

On January 2, 1920, Hoover launched massive raids on labor and political groups across the nation. Over 10,000 people were arrested, mailing lists were seized, membership records destroyed. A significant part of the labor movement, which had shown so much vitality in the wake of World War I, was destroyed virtually overnight. The part that survived was subjected to relentless corporate harassment under the so-called American Plan.

PG&E in 1921 seized this opportunity to cancel its agreement with the IBEW. For the next 12 years, unionism made no headway on the property, a fact that was reflected in the living standards of workers. In the middle of the “roaring 20’s”, when American business elite’s were making millions, much of it in wasteful speculation, wages for linemen at PG&E were frozen in 1927 at $170 per month.

And they stayed at that level for several years.