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Attacking the Neanderthal

13. MARCHING TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER

While the IBEW was gathering strength in the countryside, PG&E workers in the Bay Area were marching to a different drummer.

In early 1941, a small group of men—probably fewer than a dozen—gathered in the Plaza Hotel at the corner of Salvio and Grant in Concord, California. It was hardly the setting for an historic event: a small bar in a two-story hotel described by one PG&E employee of that era as little more than a glorified rooming house. The Plaza Hotel has long since vanished from the city landscape, but the meeting in the bar that day turned out to be a landmark in local labor history.

The men in attendance were from PG&E’s three River Plants at Martinez, Avon and Oleum. They included Bert Mudgett, Bill Tod and John Hanson, all watch engineers. They included Don Hardie and Ray Michael, and Jim Cuthill, a fireman at Martinez. Also present was 25-year-old Ron Weakley.

Like Hardie and Riley, Weakley brought a union background with him to PG&E. His stepfather was a committed union man, a member of the IBEW since 1905. While Mitch Mitchell was in the north woods in the early 1930s learning unionism from the IWW, Weakley was dipped in the waters of labor activism during the 1934 Longshoremen strike in San Francisco. Only 19 years old at the time, Weakley pitched in and did what he could to aid the strikers. He was among the thousands of strikers and sympathizers who staged a dramatic silent march up Market Street to protest the killing of two union supporters on Bloody Thursday.

After spending four years in the Navy, Weakley worked briefly for the old Key system, now called AC Transit, and in 1940 hired on at PG&E for 50-cents an hour in the steam generation department in San Francisco. Like Hardie, Riley and Michael, Weakley was soon transferred to the River Plants in Contra Costa County where he became a watch engineer.

Those who attended the meeting at the Plaza Hotel credit Weakley with driving the group forward. Michael remembers Weakley this way:

“He acted like he had the experience and the background to know what to do and what to expect. And we just followed.”

And, indeed, there was little doubt in Weakley’s mind where the group was headed: the industrial unionism of the CIO.
14. ATTACKING THE NEANDERTHAL

The IBEW at that time was still primarily a union of linemen. It had barely a toehold among linemen at PG&E and showed little interest in other classifications. Clearly the steam plant workers meeting at the Plaza Hotel had to look elsewhere for a union banner under which to rally. That banner was the Utility Workers Organizing Committee.

It was almost a laughable undertaking: fewer than a dozen people believing they could take on one of the largest corporations in America, a company that had spit in the eye of the National Labor Relations Board and ripped apart every organizing drive ever conducted on its property. If the company had shown any interest in addressing some of the workers’ concerns, the union movement might never have left the starting gate. But workers saw little evidence that the company would ever change voluntarily: it just wasn’t in the nature of the beast.

Ron Weakley remembers:
“PG&E didn’t like ever losing anything. They had things like area differentials where they paid people less out in the boondocks. They had sex differentials. It was pretty Neanderthal. We had to attack all these things. The CIO principles were equality for everybody. The basis of mass organization was that you shouldn’t discriminate against anybody, for political beliefs, sex, race, or anything else.”

Workers also had serious health and safety concerns, Weakley recalls:
“One of them was inclement weather, linemen working in the rain—which is very very dangerous. Dirty water is a conductor. Another was adequate retrieval of injured persons from the underground: caving in of ditches, no shoring. We lost people from that. Another problem was in steam plants: protection from steam burns. Protective things around ladders—they had these great big tall things you had to climb—that was one of them. And one of the problems for the clerical workers was their working spaces and conditions. They didn’t have coffee breaks and things like that.”

Throughout the Bay Area workers were frustrated with conditions at PG&E and looking for some way to organize. And the men meeting in the bar of the Plaza Hotel in Contra Costa County, though not the first to gain a UWOC charter, were among the first to take action. Chartered on April 17, 1941, as UWOC Local 169, they began the job of dragging PG&E—kicking and screaming—into a union representation election.