IBEW 1245 HOME |
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HISTORY FOCUS: •PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC •SACRAMENTO MUNICIPAL UTILITY DISTRICT •SIERRA PACIFIC POWER
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The Great Defection |
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17. SUSPICION AND HOSTILITY Despite impressive victories at the Divisional level, the IBEW and the UWOC were nowhere near organizing one union on the entire PG&E system. In fact, following World War II, the forces pulling the union movement apart at PG&E were probably as strong as the forces drawing it together. While both the IBEW and the UWOC continued to claim that a single union for the entire system was their ultimate goal, each union regarded the other with great suspicion, if not outright hostility. That left PG&E plenty of room to make mischief. For example, the company might tell one union it must bargain for certain working conditions already granted to the other union. Or the company might use the issue of transfers to stir the pot. Mitch Mitchell believes the company enjoyed the friction that resulted from mixing CIO members with AFL members: “If they sent a CIO crew in there [to an AFL area], that didn’t affect the company a bit. But it affected us. There was turmoil for us. But the company could stand that. They always had hopes that the union would go bust, that it wouldn’t last. The company was trying to stir up trouble all the time.” Compounding the problem, Mitchell notes, was the fact that each union now had something to lose and did not want to give up what it had fought so hard to gain: “Each was protecting its own. The status quo is preferable to the unknown, so once they had become established there wasn’t any real effort to, you know, to put it back together again. The dues were coming in. You see, there was an enormous amount of money spent by both the AFL and CIO in organizing to begin with. So they wanted to recoup that; they didn’t want to have to spend a lot more, because organizing costs money.” Continued competition between the two unions could have left the workforce in a state of permanent discord. However, political events in the nation at large following World War II brought about a crisis in the organizing drive on PG&E.
From left: Marvin Hassler, "Queenie" Swinden, and Bob Tracey. San Jose, California. 1946. (Courtesy R. F. Tracey) |
 Franklin Butler, ditch tender, at Camp 2, Sipdon House ice spill way, El Dorado Canal, Placerville. 1947. (Courtesy Franklin Butler) 18. ANTI-RED CRUSADE The Soviet Union, a major US ally during World War II, became a rival following the war. Right-wing forces in the United States used this rivalry—the Cold War—to attack political opponents within the United States. Those with whom these right-wing fanatics disagreed were branded as communists, whether there was evidence to support such a charge or not. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin brought this practice of “red-baiting” to new heights—or depths—when he conducted hearings intended to besmirch the reputation of law-abiding Americans. But McCarthy, later proven to be an outrageous liar, was only one player in what had become a national hysteria. Just as colonists in Massachusetts in the 17th Century conducted “witch hunts” and burned innocent women at the stake, the American public was led on a witch hunt for communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Labor unions were a principal victim of the “anti-red” crusade. In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other provisions, required union officers to sign affidavits swearing they were not communists. Many American trade unionists protested this anti-red requirement as an infringement upon the civil liberties of union officers. Unfortunately, some unionists began to use the anti-red hysteria to jockey for power within particular unions. Shortly after the war, the independent Utility Workers Organizing Committee, chartered nationally by the CIO in 1938 as an organizing vehicle, affiliated with the Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA), a newly-chartered International union within the CIO. When Ron Weakley and a delegation of West Coast utility workers attended the founding conference of the UWUA in Atlantic City, they were disturbed by the red-baiting atmosphere. One provision of the proposed UWUA constitution would require every worker to sign a non-communist affidavit in order to be admitted into the union. The West Coast delegates believed this provision to be undemocratic. The Bay Area UWUA group became even more upset when the national UWUA began to “clean house.” Among the victims of this house-cleaning were the UWUA regional director and two national UWUA representatives on the West Coast who had provided valuable assistance to the organizing drive on PG&E.
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