PG&E History 21 & 22

HISTORY FOCUS: •PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC •SACRAMENTO MUNICIPAL UTILITY DISTRICT •SIERRA PACIFIC POWER

The Great Defection (continued)

21. NO OTHER WAY OUT

When the great cross-over began, the UWUA had some 5,000 members in eight Bay Area locals, working in four PG&E divisions. Just because Weakley and other local leaders believed the switch should be made, not all of the members necessarily agreed. The various UWUA locals in the Bay Area, after all, had a contract with PG&E through the UWUA joint council. They had the authority to process grievances and conduct other union business. The newly-formed IBEW Local 1324 could offer workers nothing concrete—only dreams of future unity, of “one union on the system.” Don Hardie remembers:

“Those of us who refused to belong to the CIO any more and had changed our status were for all practical purposes without any power at all. In this Concord-Martinez-Oleum area, the leadership had all gone to the AFL. They said: ‘This was it—we’re going to make this move.’ You had the likes of Weakley, Stan Dahlin, who was the line shop steward, the shop station operators, the steam plant—everything in this jurisdiction was solid. We’d gone [over]. So we had to suffer. There was no other way out.”

The Contra Costa County PG&E workers weren’t alone in their unhappiness. Throughout the Bay Area, discontent with the national leadership of the UWUA had been growing. In the South Bay, one of those ready for a change was Mert Walters.

Walters went to work for PG&E in 1944 as a groundman in Redwood City, on the peninsula. Joining the union had been an easy decision for Walters, who came from a union family. His father and a brother belonged to the newspaper pressman; another brother was a wireman. Soon after being hired Walters was signed up in UWOC Local 137 by a union lineman named Thomas J. McKay, more popularly known as “Old Iron Head.”

But Walters began to have second thoughts about his union after the UWOC became part of the UWUA. He remembers national officers of the UWUA addressing the local membership at a state UWUA conference in Santa Cruz early in 1948:

“The national officers tried to tell us how we had to run affairs. We didn’t buy it. We had tried to set up a strike fund and they told us we couldn’t. I remember I told them it was my money and I’d do with it what I wanted. I was young and feisty then. But they didn’t believe in strikes.”
By November of that year, when IBEW Local 1324 was chartered, Walters was ready to cross over. So ready, in fact, that he devised a plan to take a lot of other UWUA members with him:

“A guy named Manny Ferrera and myself took three days off on the UWUA payroll—got a three-day leave of absence from PG&E. That was in the Peninsula District, San Jose Division. We went out and pulled the guys off the poles and out of the ditches and signed them up in the IBEW. We signed up more members than we had in the UWUA. We signed up everybody but one individual.”

Around the Bay Area the drive was on to bring UWUA members over to the IBEW. During the early months of 1949, units of Local 1324 were established in Martinez, Santa Rosa and Ukiah, along with a unit covering San Francisco, San Mateo and Redwood City. In large part these units were composed of employees who had simply come over to the IBEW from the UWUA. In cases like UWUA Local 169 in Contra Costa County or Local 137 on the peninsula, the switchover to the IBEW was rapid and massive, which raised an interesting question: Who did the union treasury belong to?

Pat Patteson crossing the Eel River south of Fortuna in a line truck. "There were a lot of deep holes you had to look for," says driver Patteson. "I had to back up and go around a few times. It was fun." Fortuna area, California. About 1949. (Courtesy C. L. Patteson)

22. WHO OWNS THE TREASURY?

The national UWUA believed it had a claim to the funds, since they were collected in the name of the UWUA. But the members of those locals saw it another way. If there was money in the union treasury it was because the members had put it there. If they now chose to switch over to the IBEW, they believed their money ought to come with them.. Just to make sure that it did, they devised some creative security measures. In the South Bay, as Mert Walters recounts:

“They come looking for the money. But they couldn’t find it. Manny Ferrara was secretary of Local 137. He hid all the money in tin cans in his back yard.. When it was time to actually go into the IBEW, we took all the money we had and paid membership dues for six months for all the people that were in the unit.”

Ray Michael recalls that Local 169 in Contra Costa County employed a similar approach. Stan Dahlin, given the local treasury for safekeeping, hid the money under his house. As with Local 137, by the time the UWUA came looking for the money, it had already been spent buying block memberships in the IBEW.

Ford line truck. 1950. (Courtesy Joe Brasher)