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

The Struggle Intensifies

25. THE STRUGGLE INTENSIFIES

The UWUA suffered a major setback in March of 1949. Superior Court Judge Milton Sapiro ruled that PG&E workers who had switched to the IBEW should not be required to pay dues to their former union, the UWUA, through a dues checkoff. He ruled that, because the contract had expired, doubt now existed about who the legitimate bargaining representative was.

In April, the NLRB hearings on the make-up of the bargaining unit were coming to a close and Local 1324 believed that a representation election would soon be scheduled. But as spring turned to summer there was still no word from the NLRB.

However, Local 1324 was making progress on another front. In July, the Executive Board of Local 1245 pledged its support for “one union on the system.” Of course both Local 1245 and 1324 were under International supervision, and were expected to cooperate in the organizing drive. The issue of whether and when—and how—to amalgamate the two unions was left to another day. In August the two locals met in Belmont and Santa Rosa, the first of many such joint meetings.

Meanwhile, the battle between Local 1324 and the UWUA for the hearts and minds of PG&E workers in the Bay Area continued. Ron Weakley remembers what union meetings were like during this period:

“Of course there was a lot of arguing at meetings of both groups—the Utility Workers and 1324—about how we should proceed. We’d go to the meetings and debate and harangue about getting one union on the system, and how the Utility Workers weren’t serving the people and so forth. The UWUA barred some of us, but quite often we’d get in. There was very little violence. We had a little shoving around and a few challenges, but as far as any major bloodying of people, there was none of that. PG&E workers were a fairly conservative bunch anyway and they weren’t prone to that kind of waterfront battling.”

Hot stick school in Napa, including Mel Daniels, Bud Shindler, Shorty Cope, Bill Caldwell, instructor, Floyd Baack, Don Hart, and Paul Spencer, foreman. 1950.
26. ‘SOME OF THE PEOPLE GOT A LITTLE MAD’

Although Weakley had become a prime mover in the union drive, he was not always center stage. He had a knack for tapping the talents of others. One such person was Gene Hastings. When Hastings, as a new PG&E employee in 1945, complained about contract provisions relating to returning veterans, Weakley immediately made a motion to have Hastings appointed to head up a veterans committee. It was an application of the old mining camp principle: “If you complain about the grub, next time you get to cook.”

Hastings quickly proved that he was ready for responsibility. Union was in his blood:

“Where I got my start was in the United Mine Workers, which is a good place to start. My father was a coal miner. When I was in junior high school in 1935 my father came home from a picket line: they were on strike. He told me how the sheriff and his deputies escorted the scabs through the picket line. They were shaking the scabs down to make sure they didn’t have any guns. My father said you could see the outline of the gun in one scab’s pocket. Hearing that was pretty impressive for a junior high school kid.

“He also told me about the superintendent driving his car through the line. He gunned it up and the coal miners just split, and he didn’t hit any of them. After a couple days of that, the third time that he speeded up his automobile and they all split apart, well, there was a great big tree laying in the road. He smacked the tree—was in the hospital. Those were the days when the coal miners used to strike every year.”

Hastings says it was Weakley who eventually talked him into running for president of UWUA Local 169 in Contra Costa County. It was an interesting position to be in during the cross-over. The national UWUA was trying to persuade the local membership to dump any officers who supported switching to the IBEW. In Contra Costa County, where the membership was determined to leave the UWUA, these arguments had little effect. But in other areas, the members were more evenly divided. Hastings recalls taking a trip to a UWUA meeting in Napa with Ed White to promote the cross-over to the IBEW:

“It was a little different story up in Napa. We wanted to give our presentation as far as to why we were going into the IBEW. Their theme song was that they don’t want to know; they’re satisfied with the CIO. They were not going to let us, if they could help it, convince anybody that this was the thing to do. I was real glad that I had old six-foot three-inch tall Ed White alongside of me because there were some of the people got a little bit mad.”

Like Weakley and Hardie, Hastings was a victim of red-baiting:

“We were called communists, the whole bit. Of course nobody could prove it. But this was one of the ploys that the CIO used, to call a fellow communist. The CIO was going to lose 5,000 members—they’d call you anything.”

By autumn of 1949 IBEW had made significant progress in organizing the North Bay. The NLRB was still silent on when it would schedule an election. And Local 1324 still had no contract and no representation rights on PG&E. All it had to offer was the dream of “one union on the system.” Some began to wonder privately how long this movement could survive on nothing but a dream.


Shorty Cope and Stan Banner in Petaluma. 1950. (Courtesy Joe Brasher)