IBEW 1245 HOME |
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HISTORY FOCUS: •PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC •SACRAMENTO MUNICIPAL UTILITY DISTRICT •SIERRA PACIFIC POWER
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And what an election it was to be. The PG&E representation vote posed massive logistical problems for the NLRB. Due to the unit’s historic size, the NLRB was forced to waive the 30-day rule and allow nearly two months for setting up the election machinery. PG&E was one of the most spread-out utilities in the United States, covering an enormous geographical area. The NLRB decided that General Construction would vote by mailed ballots. To accommodate the rest of the PG&E employees, the NLRB established 100 polling places. Fifty NLRB officials were brought in from all over the West to conduct the election. For the International staff of the IBEW, working under International Vice President Oscar Harbak, the election was the culmination of over a year of hard work in which they assisted the campaign and supervised the two locals. Those International representatives included Chuck Hughes, Merritt Snyder, Larry Drew, “Heavy” Newcombe, and Kenny Favel. Ron Weakley worked behind the scenes for much of the organizing drive; his name rarely appeared in the Local 1324 newsletter. But three weeks before the election, Weakley decided to speak out. In an open letter to the UWUA published in the IBEW newsletter, Weakley took a last, almost wistful, look back at the CIO union he and others had once helped to build, and were now trying to defeat. He addressed his letter to “The Leaders of UWUA’s Last Outpost”: “I remember a few years ago, around here pioneering a union, when it was tough to advance the cause of Organized Labor on this system,” Weakley wrote. “The old CIO Union was built, not because of, but in spite of, eastern pie-cards and johnny-come-latelys. Our full time, elected leadership in those days worked hard with many of us to build a Union of 7000 members on this Coast...Those days are gone forever. The old CIO is dead and you can take much of the credit for its funeral. We, whom you continued to slander, are not proud and do not boast about the death of a good Union... You demanded a Union of political adherents to you and your planned program. We demanded a strong, unified Union which would and could act in our behalf in collective bargaining. You have placed your program before the employees and we have submitted ours. The employees will soon decide which they believe to be the better program.” On January 25, 1950, the employees rendered their decision in the certification election for all physical employees at PG&E: The IBEW had won a decisive victory. Following the election, the union newsletter paid tribute to some of the individuals who had made the victory possible: Les Glasson of San Francisco, 33 years with PG&E and president of the first council in 1937; Ed White of Oakland, described as the “hard-working wheelhorse of our organization”; William Haars of Oakland; Ed Hanlon and Bill Kennedy of San Francisco; Milt Ingraham of Ukiah; Don Hardie, Gene Hastings and Ron Weakley of Martinez. Also mentioned were “Brothers Mercer, Carrithers and Hughes of Santa Rosa; Brothers Troxel and Gibbs of Redwood City.” These were the individuals, the newsletter said, who “have taken an active part in the heartbreaking job of rebuilding an organization after they saw the degeneration and imminent collapse of the Union they built with hard work, loss of sleep, personal sacrifices and sometimes apathetic support by those they worked so hard for.” |
30. AMALGAMATION: ‘PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE’
The IBEW faced a host of pressing problems following its election triumph. PG&E workers had had no raises for more than 14 months. Under the UWUA a huge backlog of grievances had accumulated and important security provisions had been negotiated away. Further complicating matters, the UWUA still held bargaining rights for clerical workers in three PG&E divisions. A comeback bid by the UWUA was by no means out of the question either. The IBEW faced internal problems as well. There were now two IBEW locals on the system, both under International supervision: Local 1245 and Local 1324. For there to be truly “one union on the system,” some process of reconciliation—and eventual amalgamation—was needed. The first steps along that road had already been taken prior to the election when Mitch Mitchell and other Local 1245 members decided to meet with some of the CIO cross-overs. Mitchell recalls coming down from Humboldt: “I had to come down to the San Francisco office—the IBEW was in San Francisco at that time—and we were told, ‘Don’t associate with these people from the CIO—the Weakleys, the Hastings, the Hardies—those are badasses. Don’t get involved with them.’ Another fellow by the name of Elmer Bushby and I didn’t buy all this malarkey. You know, people are people, and I didn’t think, just because they were affiliated with another organization, that they weren’t interested and concerned about the welfare of people in PG&E. They were PG&E employees. “So Elmer and I arranged to meet with Don Hardie. We started meeting with him when we’d be down here and talking about what we could do to organize and get everybody together. Weakley, of course, was a real strategist. He never was really out in front, but he was pushing everybody. He was meeting with his own people and strategizing to put things together. I didn’t meet up with him for quite some time after we started meeting with these other people—before he came out of the woodwork.” Don Hardie describes why amalgamation, after the election, was such a pressing concern: “It became obvious that the company was still going to be happy if it had two locals to pit against one another even though they were under the same International. They could still play their game. The thing we had set out to do was to have one [local]. There had to be some mechanism to get this done. “Here were people who had been at swords points over a number of years and all kinds of things said about each other that had to be overcome. [Local 1245] people had to realize that we weren’t a bunch of people running around with bombs in our back pockets and all that crap, that we were actually interested in having a bargaining unit.”
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