IBEW 1245 HOME |
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HISTORY FOCUS: •PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC •SACRAMENTO MUNICIPAL UTILITY DISTRICT •SIERRA PACIFIC POWER
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One Union (continued) |
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35. CARRY IT ON In the years ahead there would be enormous challenges: Grievance procedures were in desperate need of overhauling. Safety concerns needed to be addressed. A proposed Right-to-Work law had to be combated in 1958. And eventually a union security clause would have to be negotiated to give the union the stability it needed to protect the interests of PG&E workers over the long haul. Without a doubt, Local 1245 bears the imprint of the great historical forces of our age. Its character was fashioned by the rise of AFL craft unions in the late 19th century, by the Wobblies who first sounded the battle cry of industrial organizing, and by the CIO which transformed that battle cry into a practical program of industrial unionism. Local 1245, like so many other unions, benefited from the pro-labor legislation of the New Deal in the 1930s, and it suffered from the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1940s and early 1950s. But Local 1245 was never just a mere product of those historical forces. Every step of the way, the union cause at PG&E was advanced |
by individual workers who had the courage to envision a better life for themselves and their fellow workers. Each injustice on the job that wasprotested, each election authorization card circulated, each grievance filed, was the act of an individual who cared enough to say: “This is wrong, I’m going to help make it right.” In the end, victory was achieved because those individuals realized that their only true strength was to act collectively. Through union, they could have a genuine voice in determining their own destiny. It was, at its heart, a dream of democracy—not just at the polling place but at the work place. Individuals who believed in that dream and worked to make it a reality brought the union this far. And they are the ones who will carry it on.
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