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

The Early Years (continued)


PG&E line crew ready for work in Modesto, California, before PG&E sold out to Modesto Irrigation District. Crew members are: Bruce Hoque, Norbert Scharanbeck, L. L. Mitchell, Harcourt “Haircut” Smith, Bob Turk, Ed Elhardt and George Rawls.

5. THE UE ELECTION OF 1937

When Mitch Mitchell left the woods in 1935 to go to work for PG&E, he brought with him a lesson he learned from the IWW: unity was strength. To succeed, workers had to stick together.

But Mitchell did not share the Wobblies’ scorn for contracts. He believed some sort of structure was necessary to build stable labor relations with employers and produce long-term gains for workers. When the UE launched its organizing drive in 1937, Mitchell chose to back the IBEW, which at that time was still primarily an old-style craft union. Mitchell would later make his peace with CIO activists in the utility industry, but the UE organizers in 1937 were too militant for his tastes:

“I think that was one of the reasons I was AFL; I’d seen too much of that militancy in the old Wobbly organization. [Militancy] was a good thing, but there was just no rationalizing anything. You just walked off the job and you got what you wanted: no compromise, no negotiations, no nothing. It was either black or white. I felt in order for stability to occur you had to have some kind of an agreement, a contract...”

The IBEW briefly joined the 1937 union election campaign on the PG&E system, but dropped out before the vote. However, another union entered the contest in May of 1937 and won a place on the ballot: the California Gas and Electric Employees. It didn’t take real unionists long to figure out that the CG&EE was nothing but a front for PG&E, a company-sponsored union. By promoting the CG&EE, PG&E hoped to divert support away from legitimate unions.

PG&E’s action coincided with a nationwide counter-offensive by corporate America against the rising tide of industrial unionism. The CIO’s initial victories in the auto and steel industries had been due in part to the political influence of CIO President John L. Lewis. Both Gov. Frank Murphy of Michigan and President Roosevelt were indebted to Lewis for past political support, debts that Lewis called in during the auto strike. In Pennsylvania, the center of steel organizing, Lewis had a well-situated ally: the lieutenant governor was also the secretary-treasurer of Lewis’s union, the UMW!

By the late spring of 1937, however, the CIO found itself losing its second campaign in the steel industry—the so-called “Little Steel” strike against the smaller steel companies. By the end of 1937 the nation was suffering another economic downturn, unemployment soared once again, and the CIO lost momentum across the nation.

The UE finally got its system-wide election in December of that year, but the historical moment had already passed. The fledgling union was no match for PG&E’s organizational clout. The company made clear to its employees that they were expected to vote for the CG&EE, the company union. Mitchell, who was on vacation at the time of the election, remembers being instructed by PG&E to come back and vote for the CG&EE. Faced with such blatant corporate subversion of the election process, the UE drive went down to defeat.

6. PG&E DEFIES NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD

Shortly after the election results were in, the UE filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, charging PG&E with illegally promoting a company union.

Two months after the election, on February 16, 1938, the NLRB refused to certify CG&EE. On August 12, the NLRB issued a complaint against PG&E, charging the company with promoting a company union. It was a serious charge. The National Labor Relations Act, after all, was passed in 1935 for the purpose of giving employees the right to democratically choose a bargaining representative. For the company to interfere in that process by promoting a phony union secretly controlled by the company would be to make a mockery of the most important labor law ever passed in the United States.

The following year, 1939, was a turning point in the long struggle to organize PG&E. Tom Mooney—the man who had assisted IBEW members during the 1913 strike at PG&E and who was framed by open shop forces for the 1916 Preparedness Day Parade bombing—was granted a full pardon by the governor of California after spending 23 years in prison. Gaining freedom for Mooney had been a cause for two decades among trade unionists around the world, including the UE organizers at PG&E. His vindication closed an important chapter in the history of labor organizing at PG&E. At the same time, the National Labor Relations Board was opening a new one.

On June 14, 1939, acting on its earlier finding that PG&E was promoting a company union, the NLRB ordered PG&E to cease and desist discouraging unionism and to post notices announcing it was doing so.

It was the beginning of the end of the open shop at PG&E. But PG&E clearly was not yet ready to wake up and smell the coffee. Instead, the company preferred to sleepwalk into the next decade, clinging to the phony patriotism of the open shop and scorning the National Labor Relations Act.

PG&E’s belligerent attitude was best revealed in a statement made by its vice president and general manager, P. M. Downing. After waiting the full 10 days allowed for a response to the NLRB order, Downing replied as follows: “We advise you that the Company does not intend to post any notices of cease and desist, pursuant to your order.”

Downing’s defiant words made a lasting impression on the trade unionists struggling to organize PG&E. He became the embodiment of PG&E’s open contempt for the workers and for the law. Mitch Mitchell remembers Downing this way:

“He was really anti-union. He said as long as he was head of PG&E there would never be a union on the property. And there never was. He finally croaked. He kept his word.”