Fanning the Flames: 1939-1941

Avon Station, Contra Costa County

7. THE UNION REGROUPS WITH NEW RECRUITS

It took the US federal court two years to rule on the NLRB’s “cease and desist” order to PG&E. During those two years, as the nation slowly began to pull itself out of the Great Depression and war clouds again gathered over Europe, PG&E moved to keep up with the area’s demand for power. Among its new projects were the River Plants in Contra Costa County in the East Bay.

One of the workers who responded to PG&E’s recruitment drive was Ray Michael, who had been attending Cal-Poly. With some previous experience as an electrician’s helper, Michael thought PG&E might be the place for him:

“They brought a carload of us up to be interviewed at Station A in San Francisco, the steam generating department. My first job was in the boiler gang. I worked in that boiler gang for maybe a month, and then they put me on a four-to-twelve shift as a janitor. I came pretty close to quitting right then because they had a lot of spittoons around that I had to clean. This was new to me.”

But Michael stuck it out, soon becoming a helper at four dollars a day. During the summer, Michael was one of several employees transferred to Station C in Oakland to be trained as operators. In the fall, the company sent Michael to the River Plants then under construction at Avon, Martinez and Oleum.

“I came up to Avon about September of 1940, before the plant was in operation. They were just in the process of starting up some of the pumps to test them, starting to what they call “boil out” a boiler to get it ready for operation. There was quite a group of us up there at that time that were learning the plant. We would go around and learn what the equipment was, how it operated, and what its purpose was.”

At Station A in San Francisco, “union” was considered a nasty word, according to Michael, something a person didn’t dare say out loud. PG&E, after all, had decisively beaten the UE’s union drive only three years earlier and was still riding high on its anti-union horse.

But remnants of the UE lingered on the property. In early 1938, some UE supporters at PG&E aligned themselves with the newly-created Utility Workers Organizing Committee (UWOC), which was established nationally by the CIO on February 1, 1938. “Utility News”, the UE newsletter during the 1937 election drive, simply added “UWOC” to the publication’s banner after the election and continued publishing in 1938 as the UWOC newsletter.

The UWOC failed, however, to establish itself as a bargaining representative on any PG&E properties during the remainder of the 1930s, let alone negotiate any contracts for PG&E workers.
But by 1940, as Michael was beginning work at the Avon plant, the idea of union was beginning to pick up momentum once again. As Michael remembers it:

“My feelings always were in favor of the union because I’m a very honest person and when I could see the dishonesty in a lot of things that went on around me I knew something had to be done. Supervisors would do things that weren’t right. People were passed over as far as promotions were concerned.”

Another of the new recruits for the Avon plant brought power plant experience with him. Don Hardie had worked as a power plant operator for seven years in Trona, California for American Potash & Chemical Co. when PG&E hired him on at what is now called the Potrero Plant in San Francisco. Like Michael, Hardie was soon transferred to Avon. PG&E probably viewed Hardie’s previous experience as a power plant operator as an asset. But Hardie brought another kind of experience that the company wasn’t likely to appreciate quite as much: he was a union man.

A native of Edinburgh, Scotland, Hardie learned unionism from his father, a woodcarver and stone cutter engaged in reconstruction work in Scotland. After coming to the United States, Hardie’s father joined the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) while working in Hollywood. Hardie joined the Operating Engineers and became active in trying to organize the plant in Trona where he worked

PG&E had let a fox into its henhouse at Avon. And Hardie wasn’t the only one.

On February 11, 1941, two months after Hardie came to work for the company, a 30-year-old radio operator stepped off a steam schooner and into a job at PG&E. Tom Riley, an Oakland native who had been at sea for over 10 years, was ready to plant his feet on the ground:

“I went to sea as a radio operator. An individual named Mervin Rathbone, who also was a radio operator, started a little monthly letter and I signed up to join him on it. This was in 1931. It eventually became the American Radio Telegraphers Association.

“I got off a steam schooner on February 11, 1941, and went to work for Pacific Gas and Electric Company down at Station C at the foot of Jefferson Street in Oakland. I was a laborer at four dollars and forty cents a day. The progression at that time was laborer, oilier, fireman, pumpman, control operator, and watch engineer. About three weeks later they shipped me up to Avon. They called me in and told me they’d give me an oiler’s job. Percentage-wise that was the biggest raise I ever got—from laborer to oiler. I went from $4.40 to $5.08 a day.”

Like Hardie, Riley’s background made him receptive to the union message. Like many other employees, Riley believed workers could do something about unfair treatment. The anti-union heyday of the 1920s and 1930s was over. The labor movement had made enormous strides in industrial organizing: workers could no longer be counted on to simply do as they were told and take whatever pay they were offered. Despite frequent setbacks, many workers now believed they had a fundamental right to organize to protect their interests on the job. Some even believed that unions could remake the world, change it into a place where individual workers were treated with respect, where democracy would reign in the workplace as well as in the political sphere.