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

World War II poster
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Orv Owen, (standing, fifth from right) and co-workers in the 1950s.

3: SIERRA EMPLOYEES CHOOSE IBEW 1245

Sierra Pacific presented an organizing target to working people, but most unions of that era were not yet organizing on an industrial basis. In fact, unions across the nation in the late 1920s and early 1930s were in retreat. But over the next few years, conditions changed.

The passage of the National Labor Relations Act under President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 gave labor unions the right under federal law to petition for representation elections. Six years later, IBEW Local 1245 was chartered to organize workers at PG&E. Workers at Sierra Pacific, which received much of its power from PG&E, were almost certainly aware of these events to the West.

However, the final catalyst for bringing the union to Sierra Pacific was one nobody could have envisioned in early 1941: the coming war with Germany and Japan. To help insure a stable labor force during the war, the federal government established the War Labor Board, which pressured industry to enter into collective bargaining agreements with labor unions.

Against this backdrop of federal support for the institution of collective bargaining, physical and clerical workers at Sierra Pacific on June 8, 1945, voted to be represented by Local 1245.

Out of 127 eligible voters in the physical unit, 76 voted for the union and 11 voted against. The new bargaining unit included linemen, apprentice linemen, watchmen, operators, substation operators, ditch tenders, repairmen, laborers, groundmen, servicemen, electricians, metermen, fitters and fitters helpers, mechanics and apprentices, meter readers, assistant bookkeeper and blacksmiths.

Out of 42 eligible voters in the clerical unit, 27 voted for the union and 10 voted against.

By daring to put themselves on the line and vote yes, these 103 physical and clerical workers set in motion a train of events that would bring new union-negotiated wage and benefit standards to future generations of Sierra Pacific employees.

4: ‘PAY ME TWICE’

But major progress doesn’t happen overnight. It happens one step at a time. At Sierra Pacific, progress depended on the willingness of workers to throw their energies behind the union cause and make the union work for them.

One of the early union activists at Sierra Pacific was a powerfully-built young worker named Orville Owen.

Owen began work with Sierra Pacific in 1949, assigned to a gas crew.

"Of course, in those days you didn’t have digging equipment," Owen remembers. "Everything was pick and shovel and jackhammer. I can remember one day I was out running the jackhammer. I was a big kid and it was the 125-lb. Gardener Denver hammer—the biggest jackhammer they had. Most people, because it was so large, would back off of it. But it was the most balanced so it was easier to handle once you got it set.

"Well," Owen continues, "we were cutting the blacktop just getting ready to lay some gas main. The vice president of the company—his name was Fairchild Barnett but we called him ‘Barney’—drove by in his car and saw me with my legs laying over that jackhammer, outrigging that hammer with my legs. He stopped, he backed up and he waves to me and says, ‘Hey, young fella. I’m gonna get one for your other leg.’ And I says, ‘That’s all right, but you’re gonna pay me twice.’"

Barnett probably didn’t realize it at the time, but he had just had his first sparring match with a future union negotiator.