Electric Meter Testers and Arc Lamp Repairers in Oakland in 1910. Pacific Gas & Electric
On the second day of the strike, strikers rallied outside PG&E headquarters in San Francisco. Shortly afterward, all the lights there mysteriously blew out. Service on the city’s Geary Street Railway was interrupted by outages for the second day in a row. Street car service was also affected in Sacramento and San Jose.
To force PG&E to the bargaining table, the Light and Power Council needed to thoroughly disrupt service. Steam plants and substations were picketed in San Francisco, and there were walkouts at Dixon, Folsom, Newcastle, Alta, Deer Creek and Grass Valley. PG&E rushed blankets, cots and cooking utensils to the student strikebreakers it had recruited from Stanford and Berkeley so that they could stay in the plants around the clock. Britton succeeded in getting police to patrol its major facilities in San Francisco. PG&E also brought in private detectives and “special officers.”
The picket lines became a contest of wills, with strikers urging fellow workers to join the picket line and managers urging them to cross it and come to work.
From the beginning there were cracks in the workers’ unity. San Francisco Gas Workers did not join the strike. Even more troubling, P.H. McCarthy, the president of the Building Trades Council, wouldn’t allow any Building Trades union to participate in the strike, including PG&E’s Steam Engineers. The reason was simple. The strike was organized by leaders of the Reid faction of the IBEW. McCarthy supported the McNulty faction.
From the beginning, then, the PG&E strike contained the seeds of its own destruction.