With Eugene Rush serving as the first president, Local 6 membership during the first several years was composed of wiremen, linemen and fixture hangers and quickly grew from the original 22 to 162 members.

During the first decade of the 20th century, as Local 6 developed, San Francisco’s entire organized labor industry seemingly wielded a great deal of power and influence in the metropolitan area. In 1901, the Union Labor Party (ULP), a political party which ostensibly represented the interests of the city’s workingmen, formed, and at the time the city was considered a “closed shop” town with labor firmly in control of its political machinery.

In 1900, the union electricians held meetings at 20 Eddy Street and in the Friendship and Myrtle halls of the Alcazar Theater at 650 Geary. By mid-1903, the local’s headquarters at 27 Sixth Street proved to be too small, and a committee found another location at 35 Eddy Street, where Local 6 opened its new offices on July 6, 1904.

During these years, Local 6 developed into a wireman’s local, and the International chartered several other local unions in and around San Francisco: Local 151 (linemen), Local 404 (fixture hangers), Local 283 (Pacific Telephone Co.) and locals 537 and 564. The IBEW chartered Oakland electricians as a sub-local in 1903 and eventually as Local 595 in 1907.

Rising From the Ashes

The “Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire” of 1906 struck April 18 and is remembered as one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States. The death toll from the earthquake and resulting fire, estimated to be above 3,000, still represents the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California’s history.

At the forefront of the reconstruction effort were Local 6 electrical workers, who helped rebuild the city within the following three years despite the fact that nearly 500 of its 700 members were missing immediately after the catastrophe. All of Local 6’s books and records at its Eddy Street office also were destroyed.

With Local 6 leading the way, the rebuilding was rapid and grand, beginning with the electrical railway system. After San Francisco’s residents rejected calls to completely remake the city’s street grid, electrical workers constructed new electric overhead lines along Market Street and throughout the city, quickly replacing the damaged cable car system.

With the city well on its way to being rebuilt, Local 6 sought to break a wage freeze imposed during the emergency by the San Francisco Building Trades Council and have its members’ daily pay increased from $5 to $6 by bargaining for a successor agreement with contractors. Other crafts also demanded wage increases, with Local 404 calling for a strike in mid-1906 and Local 151 going out on strike with the United Railroad carmen, who were asking for a reduction of their work day from nine to eight hours and an increase in wages from $2.50 to $3.00 per day. Starting May 24, 1907, streetcars did not operate for the next 131 days.

Local 6 itself continued to work for those employers who sided with the local but withheld its labor from those who did not.

The Building Trades Council disallowed those demands for wage increases, and demonstrated its authority early in 1907 by asking Local 6 to leave the building trades and recognizing a separate electrical workers union, the Electrical Mechanics of California.

Eventually, with the help of IBEW Grand President Frank J. McNulty, who was present at a meeting held on March 11, 1908, and observed that the city reconstruction was well underway, unity prevailed. The members of Local 6 and the Electrical Mechanics voted to consolidate as one union and requested approval from the IBEW. The International re-organized San Francisco electricians and re-chartered the Local on January 9, 1909.

The city would celebrate its rebirth at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in the Marina District in 1915, for which electrical workers provided the labor for the construction of buildings and overhead lines for the expanding the rail line to serve the event. Meanwhile, the commercial downtown area was building out, so much that Montgomery Street would eventually be known as The Wall Street of the West, as it became the home of many financial institutions. The destroyed mansions of Nob Hill became grand hotels, and City Hall rose once again in splendorous Beaux Arts style – all wired by the electrical workers of Local 6.

Roaring Through the 20th Century

A construction boom in the 1920s added many financial-district high-rise buildings to San Francisco’s skyline, including the 26-story Pacific Telephone building, the Shell building, the Russ building and the Bank of America building at Powell and Market Streets. San Francisco also was becoming a major port city, as its packing, canning, lumber, mineral and oil-production industries flourished during that time. The city’s population exploded from 506,000 in 1920 to over 634,394 people by the end of the decade.

The commercial and manufacturing construction that accompanied the city’s growth ushered in a rapid electrical-service expansion and a rising need to transport people into and out of San Francisco, contributing to a continued need to build out San Francisco’s overhead line and electric railway systems. In turn, continued construction of steel-frame, high-rise commercial buildings and the various multiple industrial, residential and municipal projects throughout San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay region contributed to the next 50 years of electrical industry development and the growth of Local 6.

In those ensuing years, the city solidified its standing as a financial capital; in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, not a single San Francisco-based bank failed. Even at the height of the Great Depression, San Francisco undertook two great civil engineering projects, simultaneously constructing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the famed Golden Gate Bridge and completing them in 1936 and 1937, respectively. During this period Alcatraz Island, a former military stockade, began service as a federal maximum security prison, housing notorious inmates such as Al Capone.

San Francisco later celebrated its regained grandeur with a World’s Fair, the Golden Gate International Exposition, in 1939 and 1940, by filling in a section of the bay, thereby creating Treasure Island. The mutually beneficial relationships between the city and union electrical industry, and within that between the local and its contractors, was never more on display than during the Exposition and was so chronicled by Local 6 Business Manager Charles J. Foehn in a letter to the IBEW Journal in 1939:

Proof that the electrical industry is one in which sensible labor relations exist between workers and employers, especially in the West, was plentiful in the building of the fair.

Electricity made the San Francisco fair. Independent surveys made not long ago among the people who have been to see it placed the spectacular electric lighting as the thing that impressed them most. And since electrical workers made the lighting possible, the success of the fair can be chalked up pretty much to their credit, too.

It was American and Canadian electrical workers who built the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridges and the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened on November 12, 1936 and remains one of the largest bridges in the world, carrying more traffic than any other toll bridge – over 270,000 vehicles each day.

Meanwhile, Local 6 was able to diversify in the 1930s, representing many different classifications of electrical work, and increasing membership. In 1934, Local 6 electrical workers supported longshoremen during the Pacific Coast Maritime Strike and the San Francisco General Strike.

On March 30, 1938, the State of California approved the establishment of the San Francisco Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee (JATC) for the electrical industry, which continues to oversee the training of apprentices and journey-level electrical workers. As it did from its inception, the Local 6 JATC, maintained in conjunction with the San Francisco Electrical Contractors Association, upholds the highest standards of service to businesses and citizens throughout the region ensured by the union electrical industry’s well-trained and highly skilled workforce.

While building construction declined during the war years of the 1940s, employment in San Francisco’s shipyards and other war-manufacturing sectors expanded, and Local 6 continued to prosper. As noted below:

During that time, the IBEW merged several San Francisco Bay Area locals with Local 6 – Local 551 of Santa Rosa, Local 614 of San Rafael, Local 617 of San Mateo and locals 892 and 202 – growing the San Francisco local’s membership to more than two thousand electrical workers. Local 6 also gained the representation rights for City and County Civil Service employees in 1943 and 1944 by organizing the Municipal Railway carmen, electricians, linemen, powerhouse operators, armature winders and related classifications.

The local played a significant part in the war, on the frontlines and on the home front, as described in one capacity in an article in the January 1943 issue of the IBEW Journal:

San Francisco is the first American city to work out a systematic plan for buying war bonds regularly at a central office. Local Union No. 6 I.B.E.W. is the union involved. This office is called the Electrical War Bond Savings Bureau and has been established at 1434 Howard Street under a joint committee of (Local 6 and the national Electrical Contractors Association).

As a sign of the great comeback made by the city and its electrical local, the IBEW held its 22nd International Convention in San Francisco in 1946.

The 1947 Fight to Save the Cable Cars

In 1947, Local 6 headed a group, “Save the Cable Cars,” that successfully lobbied against one of the most brazen attempts to disband San Francisco’s cable car system – saving the city’s fabled electric trolleys, which still operate today. On November 4 of that year, San Franciscans approved a ballot measure, “No. 10,” that proposed a charter amendment to preserve and protect two of the city’s remaining cable car lines for eternity.

Three years earlier, the Powell-Mason and Washington-Jackson lines had been taken over by the Municipal Railway after the Market Street Railway ceased operations. With the meteoric rises of the automobile and the modernizing city, Mayor Roger Lapham wanted to scrap the remnants of the old Ferries & Cliff House line’s Victorian-era cable cars, which had begun operating in 1887, with new diesel buses. He had some very powerful allies on his side, including the gasoline, automobile and rubber industries.

But the “Citizens Committee to Save the Cable Cars,” led by Local 6 and resident Friedel Klussmann, hounded local politicians, lobbied the city’s citizens and eventually proposed a ballot initiative to amend the City Charter so that cable cars could never be eliminated again.

The battle was joined across the country. Media outlets such as Life, Time and The Saturday Evening Post all ran stories and editorials on the cable car “wars” – and even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt defended the trolleys in her daily column, “My Day.”

As public sentiment unquestionably favored the historic, romantic cable cars, Elmer Robinson, who was running for mayor in the 1947 election, took advantage of the uproar to declare his support for the cable cars, spending his campaign riding cars and ringing their bells, making the issue synonymous with his bid for mayor.

In the end, Measure 10 garnered a resounding victory of 170,000 “for” votes and only 50,000 “opposed” to it. The cable cars, Local 6 and the city had won.

Remaining Plugged-In and Powered

The construction of steel-frame, high rise commercial buildings, and various industrial, residential and municipal projects contributed to the next 50-year period of development in San Francisco. Importantly, this would greatly benefit Local 6 and its membership in a multitude of ways.

The region experienced an unprecedented housing need in the 1950s as people flocked to the growing San Francisco Bay Area and population skyrocketed to 775,000 at the start of the decade. New office buildings and high rises in downtown also continued to appear along with the influx of wood-frame and stucco homes in the ‘50s. Candlestick Stadium opened in 1958 to house the city’s professional baseball and football teams. So, too, did the apprenticeship program blossom, as described by Local 6 Press Secretary Harry Davi in a letter to the IBEW Journal in August 1952:

The apprenticeship program here in San Francisco has undergone a great many changes in the last few years. Many reforms have been instituted in an effort to bring to the apprentice the maximum opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skill necessary in his future performance as a journeyman.

Only recently the apprentice classes completed the move from the old Samuel Gompers Trade School to the new John O’Connell Vocational and Technical Institute. More than 1,600 feet in the new school is devoted to training of the inside wireman apprentice.

At the present time we have 73 apprentices enrolled, of whom 22 have been called into the armed forces. Eight were graduated this month, bringing the total since 1949 to 119.

As Local 6 and its SFECA partners remained busy servicing the city’s growth, the local also was able to establish a health and welfare plan for its members in the mid-1950s.

The boom persisted throughout the second half of the century. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART), started in the 1960s, continues to expand and be serviced by Local 6 members. Additional significant projects the electrical workers of Local 6 participated in bringing to life included the Palace of Fine Arts in 1962, the Pacific Gas & Electric Potrero Power Plant in 1965, the Mt. Sutro television and radio broadcast tower, shared by more than a dozen stations, and the landmark Transamerica Pyramid building in the early 1970s.

With the continued opportunities, particularly in the 1960s when significant high-rise skyscrapers in the city that still stand today were built with union electricians, Local 6 membership again saw the fruits of their labors. In 1961, the local established a defined-benefit pension plan, known as “The Northern California Electrical Workers’ Pension Trust Fund,” making Local 6 the first local union west of Chicago to have its own pension plan.

In 1980, the local’s inside wiremen started an annuity retirement plan, supplementing the defined-benefit plan.

Other Local 6 “in-the-field” achievements in the following decades included working on the seismic retrofitting of City Hall; relocating the main public library building; building new municipal court and federal buildings; and constructing the Performing Arts Center.

To commemorate the later project, Local 6 Business Manager Franz E. Glen wrote in the February 1981 issue of the IBEW Journal:

On September 13, 1980, the construction men and women who worked on the Performing Arts Center in San Francisco were invited, along with their guests, to attend the premiere performance of the world-famous San Francisco Symphonic Orchestra at the newly completed Performing Arts Center. The performance was billed as “The Hard Hat Concert.”

The opening number, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was sung by our very own Ed Rajeski, a member of Local 6 who worked on the project.

The men and women from Local 6 who worked on the project during the two-year period it was under construction can certainly be proud of their efforts as it is rated as one of the finest concert halls in the world.

San Francisco’s first-ever female electrical inspector to work in the city’s Electrical Inspection Department was a Local 6 member – Sister Darlene Hartley. Darlene was named to the position in 1990. She was a journeyman inside wireman at the time, having also completed the Local 6 apprenticeship training program.

Dawn of the New Millenia

With the turn of another century, Local 6 continued to put its mark on San Francisco’s skyline. In 2000, Local 6 helped build AT&T Park, the new home of the San Francisco Giants, and in 2003, the Ferry Building Marketplace renovation. The IBEW International Convention was held at the Moscone Convention Center during September of 2001, and in 2003 Local 6 contributed greatly to the Convention Center expansion project which culminated in the addition of the state-of-the-art photovoltaic system for the Moscone South building. Local 6 members have also helped install and still maintain many modern, high-tech internet switching facilities and modern communications systems throughout the region, making modern communications systems readily available for use by San Franciscans.

Today, union electrical workers are an integral part of the construction of the city’s state-of-the-art Trans-Bay Terminal, which when completed will connect seven different transportation systems, and be known as the Grand Central Station of the West. With the labor of Local 6, the University of California is building an ultra-modern medical laboratory that is the cornerstone project of the Mission Bay development located in the China Basin neighborhood. The Municipal Railway Third Street light rail extension also is now in operation thanks in large part to a Local 6 workforce.

Meanwhile, Local 6 members are important players in the region’s burgeoning solar, biotechnology, green-technology and clean-tech industries, particularly in the Mission Bay area. Notably, the local is leading the way on commercial-grade photovoltaic installations throughout the city.

The Labor-Management Cooperation Committee

of the San Francisco Electrical Industry

A strong relationship with its signatory contractors has been the cornerstone of Local 6’s success. The official partnership between the local and the San Francisco Electrical Contractors Association is the Labor-Management Cooperation Committee (LMCC) of the San Francisco Electrical Industry.

Primarily, the LMCC promotes the electrical industry in San Francisco and is funded through the collective bargaining agreement between Local 6 and the SFECA. Its main goal is to advance our common interests as labor and management while promoting the electrical industry within the City and County of San Francisco. The LMCC also hosts several charity functions each year to benefit community based organizations, including Rebuilding Together, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the St. Anthony Foundation, and an annual motorcycle run in December for the San Francisco Fire Fighters Toy Program.

Lighting the Future

For more than 100 years, Local 6 members have constructed and maintained San Francisco’s and the San Francisco Bay Area’s various electrical systems. Electrical contractors associated with the San Francisco Electrical Contractors Association have employed these highly skilled members.

Today, Local 6 is the bargaining agent for members working under more than 15 collective bargaining agreements, allowing the more than 2,600 members of Local Union 6 to provide labor and services to the citizens of Northern California throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and eastwards into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The members of IBEW Local Union 6 now benefit from the superior job conditions handed down from pioneer union electrical workers, and the union is well-positioned for opportunities that will allow it to increase its market share and the standard of living for its membership into the 21st Century.