1914-1919 Making the Connections—
The IBEW and the Telephone
On June 17, 1914, the last pole in a telephone line stretching across North America was set. A generation before it wasn’t possible to take a train across the United States, but in 1914 it was possible to have a conversation with someone a continent away. Few inventions in history have altered life around the world as much as the telephone. Today we can’t imagine communicating without it.
The IBEW has been involved with the telephone’s progress all along. IBEW linemen Strung the wires, IBEW craftsmen built the telephones themselves, and IBEW technicians built and maintained the complex switching machinery which today make telecommunications possible. By 1914 the IBEW was involved with the telephone system in another way, organizing the enormous network of operators.
As early as 1897, Mary Honzik of Cleveland, Ohio, had formed an IBEW local comprised of telephone operators. But because of employee turnover and intense antiunion pressure, the local was short lived.
According to Julia S. O’Connor, an early telephone-operators organizer and later President of the IBEW’s telephone Operators’ Department, “The first permanent union of telephone operators in [the United States was organized in Boston, the charter being issued by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in April 1912....his Boston organization came into existence almost entirely as a result of the hardship and burden imposed by the long and irregular working hours, and the then infamous [ double shift, known as the] split trick.”
Sister O’Connor began organizing operators in the 1910s. In 1921 she wrote a series for the IBEW Union Telephone Operator on the history of the push to unionize operators. She wrote,
With the hope of remedying [the]...injustices and abuses [the operators faced], a group of operators employed in the [Boston] Toll office left their work one day determined to bring about some method of relief for themselves and their fellow workers....It was decided that the telephone operators logically belonged in the International Brotherhood of’ Electrical Workers....and the General Organizer of the Electrical Workers, Peter F. Linehan, came to the city to help organize...
The spirit for organization took hold.. and hundreds of members were initiated at each meeting and officers of the union were flooded with applications. Within just a few short weeks, seven or eight hundred girls were organized; and the union made its first demands.
In 1913 the new Boston IBEW members pressed for the abolition of the double shift, an eight-hour-day (a nine- to l0-hour day was the norm), the establishment of a board of adjustment and a pay raise. They won on all counts: a pay raise, including the establishment of a standardized pay scale based on seniority; all eight-to eight-and-a-half-hour day; and regulation of the company practice of double shifting.
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1914-1919 Making the Connection |
Julia S. O'Connor, first President of the IBEW's Telephone Operators' Department.
 Telephone operators, circa 1919.
1914 World War I begins in Europe, airplanes first used as war weapons; Great Britain declares war on Germany; Canada also enters fray, employers use war as opportunity to expand working hours to 13 or 14 per day; Panama Canal opens; Colorado National Guard burns a striking miner's camp, killing 13 children, seven adults in the Ludlow Massacre; Amalgamated Clothing Workers formed; Clayton Antitrust Act passed; Ford institutes eight-hour day, $5.00 minimum daily wage, profit sharing for employees in his plants; Reid-Murphy faction reunited with IBEW by agreement; Ontario adopts workmen's compensation law on which present plans are based. |
