Mary Gannon, leader of the Washington Telephone Traffic Union, in 1944.
By Craig G. Simpson
The Washington Telephone Traffic Union had its roots as a company-sponsored association, but by 1944 was the most militant local union in the Washington area and one of the fiercest telephone operators’ union in the country.
The union staged as many as 200 mini-strikes—most only an hour or two long and were often sympathy strikes in support of other local unions across the country, usually winning victories because of Washington, D.C.’s location as a strategic communications center.
Their leader Mary Gannon was the first woman to lead a sizable and influential District of Columbia union.
The 3,000-plus member overwhelmingly female operators union was also a forceful advocate of equal pay for women and of a strong national organization to take on the monopoly Bell system. It was a powerful voice for women within the larger union at a time when union leadership was a near exclusive men’s club.
Beginnings
C&P Telephone Co. operators worked side by side connecting calls from one line to another.
In an era with no mobile phones, e-mail, messaging or social media, the telephone reigned supreme for one-to-one communications.
Operators worked at rows of switchboards to connect a call from one telephone number to another. Rotary dial phones were introduced in 1918, bypassing the operator for local calls, but by the early 1940s about half the country’s local calls still had to be connected through an operator and all long distance calls went through operators.
American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T, the Bell System or “Ma Bell”) was a monopoly that controlled nearly all the phone service in the country as the sole provider of long distance calls and its local phone company subsidiaries in urban and suburban areas.
Locally the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. (C&P) was a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T that served the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland and Virginia. There were three other AT&T subsidiaries with the same name serving three other areas–the rest of Virginia, the rest of Maryland and West Virginia.
In Washington, D.C. during the 1940s there were between 2,500 and 3,000 operators who worked side-by-side in a regimented environment where permission was needed to take off a headset to scratch your ear.
Early Unionization
Like most large corporations, the AT&T system was long hostile to labor unions. Near the beginning of the 20th century the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) gained a foothold of about 20,000 members by the time of the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917.
In December 1917, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized U.S. railroads and set up national adjustment boards in each industry with representatives from both labor unions and management. But the Bell System was put under the Post Office—an anti-labor organization—that set up a Wire Board that took little action initially.
Nevertheless, phone operators in New England went on strike and were joined by cable splicers, test room technicians, and other workers from the electrical union. Elsewhere telegraph workers walked out in the South after the discharge of 300 of their co-workers. As other areas threatened strikes, Postmaster-General Albert Burleson was forced to act.
Burleson issued a directive to the telephone companies to permit union organizing without retaliation and charged the national Wire Board with enforcing the order.
The Company ‘Union’
A Rubber Workers Union cartoon slams company unions as puppets of management.
Two days later, AT&T issued its own directive that a company union—The American Bell Association—was to be organized among its employees. Chapters were to be set up in each local area around the country and in larger cities multiple chapters were organized. Where multiple chapters existed in a local area, there were representative meetings from each chapter.
Such was the case in Washington, D.C. where installers and telephone operators had their own chapter, sending delegates from different job classifications to a city-wide meeting. It is not clear if other classifications such as the C&P cafeteria workers or office workers also had their own chapter.
Thomas Brooks writes in Communications Workers of America: The Story of a Union that a company official in Pennsylvania, Harold Porter, explained that employees elected as representatives to larger councils should be “only those who are ‘simon-pure’ employees.” Foremen and other supervisory personnel were encouraged to be a “big brother and boss to his people.”
Porter counseled that individual grievances were to be avoided, but, “All questions are decided by getting the facts. No change in our working practices governing carfare, vacations, hour of work, etc. is made without full discussion with the employee committees and gaining their agreement.”
A circa 1920 dial telephone that made bypassing the operator possible for local calls.
Meetings were chaired by management, but efforts were made to, “make them [employees] feel they are part of the works in their proper sphere.” Further, “it is better to discuss wages…in the committees than on street corners.”
However, the reality was these associations didn’t discuss wages and benefits and functioned only as a way to forestall real workers’ unions.
William Walsh, a worker with Ohio Bell, recalled that things worked a bit differently in practice than Porter set out. He described the local Bell Association by saying that, “…once in a while you’d have a so-called membership meeting, but if anybody talked about anything other than about the pencil sharpener needed replacing or was dull, why, there [would be] some reprisal very shortly thereafter.”
AT&T’s efforts paid off for the company. Legitimate unions were staved off by the associations and the IBEW lost most of its members in the telephone industry during the period the American Bell Association was active.
Growth of Unionism
Sen. Robert F. Wagner celebrates Supreme Court upholding a labor law in 1937 that bore his name.
This was the system that Mary Gannon stepped into as a young woman in 1935 when as a new employee, she became active in the local Washington, D.C. association.
The time was in the midst of the Great Depression where a series of major industrial work stoppages around the country resulted in clashes between police and workers.
In response to this growing and uncontrolled unrest, Congress passed the 1935 Wagner Act setting out an orderly means of unionization and collective bargaining.
The Committee of Industrial Organizations was also formed in 1935 and set itself to the task of organizing millions of workers in basic industry across craft lines into a single union for each broad sector of the economy—auto, steel, rubber. electrical and other large sections.
One of the provisions of the Wagner Act made it illegal for an employer “to dominate or interfere with the formation or administration of any labor organization or contribute financial or other support to it.”—effectively outlawing the American Bell Association.
AT&T and its subsidiaries began cutting ties with the American Bell Association and their chapters, although some awaited the outcome of a court challenge to the law. Many in business believed the Wagner Act would be struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court like a number of other New Deal laws, believing it to be a violation of their property rights.
True Unions in the Bell System
The National Federation of Telephone Workers was formed in 1939 and published The Telephone Worker. Here, Mary Gannon is featured on the cover of the April 1945 issue.
In 1937 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act and the Bell System severed all formal ties with its employee association while attempting to continue to utilize them to blunt any unionization drives by old-line crafts of the American Federation of Labor or the new CIO industrial union organizing drives.
While some associations quickly began acting like a union, particularly in the southwest and in Ohio, most continued close ties with management. Many newly independent associations were initially given seed money by the Bell System and some continued to be allowed to meet for free on the company premises.
Washington, D.C. phone workers followed the old American Bell Association organizational model with a federation—the District Federation of Telephone Employees–with branches in at least two crafts; installers and operators.
Telephone operators, supervisors, installers clerical employees, accountants, elevator operators, rest room attendants and food service workers at C&P numbered perhaps 6500 in total.
However, women were the vast majority of 2,500 telephone operators, 500 food service and 200 clerical workers while nearly all the 3200 installers and many accounting clerks and customer representatives were men. The majority of telephone operators reported to the headquarters at 13th and G Streets NW, but also worked at some 30-odd satellite facilities around the city and close-in suburbs.
In 1935 Mary Gannon was an activist in her new local union and although the District workers were now organized, those working for the same Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company in northern Virginia were not.
Gannon, along with others, set out to organize the northern Virginia workers into a union and beginning in 1937, Gannon served as traffic (telephone operator) chair of the Northern District of the Virginia Federation of Telephone Workers and in 1940 she was elected president of her home union, the Washington Telephone Traffic Union.
At the same time as Gannon was taking the reins of the operators in Northern Virginia, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was had an eye on unionizing the telephone system, across craft lines into a large industrial union and ultimately established the American Communications Association that picked up the Northern California Telephone Traffic League.
The established American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was largely organized along craft lines, was also eyeing telephone workers. It held a meeting of Washington, D.C. telephone operators in June 1937 of its fledgling National Telephone Operators Union that attracted 35 women, but the effort failed to gain traction.
However the number of true independent unions that arose from the former Bell Associations grew and in December 1937, The Ohio Federation sent out a nationwide call for a conference to be held in St. Louis.
Helen Ward from the District of Columbia Traffic Union was sent to attend this first national conference in St. Louis.
Eight women and 21 men from across the country representing perhaps 60,000 workers attended the first meeting. A proposal was put forward to form a loose federation with a national office. The measure was voted down and the first attempt to form a national union failed.
The following year, two more conferences were held in Chicago and New Orleans that finally launched the National Federation of Telephone Workers in New York in 1939 with a national office, but with each local union running its own affairs.
Women and the NFTW
Pansy Harris from the Southern California League was the first woman vice president of the NFTW–elected at the founding convention in 1939.
Men from the plants, installation and repair facilities were suspicious of women and weren’t sure women could be real trade unionists.
However approximately 62 percent of telephone company employees were women and the percentage eligible for the union was higher since the nearly all-male management was excluded from membership. The traffic unions were almost entirely composed of women.
The new constitution at the founding convention of the union in 1939 provided for seven board seats from which three would be elected as the officers. Pansy Harris of the Southern California Traffic League was the only woman elected to a board seat.
The convention elected men to all three officer positions–president, vice president and secretary-treasurer.
The 1940 convention of the NFTW passed a resolution recognizing that “the nature of the problems and interests of…women workers differ in so many ways from the problems and interests of the male workers represented in the federation” that “in order to most equitably represent the will of women workers and to best serve their interest, the elected feminine member of the executive board shall be in attendance at all conferences where the opportunity may present itself to plead their cause.”
The 1940 convention expanded the number of executive board seats to nine and Harris was re-elected. However other women running for executive board slots were defeated, causing a wave of resentment among the telephone traffic units.
The following year, women met before the annual convention and the traffic unions threatened to withdraw their locals from the NFTW unless they had more representation within the national union and their concerns as operators were addressed.
The 1942 traffic panel at the NFTW convention.
During the 1942 convention of the NFTW, a panel discussion was held on the appropriate number of women that should serve on the executive board.
At one point in the discussion, Gannon in exasperation, angrily declared:
“Why shouldn’t we have three women on the board if it is necessary? What difference does it make if the president, perhaps, should be a woman? I am afraid I don’t see things from the man’s point of view alone. I think there are intelligent women in the world.”
The traffic units put forward a resolution that three representatives from the operator local unions should sit on the executive board. But men dominated the number of delegates and voted the constitutional amendment down.
A compromise was ultimately reached and the convention voted to reserve another seat on the executive board for traffic units, allowing for two in total. Theresa Donahey of the Ohio traffic union was elected along with Harris.
Equal Pay
At the meeting before the 1942 convention, women also sought to place “equal pay for equal work” as a demand and it was adopted at the convention.
AT&T was constantly taking job duties from a higher paid, predominantly male classifications, and transferring those duties to lower paid predominantly female classifications without any increase in pay.
Further, many AT&T subsidiaries listed different pay scales for the same job for men and women with the male jobs paying more.
As a result the NFTW became one of the pioneer unions in advocating for equal pay for equal work
A 1944 study by the federal Women’s Bureau found that the top pay of some women’s clerical classifications in the telephone industry was below that of the starting pay for similar male classifications.
Top NFTW women officers in 1945: traffic panel chair Mary Gannon, executive board member Anne Benscoter, and executive board member Frances V. Smith.
Gannon, the national chair of the union’s traffic panel during that period editorialized in The Telephone Worker, the NFTW periodical, for equal pay for equal work.
The traffic panel sponsored a successful resolution at the 1944 NFTW convention that encouraged local unions to end separate job classifications for men and women.
The National War Labor Board endorsed the policy of equal pay for equal work. During World War II, strikes in defense-related industry were illegal and disputes were settled through the federal Labor Board.
The telephone union often made the demand for equal pay when a contract dispute went before the Board. As a result many telephone labor contracts contained “equal pay” provisions.
Similarly Congress took up the Equal Pay Act of 1945, supported by the NFTW, that provided for equal pay between “comparable” jobs. But despite strong support from powerful elected officials, the Act failed to pass.
Faced with the problem of the loss of telephone operator jobs through conversion to direct dial, the traffic panel also sponsored a resolution that was endorsed by the NFTW convention to encourage local unions to increase severance pay for operators who were laid-off.
Another demand of the traffic panel was urging the Labor Department to re-categorize operator work from semi-skilled to skilled in order to bolster their case for higher pay in cases before the War Labor Board. The union provided reams of data to the the Labor Department on skills and training. After a lengthy study period the Labor Department found in 1946 that the operator position met the criteria for “skilled.”
The War Labor Board had since lapsed, but the finding was useful to the NFTW and later Communications Workers of America (CWA) in making the case to bolster telephone operator pay.
Despite having a majority of members, no woman ever served as an officer of the NFTW and women had only one executive board seat when there were seven total and later only two of nine. However, even with the domination of men, the NFTW women were able to successfully advocate for women workers.
Washington Comes into its Own
Western Electric’s D.C. headquarters at 1111 N. Capitol St.
It’s not clear how Gannon underwent a transformation from the “simon-pure” employee described by Porter to a militant trade union leader, but the roots probably lay in the turbulent times of the Great Depression and her exposure to other trade union leaders through initial meetings of the efforts to form the local and national telephone unions.
The regimented, military-style command structure of C&P Telephone with its micro-managing, invasive rules probably also played a role.
It’s not clear exactly when the Northern Virginia District of the Virginia Federation of Telephone Workers became part of the Washington unit, but it probably occurred in 1940 around the time Gannon was elected president of the Washington Telephone Traffic Union.
The Washington union’s first brush with a possible strike came in 1941 when 8,000 phone and equipment installers at Western Electric, a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T, threatened a nationwide strike over wages. Western Electric in the District of Columbia had about 600 workers in a separate unit of the NFTW.
The fledgling NFTW, with 150,000 members, announced that its operators and service personnel would honor picket lines. The dispute was resolved without a strike through the intervention of federal mediators, but marked a new militancy by the independent union.
Another strike was threatened by the NFTW long lines union—direct employees of AT&T—who could shut down long distance service across the country if they walked out. This too would have affected the Washington unions if the long lines workers set up picket lines at local facilities. The NFTW constitution required affiliate local unions to respect the picket lines of other affiliates.
It is not clear when Washington, D.C. telephone workers obtained their first labor contract, but an article in The Washington Post mentions a contract with an effective date of April 1942.
In August 1942, with the United States now at war against Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and their allies, Ohio telephone installation and repair workers staged a strike over wages that spread across the state to Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron and Canton. Telephone operators refused to cross picket lines, disrupting communications across the state.
The World War II War Labor Board, instituted by executive order by President Franklin Roosevelt to settle labor disputes in broadly defined defense-related industries, quickly settled the Ohio dispute, but the strike reflected a rising militancy on the part of Ohio telephone workers–and of the NFTW as a whole.
In October 1942, the Washington Federation of Telephone Employees sought negotiations for improvements with C&P ahead of the April 1943 expiration of their contract that covered 6,500 workers in the plant, traffic, commercial and accounting departments.
The WFTE membership covered Washington, D.C., Arlington and Fairfax counties in Virginia and Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland.
However the company refused to bargain other than to demand an extension of the current labor agreement.
The Washington Post covers the arbitrator’s recommendation for a $2 per week wage increase.
A federal arbitrator was appointed in February in an attempt to settle the dispute and recommended a $2 per hour pay increase in March 1943, retroactive to January 1, 1943.
The War Labor Board upheld the arbitrator’s finding in June 1943 applying the $2 increase to about 4,400 of the workers and granting increases to about 1,300 other workers to maintain differentials. One of the suburban facilities in Silver Hill, Maryland, had their pay equalized with other telephone workers covered under the contract.
In September 1943 the WFTE again asked to open negotiations for a new agreement asking for pay increases, a reduction in the time it takes to reach top pay, arbitration of grievances, a union membership requirement for traffic workers, and seniority rights.
Once again the War Labor Board took jurisdiction over the dispute. After hearings were held, a panel recommended no general wage increase, a voluntary maintenance of union membership and a shorter wage progression plan.
Separate Bargaining
Sometime between 1943 and 1944, the two unions comprising the Washington Federation of Telephone Employees each began pursuing their own contract negotiations.
There seems to be no record as to the cause of the split, but it was likely the tensions between the predominantly male installers and the predominantly female operators.
Venus Green writes in her book Race on the Line, “According to male and female organizers, plant men often resisted women unionists and feared operators’ militancy.”
Later, the conservative nature of the local installers union was clearly revealed and contrasted sharply with the militancy of the traffic union.
Gannon headed the Washington Telephone Traffic Union while Helery Robinson served as president of the C&P installers’ Federation of Telephone Workers of D.C.
Representation of other classifications were split between the two unions with the traffic union containing cafeteria workers, clerks, rest room attendants and general helpers while the Federation had the accounting clerks, elevator operators and service representatives.
C&P Telephone, Black Workers and the Union
Black union members mix with white union members at Turner’s Arena during the Jan. 1947 “continuous meeting.”
Like many companies in Jim Crow Washington, D.C., C&P Telephone openly practiced discrimination against Black people. Black people were hired only for the most menial jobs, including janitorial, food service and window washing. Elevator operator was the top position open to African Americans.
Black workers were not permitted to eat with White workers in the eight company cafeterias, according to one person whose mother worked for the company.
There doesn’t seem to be records covering Black participation in the earlier employee association in the District, but when the District Federation of Telephone Employees was formed, predominantly Black classifications were covered and Black workers in those classifications were signed up as union members. This positive step avoided establishing separate Black and White Jim Crow unions like the postal workers had at that time.
In response to a threatened march on Washington organized by Black labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, President Franklin Roosevelt issued executive order 8802 in June 1941 that barred discrimination in defense and defense-related industries based on “race, creed, color or national origin” and quickly established a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to enforce desegregation orders.
In 1942 the Committee on Jobs for Negroes in Public Utilities was formed to challenge Jim Crow in publicly regulated utilities that included Capital Transit, Chesapeake and Potomac (C&P) Telephone, Washington Gas Light Co. and Potomac Electric Power Co. (Pepco). Leaders included William S. Johnson, of local Communist Party and the leader of the cooks union, Dorothy Strange of the National Negro Congress and Ralph Matthews ,of the Washington Afro American newspaper.
Pressure on C&P
An FEPC investigation into public utilities in 1942 and pressure from the Committee on Jobs spurred the company to establish a business office at 14th and U Streets staffed by Black employees.
The jobs included a Black manager, service representatives, consumer representative, accounting and toll clerks and typists—about 25 workers in total. These were first Black workers hired into these positions.
However, no Black operators were permitted and Black workers were not permitted to transfer to all-White facilities elsewhere in the city and suburbs.
William S. Johnson (center) Ralph Matthews (standing), and Dorothy Strange (2nd from right) at a Committee on Jobs for Negros in Public Utilities meeting in 1942.
Johnson and Mayme Brown of the Committee on Jobs sent a letter to the company protesting the move as a “dodge” to evade training Black workers for operator and other jobs in the phone company across the city.
“Your company’s long-time policy of racial discrimination in employment is now quite untenable. This fact is in no way altered by the segregated business office you now propose to establish,” the letter to the company said.
“Your public responsibility requires the supplementing of your staff of operators with the large number of competent colored girls now available for employment. This we call upon you to do,” it continued.
Citing President Roosevelt’s executive order, the group stated that “whether to employ colored operators is no longer solely a question of social ethics, but an established policy of the government.”
Most of the jobs created at the facility at 14th and U Streets were covered by union contracts. The telephone traffic union covered clerical employees and helpers while the installer’s union covered accountants and service representatives.
Gloria Ricks, one of the first eight Black workers hired at the all-Black facility at 14th & U Sts. NW is shown with her husband Ulysses in 1944.
The unions signed up most of those employed at the facility for union membership.
The national union was not a loud voice for desegregation of the operator job. But the NFTW ran a short favorable article in their national publication The Telephone Worker on the 1944 FEPC-sponsored agreement in New York to hire 26 Black people into telephone operator positions for the first time in a major metropolitan area.
The article noted that the local Traffic Employees Association took part in the conference and quoted the union as saying that they “did not anticipate any problem in the union because of the employment of Negro operators.”
The article had some additional significance because it appeared shortly after a long unionization drive and subsequently tough contract negotiations in the south that brought many new workers into the national union in an area where Jim Crow held the strongest sway among the White population..
Union meetings
With Washington, D.C. still a Jim Crow town, there were few large facilities that permitted mixed-race seating so a decision had to be made as to whether to hold separate union meetings for Black and White members, establish Jim Crow seating in a facility that permitted Black and White to gather in the same hall or to hold meetings with no seating restrictions in one of the few halls that permitted open seating..
Gannon took the issue head on and held mass strike meetings in facilities with no seating restrictions–Black and White workers mixing together in 1944-45 at the Hamilton Hotel and in 1946-47 at Turner’s Arena.
However, a joint meeting of six D.C. area NFTW local unions sponsored by the national NFTW was held at the Uline Arena, a Jim Crow facility, for their 4-hour work stoppage in 1945.
The FEPC lapsed in 1946, failing in its attempt to desegregate C&P telephone operators.
During the 1947 nationwide strike by telephone workers, Black union members marched together with white workers on picket lines at the various locations around the city in addition to the all-Black facility at 14th & U Streets NW.
Renewed Pressure on C&P
After World War II, the Urban League pressed the White House to act on integrating public utilities while the NAACP filed suit against C&P Telephone in 1953.
Civil rights icon Mary Church Terrell being interviewed by Dr. Tomlinson Todd for his One America program circa 1952.
Dr. Tomlinson D. Todd was a key figure in the desegregation of Washington, D.C. Jim Crow restaurants, along with civil rights icon Mary Church Terrell.
Todd had in 1943 first discovered and publicized the 1871 and 1872 “lost laws” in the District that prohibited discrimination in public accommodations. They were called “lost laws” because they were removed from the city code without being repealed.
Regular pickets and boycotts of Jim Crow restaurants were held 1949-53 and a lawsuit was filed where in 1953 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the District’s so-called “lost laws” and outlawed segregation in public accommodations in the city.
However, employment was not covered by those 19th century laws. Todd had a radio show in 1953 and interviewed C&P Telephone officials about their refusal to hire Black operators.
The Washington Afro American reported a C&P official said:
“The telephone company would never hire colored operators…until other things in Washington changed such as the integration of the school system.”
“When children learned through the schools to live and work together, then industry would be willing to accept them on an integrated basis—this would take time…within the next two or three generations.”
Pressure on C&P to desegregate its workforce included a lawsuit by the NAACP.
However rights activists were not waiting and were now pressuring the President’s Committee on Government Contracts, which was the agency charged with ensuring that firms holding government contracts did not practice discrimination.
In February 1954, C&P agreed to begin desegregating clerical employees and transferred two Black accounting clerks from the 14th & U Streets office to the downtown office.
The U.S. Supreme Court issued its Bolling v. Sharpe decision May 17, 1954, ordering desegregation of District of Columbia schools.
First Black Operators
By 1956, the company permitted some Black clerical employees to train as telephone operators and ultimately transferred some into previously all-White facilities, beginning a slow process of desegregation that would continue long after the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in employment.
In contrasting the role of unions in desegregation, the Capital Transit Company in the District barred Black bus and streetcar operators until 1956, citing union opposition and the fear of a wildcat strike whereas C&P officials were never able to blame the union. When it comes to union organization, the WTTU admitted Black members on an equal basis with no Jim Crow seatings at members in contrast to the postal unions that expelled Black members early in the 20th century, forcing Black postal workers to set up separate unions and locals.
But there is no record that the WTTU was a forceful advocate of desegregation in contrast to those CIO unions and the AFL cooks and laborers that championed abolishing Jim Crow during the same period.
However it can be said that Gannon and the WTTU were not an impediment and that Black members that were hired by C&P were enrolled in the union as equal members.
Use of the ‘Union Meeting’ Strike
The Washington Star reports on a planned walkout by telephone operators Sept. 29, 1944.
It was during World War II that Gannon began to use the mini-strike as a weapon to obtain workers’ goals and build solidarity nationwide.
Gannon called her first city-wide job action September 29, 1944 when she summoned union members to an “emergency meeting” at the Hamilton Hotel during working hours.
The War Labor Board had again taken charge of a wage dispute between Gannon’s union and C&P Telephone and Gannon feared another long, drawn-out process.
One of the issues, besides a wage increase, that was of paramount concern to the union was the company’s practice of recruiting out-of-town operators and paying them a living expense in addition to regular wages. Local operators resented this because they faced the same expenses.
The practice began in 1941 after the U.S. entered World War II. The number of these out-of-town operators had decreased from around 400 to about 200, but still nagged at the local workers whose pay also lagged behind other industries.
Learning of the meeting and potential strike vote, the Board sent a telegram to the union which read in part that, “The New Case Committee of the National War Labor Board has today voted to refer the dispute for immediate hearing to a national panel of the board.”
The Board went on to say, “We would appreciate it if the union would make known to those attending the meeting the fact that this dispute has been referred to a national panel. In view of the untold damage that would be done in the National Capitol to the Allied war effort should any interruption of its telephone service occur, the board expects the meeting tonight to be conducted in such a manner as not to result in any interruption or impairment of vital telephone service.”
More than 1,200 members heeded Gannon’s call and a tumultuous union meeting followed where at one point several dozen women chased away news reporters. At the conclusion of the two-hour meeting, the women voted to return to work since the Board had expedited hearings on their dispute with C&P Telephone.
Nevertheless, the two-hour meeting served notice of just how effective even a short strike could be.
The Washington Post reported:
“Long distance telephone service was delayed last night and in some of the outlying exchanges operations were seriously disrupted. Residents in the Capitol Heights (Maryland) area and Falls Church (Virginia) section reported they were almost completely cut off for a time. Even connections to fire and police departments were affected, it was said.”
“Serious disruptions in service were also reported by telephone subscribers using the Alexandria and Locust exchanges.”
It was far from the last time that Gannon would use a “union meeting” as a type of strike.
Wartime Strike
Telephone operators picket the main C&P office on 13th Street NW Nov. 23, 1944 during a sympathy strike with Ohio workers.
During World War II, strikes in defense-related industries were barred and disputes settled by the War Labor Board. Telephone workers fell under this umbrella.
Operators in Dayton, Ohio walked off the job November 17, 1944 in defiance of the Board over the issue of a pay premium for workers imported from out-of-town.
The night before the Thanksgiving holiday, a mere two months after her last “emergency meeting, Gannon called another and this time telephone operators voted to stage a sympathy strike with the Ohio workers.
Hundreds of operators, including those on the night shift, crammed the assembly room and halls of the Hamilton Hotel for a meeting that was held in two shifts because of the size of the crowd of workers.
Upwards of 2,000 of the 2,500 operators struck and were joined by other workers who refused to cross picket lines at the downtown offices as well other locations around the city and suburban locations.
C. A. Robinson, vice president and general manager of C&P Telephone released an appeal to employees that said in part, “We need not tell you that Washington is the communication center of the entire Allied world—that fast and dependable telephone service is vital to the war.”
The Washington Star reported that, “R. A. Morgan, city commercial manager of Western Union, said the telegraph company began to feel the effects of the strike about the middle of the morning when messages increased and many of them carried the notation that the senders had been unable to put through telephone calls.”
Gannon said that special crews had been authorized by the union to handle calls from War and Navy Department and the White House. Most defense agencies already had their own direct long-distance lines and were unaffected by the strike. However, long distance calls from private lines to the government facilities, including the White House, were interrupted.
Strike Begins to Spread
Detroit, Mich. workers also walked out while a dozen local unions in other cities scheduled meetings to consider joining the strike.
Gannon told reporters, “We want it made clear that we are not striking for a raise…All we want is equality. We want them to send these imported workers home or raise us to their pay level. We should have come out before Ohio. This has been pending for a long time. All we want is fairness.”
The Washington Post reported a conference of federal officials was held to consider seizing the companies and resuming telephone operations using the Army Signal Corps.
The local Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) urged a return to work, but also laid the blame for the strike at the feet of the company.
Oliver Palmer, head of the Cafeteria Workers Union, and Henry Beltacher of the United Federal Workers issued a statement that the C & P Telephone “must bear its share of responsibility for the strike because of its consistent policy of not hiring qualified Negro telephone operators in the District of Columbia.”
“Instead, it has imported operators and paid them extra subsistence pay,” the statement said.
Strike Called Off
Robert Pollack of The Ohio Federation and Mary Gannon call off the strike.
By 6 pm on November 23rd, Robert Pollock, president of the Ohio Federation and Gannon held a press conference where they announced they were calling off the strike. The two had become convinced that federal seizure of their companies would freeze wages and working conditions in place, preventing any ruling on the “imported worker” issue.
One outcome of the strike was the National War Labor Board set up a separate panel to hear telephone disputes—cutting the wait time for hearings in the industry.
Gannon was pleased with the strike.
“I’m sincerely glad that it didn’t do any more harm to the war effort than it did. We’re glad to return to work. But we’re more than glad that we supported Ohio,” Gannon told the Washington Star.
Labor Board Findings
Pickets in front of the main C&P building on 13th Street NW Nov. 23, 1944.
The War Labor Board issues its preliminary findings in the Washington case in December raising the wages of telephone operators with less than 10 years of service by $4 per week and those with more than 10 years of service by $3 per week and left in place an agreement to end imported workers by February of 1945 provided that there was no effect on telephone service.
The recommendation was blasted by the union as insufficient, which filed a brief that said in part,
“Certainly if the telephone company paid better wages it would not have been required to import hundreds of operators into the District and pay them an incredibly inflationary rate of $18.70 [per week] above the local rate.”
The union went on to charge that “the company deliberately undertook to pay these extraordinarily high wages to relatively few employees …in order to keep from being required to raise its general wage levels to a point where it would be able to recruit labor in Washington.”
In a victory for the union the War Labor Board made its final ruling in March 1945, granting a $4 per week increase to all employees.
The strike demonstrated both the strengths of the fledging national union and its weaknesses. The solidarity strikes by Washington and Detroit with other local unions poised to join them demonstrated the strength of telephone workers nationally.
But it also demonstrated their weakness—there was no central decision-making means of calling a nationwide strike and any action was left to local decisions against a company that held a monopoly in the telephone industry.
Gannon, already influential in the national telephone union, was propelled into near stardom among telephone operators for her role in taking out the high-profile Washington, D.C. union on a solidarity strike.
Sit-Down Strikes
C&P ad responding to January 3, 1946 sit-down strike.
Gannon used all the direct action tactics at her disposal and perfected the use of mini sit-down strikes over grievances beginning in 1943.
Sit-down strikes where workers remain at work, but refuse to perform their duties had been outlawed by the National Labor Relations Board and a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1939 affirmed that they were illegal.
Despite the unfavorable legal ground, Gannon called sit-down strikes anyway.
Information on these mini-strikes is scant, but the company published an advertisement in the Washington Star in January 1946 that claimed a 1-hour sit-down strike was the 13th work stoppage in the past two-and-one-half years. Brooks’ book puts the number of mini strikes by the D.C. traffic union at around 200 in the post-World War II era.
Madge Giles, a steward and later president of Washington Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 2300 described how it worked, according to Brooks in his book.
“On getting the word from Mrs. Gannon, the stewards would go and ask a friendly service assistant, ‘May I get in position?’ I would pick up the SA stand (a ring would follow on everyone at the same time). ‘We have a work stoppage. We’ll explain later.’ and it would be explained later,” Giles is quoted.s
Conflict Over Supervisor’s Duties
The issue of the company using supervisors as supplemental operators was one flash-point for these strikes.
Supervisors were union members and were more akin to lead personnel in the industrial setting and had no power to discipline employees
On February 19, 1945 when supervisor Hazel Woodville refused to handle calls at around 7 p.m. at the central office on 13th Street NW, management suspended her and upwards of 100 operators responded by sitting at their consoles and refused to connect calls.
After a conference between Gannon and the management, Woodville was returned to work and the protest ended.
Gannon told the Washington Star that a meeting would be held with company officials later to clarify the duties of supervisors. She asserted that supervisors had in the past been required to assist during peak periods, but not during times of normal traffic.
Before the meeting with company officials was held, C&P suspended another supervisor who refused to handle calls at the Woodley exchange office. About a half dozen women out of 17 operators on the evening shift refused to answer calls at the facility.
The C&P Telephone main building at 725 13th Street NW circa 1940.
However, the issue remained unresolved.
The January 3, 1946 job action was called when supervisors were again ordered to perform the duties of operators. Gannon called a one-hour sit-down strike between 10 and 11 a.m. where some 600-700 workers, including supervisors, sat at their consoles but refused to handle any calls.
Gannon said the job action was “a demonstration against sweatshop practices and a drive on the part of the company to break the union,” the Star reported.
She charged that the company had been calling employees in one-by-one and in small groups to discuss issues that were a matter of collective bargaining.
The company was by-passing the union on matters of grievances, working conditions and discipline according to Gannon.
“Supervisors are constantly having to plug in on operators because service is not 100 percent perfect. The reason for this is that the company pays such low wages turnover is high and it cannot obtain a sufficient number of operators,” Gannon explained as quoted in The Washington Star.
The mini-strike slowed long distance service and halted service at seven local exchanges where local calls hadn’t yet been automated.
The sit-down ended when management agreed to meet with the union on the issue.
The Mini-Strike as a Sympathy Strike
Pickets at the Hotel Washington during the Oct. 1946 city-wide strike. The WTTU refused to put telephone calls through to the hotels during the strike.
Chicago telephone workers walked off the job November 19, 1945 in a dispute over wages. As the strike took hold, upwards of 9,000 workers were involved.
The Chicago union was challenging a War Labor Board award of a $4 per week wage increase and demanded a $6 per week increase.
Gannon responded to the Chicago strike by instructing telephone operators in Washington, D.C. to refuse to handle calls into the telephone exchanges served by the Chicago union.
As the Chicago strike entered its sixth day, Washington telephone leaders announced that they expected a call from Chicago—one way or another—for a support strike from D.C. area workers and that they would honor the request.
NFTW president Joseph Beirne alerted local phone unions around the country to be on alert for a national strike call to support Chicago.
However the Chicago strike was settled through intervention of federal mediators and the union agreed to an increase retroactive to January 1945 of $4, an increase of another $2 per week in February 1946 and negotiations with the company over other wage items. This precluded any further action by the Washington telephone union.
Hotel Strike
In another example of a solidarity job action, Washington’s telephone operators refused to place calls to the 18 Washington, D.C. hotels during a 21-day strike by the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union in October 1946.
The Washington Post reported, “The telephone action, ordered by Mrs. Mary Gannon, president of the telephone operators’ union, halted the incoming and outgoing long distance service of all hotels through hotel switchboards…”
“The company has not authorized or agreed with the union to refuse to handle any calls. Our operators are instructed to answer calls in order of their appearance,” the Post reported a hotel spokesperson said.
The use of the sympathy strike was a powerful weapon in building solidarity among workers across the country.
Eleanor Jane Palmer, the secretary-treasurer of the Washington Telephone Traffic Union at the time, recalled how Gannon staged sympathy strikes to aid telephone workers in other areas and helped to lay the basis for a real national union. Brooks quotes her in his book:
“Whenever anybody in the country was out! I remember at one time in St. Louis the traffic girls were trying to get some air conditioning put in, and the only thing the company would offer were the tubs of ice. You’ve heard about them. In order to get some satisfaction on their grievance, they could have had a work stoppage, but they weren’t in the prime position where they were really disturbing the country or upsetting the country. So what they did was call to Washington and ask our president if she could give them some help.”
Sympathy strikes were later outlawed by the 1947 anti-labor Taft-Hartley law.
First National Work Stoppage
Washington area telephone workers mill outside the Uline Arena October 8, 1945 during a 4-hour meeting that served as a nationwide work stoppage.
Two major challenges faced the national NFTW in October 1945.
The first involved the CIO’s United Electrical Workers challenging the certification of the NFTW as a bargaining agent.
A National Labor Relations Board agent subsequently made a recommendation to de-certify NFTW affiliates at the massive Kearny, New Jersey manufacturing facility and at facilities throughout New York and New Jersey covering 30,000 workers–claiming the local unions were company unions in violation of the Wagner Act. The recommendation was widely seen as a tilt by the Board away from independent unions and toward the CIO.
A final decision would surely be followed by other unions challenging the NFTW certification as the collective bargaining representative at units across the country.
The other major issue the NFTW faced was the fragmentation of bargaining by local units in different geographical areas that resulted in widely disparate wages and benefits for those doing the same job.
4-Hour Union Meetings
NFTW president Joseph Beirne called for simultaneous four-hour national union meetings October 8, 1945 across the country as a show of strength to address the challenges.
Workers at the Kearny facility were the first to walk off the jobs for the meeting followed by the Washington Telephone Traffic Union, which left their jobs two hours early before the meeting of all Washington NFTW locals scheduled for 2:00 p.m. at the Uline Arena.
“By 1:00 p.m. a phone company official said the walkout was virtually 100 percent effective,” reported The Washington Post.
The response across the country was similar with operator-assisted service halted in hundreds of towns and cities as 200,000 workers quit their jobs to attend the meetings.
It was the first national telephone work stoppage in history.
In Washington, D.C. 6,000 installers, operators, repair personnel, cafeteria workers and office workers from six locals in the District, Virginia and Maryland jammed the Uline Arena and unanimously voted to authorize the national NFTW to call a strike.
The Washington meeting and those around the country voted to pass five resolutions:
• Authorize the national federation to seek an NLRB strike vote.
• Authorize the federation to call other meetings like the one held October 5th.
• Give the federation blanket authority to act in the Kearny, N.J. case that involved a recommendation by an NLRB examiner that federation-affiliated unions is 22 Western Electric Co. plants in New York and New Jersey be dissolved as company-dominated.
• Write to congressional members and government officials seeking justice in the Kearny case.
• Send presidents of local NFTW unions to Washington to confer with officials who might help in getting a reversal of the recommendation in the Kearny case.
Union Reaction
Union leaders were euphoric with the response of their members.
“It’s like a dream come true,” said Gannon.
William M. Dunn, an NFTW representative on the War Labor Board.
William M. Dunn, the labor representative on the War Labor Board Telephone Commission responded to a reporter’s question about the members losing pay as a result of the meeting:
“Let me tell you this. For every dollar it costs in wages, it costs the telephone company $5 in income.”
The Washington Star reported that all calls that were operator-assisted were halted along with long distance service, NBC and ABC teletype service and telephone communications to some countries.
In smaller cities and communities in Maryland and Virginia where automated local calls had not yet been introduced, service was non-existent. Those included Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, Suffolk, Staunton, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg in Virginia and Frederick, Hagerstown and Cumberland in Maryland.
Beirne was asked by a reporter why the union called for a meeting and a strike vote before filing an exception with the NLRB or seeking a hearing on the Kearny case.
“It is senseless,” Beirne replied, “to wait until your throat is cut.”
The four-hour national strike put Beirne in a position to demand a national contract, if he could get his affiliates to go along and was a powerful demonstration that the NFTW was not company-dominated.
The full NLRB board hearings dragged on for months, but the the decision finally went in favor of the NFTW.
D.C. 8-Day Telephone Strike
Members of the D.C. traffic union leave the main C&P office on 13th St. NW Jan. 10, 1946 for a “continuous union meeting.”
Workers at the Kearny facility went out on strike over wages January 3, 1946 and the bitter dispute threatened to spiral into a national sympathy strike.
In addition, Western Electric installers were chafing over a World War II Labor Board decision that failed to grant installers “a wage structure with wage levels comparable to a wage structure with wage levels of telephone plant employees,” according to Brooks.
Beirne received a letter January 9th from the national installers union president asking for approval for a strike that had already begun. Installers planned to picket all telephone facilities, triggering a nationwide strike.
That day Beirne told news media he was considering calling a national strike.
Gannon’s Union on Collision Course
Meanwhile Gannon was growing increasing inpatient with C & P Telephone over its use of supervisors. She had just concluded a one-hour sit-down strike over the issue on January 3rd and the rank-and-file was growing irate over “sweatshop conditions.”
Gannon’s union was on a collision course with a C&P management that in turn had grown tired of the regular work disruptions.
Brooks writes, “The Washington Traffic group took on its management in a contest over ‘excessive and dictatorial’ supervision.”
“Under a new ‘service program,’ supervisors were ordered to ‘observe’ experienced operators as well as trainees.”
“Systematic spying reinforced these orders: ‘Keep a plug in your hands at all times, be alert, use a courteous tone of voice at all times, keep your eyes on the board at all times, don’t talk to the adjacent operator, keep your headset adjusted one-fourth of an inch from your mouth.’”
“’Do not change headset from one ear to the other without calling your supervisor, sit up straight with both feet on the rail, keep hands on the edge of key shelf, if the customer says ‘good morning,’ don’t answer him, hold the plug at a forty-five degree angle, don’t take an aspirin without being relieved from your position.’”
The list of miniscule infractions went on and on.
Mass Meeting
Washington Telephone Traffic Union members jam Turner’s Arena Jan. 10, 1946 at the start of their 8-day “continuous meeting.”
Gannon called a continuous union meeting at Turner’s Arena for January 10th at 11 a.m. with instructions for union members to leave work at 10 a.m.
As union members entered the hall, they were given a flyer asking them to honor any picket lines set up by the installer’s union.
The 11 a.m. meeting was delayed an hour as union wardens searched for a reporter who had slipped into the meeting hall. Nearly all the union’s 2,500 operator members attended according to Gannon.
When the meeting ended at 12:50 p.m., Gannon announced that a federal conciliation conference would be held that afternoon and that the meeting would be reconvened at night.
“The union members will meet briefly tonight, when I simply will report whether the conference was successful,” Gannon said according to the Star. “If it fails we will recess until tomorrow morning.”
Gannon said when the meeting would end was up to the company, which she said must meet the union’s demands.
The Washington Star summarized Gannon’s 4-point demands as follows:
• Too many “service programs” and constant reminders of rules and regulations concerning the operation of switchboards.
• The “plug in” rule requiring that an operator relieving another must have the connecting cord in her hand as the operator going off duty leaves her seat.
• Excessive observation of operators by officials
• Meetings of employees called by officials to “hammer home” directives.
“The management of the offices constantly walk up and down behind the girls at switchboards, making them nervous. Sometimes they look over operators’ shoulders and even breathe down their necks,” Gannon told reporters.
“The day chief, the evening chief, the night chief, the assistant chief and the manager of the office take turns at this.”
“The supervisors must account for every minute of their time—must be constantly checking on the girls’ work, listen to customers’ complaints and report on equipment out of service.”
“We have girls leaving the boards and going home because of these conditions. Absenteeism is terrible and the public is not getting the service it should. The people remaining on the job are doing so under terrible handicap.”
C&P Reaction
C&P Telephone responds to the “continuous union meeting” in a Jan. 12, 1947 ad in the Washington Star.
H. R. Maddox, vice-president and general manager of C&P denounced the union in a statement that read in part.
“Telephone operators walked off the job today because the company requires that telephone operator supervisors perform the duties of the job for which they were hired. This is the 14th strike in the past two-and-one-half years.”
“The situation is exactly the same as it was last Friday when the union staged a one-hour, sit-down strike.”
“This matter has been discussed with the Washington Telephone Traffic Union but the discussions were fruitless. It has been apparent from the start that the union had embarked on a program of deteriorating telephone service in Washington and dictating what type of service the public should have.”
“Now the union is changing its attack and seeking to accomplish the same result by charging that the performance by employees of their traditional duties results in working conditions unacceptable to the union.”
No picket lines were set up because Gannon claimed it wasn’t a strike, but simply a long union meeting.
Once again, long distance and other operator-assisted service slowed to a crawl as management personnel, engineers and others attempted to continue service.
Even the White House was not exempt; incoming long distance calls were blocked and outgoing long distance service had to be routed through military lines.
Installers Strike
Western Electric workers set up picket lines at C&P facilities around Washington, D.C. shown here at an unidentified facility Jan. 12, 1947.
Meanwhile, telephone installers across the nation employed by Western Electric (an AT&T subsidiary company) went on strike and set up picket lines at most telephone facilities bringing nationwide long-distance service to a crawl.
Western Electric manufactured and repaired telephones and equipment and installed large equipment.
The effects in Washington were limited because operators had already called their continuous union meeting and long distance service was already halted. But the 600 installers in the city set up picket lines outside the main C&P office on 13th Street NW and at some satellite facilities.
Beirne had hoped to hold off the Western Electric installers.
He had been working to cobble together local union telephone labor contracts that were expiring over the next year in order to facilitate a national bargaining agreement.
At a Milwaukee conference in December 1945 where 38 of 47 local presidents attended, they formulated national demands of a return to the 8-hour day from the wartime 48 hour day, a $0.65 per hour minimum wage retroactive to August 1945, and a $2 per day wage increase.
Beirne undoubtedly knew many of the bargaining units were conservative and repeatedly asking them to strike was a doomed strategy.
Affiliates Split on Installers’ Strike
This January 13th meeting of the NFTW executive board called off the Western Electric strike, postponing it until other affiliates filed legally required strike notices.
A number of the NFTW affiliates rebelled against the installers strike and voted not to honor picket lines, including the large New York City union while others, including Washington, pledged to refuse to cross them.
Meanwhile the federal government made preparations to seize the nationwide telephone service to end the strike.
Beirne called a January 13th meeting of the national executive board where it was decided to announce that a nationwide strike would be called, but only after each affiliate filed the legally necessary 30-day strike notice.
Meanwhile, he announced, the installers would go back to work. Installers’ pickets were withdrawn January 14th.
Beirne still had a shot at nationwide bargaining and a pact between the NFTW and the Bell System.
Washington Strike Continues
An undated photograph of a Washington Telephone Traffic Union mass meeting at Turner’s Arena.
Separate from the activity on the national scene, Gannon’s conference with C&P and the federal conciliator on the first day of their “continuous meeting” ended without movement by either side, Gannon announced at the evening session of their January 11th meeting.
Commissioner Richard Goodrick of the federal Conciliation Service told the press that he would not be involved further until prospects of a settlement between the two sides brightened.
At a morning meeting on Saturday, January 12th, Gannon told the members that the company had upped the stakes and filed notice to terminate recognition of the union on April 1st and that it would refuse to negotiate on the termination after March 1st.
The contractual agreement to recognize the union was one of four labor agreements between the Washington NFTW affiliate and the company, but the most important because the others were meaningless without union recognition.
Gannon told the 2,000 union members assembled that the meeting would be adjourned until Monday morning. She had a message for the press in response to the company’s termination of bargaining rights notice.
“If there are any member of the press present,” she said addressing the meeting,” I want them to know we don’t mean we will be out until Monday—we mean indefinitely.”
She later added that C&P’s termination notice was, ‘just another one of its anti-labor acts. We intend to ignore it,” reported The Washington Star.
“We don’t like work stoppages and continuous meetings”, she continued. “We don’t like strikes; the word isn’t nice. But what do you do when you have your back against the wall?”
Union Meeting Continues
With permission from the striking Western Electric workers, striking traffic workers cross the picket line at 14th and R Streets NW to pick up their last paycheck Jan. 12, 1947.
Meanwhile, arrangements were made with the installers for the telephone operators to cross installers’ picket lines, which were still up, in order to pick up their last paycheck for work performed before the continuous meeting.
On Monday, January 14th, a little more than 500 members came to the fourth “continuous meeting” at the arena—significantly less than those the previous week.
According to the Star, Gannon exhorted her members, “Stay with me—I know what is best. Today will bring good news.”’
“I hope you will hear from newspapers and radios that you will be returning to your jobs,” she continued.
She told those assembled that the union’s demands were just and that the company had not learned what collective bargaining is.
“I don’t need to tell you we must stick together. I assure you that when you do go back to work there will be no discrimination against you or interference with your seniority.
When the meeting concluded, she invited press into the arena and urged the crowd to show how they felt.
The crowd broke into a loud, rhythmic clapping as a demonstration of continued support for the strike.
But Gannon knew the resolve of some of her members was weakening. Some were contacting management and telling their bosses they wanted to go back to work. Others were talking among themselves asking how were they going to make it as they spent the money from their last paycheck.
Red Herring
C&P’s most effective ad used a red herring to gain public support. This version was published Jan. 17, 1946.
After the “continuous meeting’ began, C&P published daily advertisements in local newspapers putting out their side with headlines like, “Should the union manage the telephone business?,” “Telephone strike follows long slow-down,” “No telephone strikes in 65 years,” and “Should a telephone operator be dismissed for not striking?”
The last initially appeared Tuesday, January 15th and a version ran for the duration of the strike. It was one of their most effective. The union had a security clause in their contract which required members to remain in good standing.
The company used this as a red herring to claim that the union would use this clause to attempt to have the company dismiss any member who crossed picket lines. The company then used their advertisement to announce that they would never dismiss an employee who crossed a picket line.
Editorial boards, congressional representatives and others chimed in to support the company stance over a non-existent issue that the union never raised.
But it had its effect and a trickle of operators began to return to work.
The union responded the same day by releasing details of a proposal it had made the previous Friday.
Beirne Weighs-In
NFTW president Joseph Beirne in 1945.
National NFTW president Beirne told reporters that local union had made a “fact finding proposal” to the company in order to end the “continuous meeting.”
The Washington Star reported Beirne explained, “When it was seen the company and union entertained a wide difference of opinion in the issues involved, the union presented a compromise, which I thought was eminently fair and would be accepted by the company.”
“The union suggested that each side appoint an equal number of representatives to sit on a committee which would function in a fact-finding manner and investigate all the issues in dispute. After a period not to exceed six months, the committee would report back its findings.”
“During this period, the company would revert to the employer’ practices in force during the [World] war and up to November 1st. It is the union contention that the company has put disagreeable practices in effect since that time.”
By releasing the proposal publicly, the union was presenting itself as reasonable and casting the company in an unfavorable light and pointing blame toward C&P as the root cause as to why telephone service was still interrupted.
Gannon scheduled her fifth union meeting for the next day, Wednesday, January 16th.
The meeting was brief—only about 15 minutes–where Gannon updated the members that a meeting was held between the company and the union and that another was scheduled in the afternoon.
General Agreement
Operators walk off the job for the beginning of their “continuous meeting” January 11, 1946.
She also scheduled another union meeting for the next day at 10 a.m.
Following the meeting, union public relations spokesperson Al Herrington told reporters that “an agreement was reached on general principles which will resolve the dispute.”
“We will try to write the language that will result in a contract covering the settlement of the dispute and return to work,” Herrington told reporters.
To confuse matters, the company announced that no progress had been made and that it was unaware of any afternoon meeting.
Meanwhile C&P announced that about 100 operators had returned to work out of the 2,500 on strike.
At their sixth meeting at 10 a.m. on the seventh day of their strike, Gannon reported to the members that the union would be making a revised proposal to the company that afternoon and another union meeting, hopefully the last, was scheduled for 7 p.m. that night.
Al Kane, general counsel for the union addressed the crowd and also told them that he believed the union’s modified proposal to be placed before the company that afternoon would be accepted.
Some Dissension
There was some dissension as a few workers grumbled about missing a paycheck while one operator complained that she had two children to support and couldn’t afford to stay out, according to the Star newspaper..
“Can’t we stick together?” Gannon replied and assured those assembled that they would be going back to work soon.
But most of those assembled had sentiments were captured after the meeting by women who said, “Well, if we don’t stick together, we won’t get anything,” and “We’ve stayed out all week and lost a week’s pay, we might as well get something for it,” as reported by The Washington Star.
Members at the meeting said that company officials had been calling them at home and telling them if they didn’t come back to work they would lose their jobs.
In response, the union posted designated representatives outside each location to persuade those wavering to hold fast.
Victory
“Victory!” Mary Gannon stands in front of ecstatic workers at Turner’s Arena after they vote to end their “continuous meeting” Jan. 17, 1946.
At the meeting that night on the eighth day of their strike, Gannon announced, “Victory!”
For the first time—anywhere–a part of the AT&T system acknowledged that workers were entitled to “good working conditions.” That basic tenant of industrial relations is taken for granted today and is part and parcel of most union contracts, but it was an earth-shaking concession for the Bell System at the time.
The Washington Star reported, “About 1,700 operators cheered and sang in Turner’s Arena when Mrs. Gannon told them they could return to work.”
The terms of the settlement were as follows:
• The union and the company both agree that the public is entitled to the best possible telephone service and that such service should be rendered under good working conditions. The operating force will return to work and perform the duties pertaining to their employment as assigned by the company.
• The union and company agreed to appoint a committee of six, three from the union and three from the company, composed of employees other than the present bargaining agents, which committee will institute a study of the work assignments and make recommendations for any changes that may appear desirable. This committee so shall function to March 31, 1947, unless otherwise mutually agreed.
• There shall be no recrimination or punitive action or discrimination on the part of the company or the union for any reason resulting from this work stoppage. Non-payment of wages for time lost during the work stoppage is not to be considered as disciplinary, punitive or prejudicial action.
“You can’t have everything. You take what you can get and you like it. After almost nine days, you have won a nice victory. Some say women can’t stick together. I think now that some will change their minds,” Gannon told the meeting according to the Star.
Operators Ecstatic
Happy telephone operators return to work at C&P Telephone headquarters at 725 13th St. NW Jan. 18, 1946.
Ecstatic operators began returning to their consoles after the meeting and by morning normal long distance service had been restored.
As the union prepared for local contract bargaining, The Washington Star reported March 7, 1946 that Gannon indicated many of the issues had been resolved by the committee.
“Grievances over working conditions which brought about an eight-day operators’ strike in January will not figure in the bargaining Mrs. Gannon said.”
“These matters are being nicely ironed out by a company-union committee appointed at the end of the strike to recommend working condition improvements, the union leader added. She said many improvements had been effected in training courses and supervisor observer tactics since the strike.”
“The committee will function until March 31, 1947, and there is reason to believe most of the grievances will be settled by then,” Gannon said according to the Star.
Gannon had done what many of her male counterparts felt was impossible—unified a nearly all-women workforce and led them on a successful 8-day strike.
Seek National Bargaining
The Washington Telephone Traffic Union votes to authorize a strike at a Feb. 7, 1946 meeting at Turner’s Arena.
Beiirne’s attempt to cobble together enough local contracts to bargain nationwide was still alive.
The union’s national executive board held a number of debates. Seven of the 17 local unions willing to go along with Beirne’s plan gave the bargaining rights to Beirne while the others pledged to “coordinate their bargaining” and honor any strike by the seven.
All seventeen units, including the Washington, D.C. traffic union, filed the legally necessary 30-day strike notices. However, the Washington, D.C. C&P installers did not join in and set about to bargain their own agreement separate from the national effort.
The national executive board settled on using the AT&T nationwide long-lines as the key bargaining unit with other local telephone company subsidiaries pledging to adopt the outcome in what’s known as “pattern” bargaining.
The NFTW executive board set a strike deadline of 6:00 a.m. March 7, 1946 if no agreement were reached. Beirne announced that seventeen units would legally strike while the remaining 33 units across the country would respect picket lines.
Union in Good Position
The country was beset by a strike wave—the largest in U.S. history by some measurements—after wages had been depressed by a ban on strikes during World War II.
Both houses of Congress were controlled by the Democrats and Harry Truman, a Democrat had ascended to the presidency upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945, a climate relatively favorable to labor.
AT&T’s monopoly of equipment manufacture, repair, local and long distance phone service made it a possible target for nationalization or regulation. Truman had already made preparations to seize the company during earlier labor unrest under wartime rules and some in Congress were advocating a takeover.
With these conditions in the background, Beirne was in a good position.
As the March 7th deadline approached, progress toward a settlement bogged down.
Government conciliators had all but given up as AT&T dug in on their final wage offer–that Beirne rejected.
Conciliation Chief Edgar L. Warren made an announcement to the press after the fourth session involving federal mediators attempting to reach an agreement, the final session lasting 14 hours and ending at 2:00 in the morning on March 6th.
Warren said he could see no “eleventh-hour action—other than a satisfactory company offer—which can prevent a strike.”
Strike Inevitable
Washington, D.C. telephone operators walk off the job at the main C&P office in the early morning hours of March 7, 1946.
Beirne sent telegrams to local union leaders across the country saying “strike is inevitable.” Locally, Gannon prepared her troops for picket duty.
Labor Secretary Lewis B. Schwellenbach stayed at the ready to enter negotiations if necessary.
Brooks described what happened in his book:
“With Labor Secretary Schwellenbach ‘standing by,’ AT&T vice president Cleo F. Craig entered the Long Lines negotiations at the eleventh hour. After a brief conference between Craig and Director of Conciliation Edgar L. Warren, NFTW president Beirne was called to the Department of Labor and his arrival placed the negotiations on a national basis.”
Craig later testified before a Senate subcommittee and Brooks described his testimony,
“He [Craig]…claimed that his staff canvassed the member companies the night of March 6th as to their willingness to bargain with their respective unions on the basis of a settlement in Long Lines. And though ‘no company delegated any authority to me to bargain,’ they ‘did say that I could bind them; that they would make an offer to their union.’”
Last Minute Settlement
After a long night of bargaining March 6-7, AT&T sweetened their wage offer and Beirne accepted. Beirne and Craig initialed the document that became the first national agreement between a union and AT&T.
An hour and a half before the strike deadline, the Gannon’s members walked off the job and set up picket lines. It had been less than two months since their nine-day strike. Maryland phone service centered in Baltimore also struck early.
The strike was called off at 5:45 a.m., minutes before the nationwide strike was to begin.
The agreement was a pattern for all pending wage settlements as was to run from March 7 1946 until March 6, 1947. The increases are per week and represented an 18.2 percent increase.
The March 1946 issue of the Telephone Worker described the wage settlement thus:
• “For plant workers–$5 at starting rates, $8 at top rates.
• “For traffic workers–$5 at starting rates, $7 at top rates.
• “For clerical workers–$5 at starting rates, $7 at top rates.
• “For janitors, house service and dining room workers etc.–$5 across the board.
• “For administrative workers—engineers, staff technicians, etc.–$8 across the board.
• “For manufacturing workers 17.6 centers per hour, distributed in any way the union and company can agree to.”
Pressure From Schwellenbach Key
NFTW president Joseph Beirne in 1945.
Asked later how he achieved the national agreement, Beirne said, “We were not only able to get Craig of AT&T, who was a top man, vice president of AT&T, down into Schwellenbach’s office, but we were able with Schwellenbach to keep the pressure on,” according to Brooks.
Gannon had pickets walking at 30 exchanges from 5:30 a.m. until 7 a.m. when she was able to get the official word out that the strike had been called off.
Pickets carried signs in front of the main C&P office at 725 13th Street reading, “We want $2 a Day So We can Maintain a Reasonable Standard of Living,” “Two Bucks a Day to Hike Our Pay Enough to Keep the Wolf Away,” and “The Voice With a Smile Will be Gone for a While—She’s Walking These Lines ‘Til Mamma Bell Signs.”
Gannon had to be pleased–not only for her bet on a national effort and a strengthened national union, but that she could turn her members out for a potentially long strike so soon after the last one.
D.C. Installers Look Foolish
In contrast Helery Robinson of the Washington installer’s Federation of Telephone Workers of D.C. had voted against the national effort at the union executive board meeting in February and struck a bargain with C&P a month before the national strike deadline.
“We may ask for a mutual re-opening of our contract,” Robinson was quoted in The Washington Post. “I am hoping the company will see their way clear to give us new consideration. Otherwise we are saddled with our contract until 1947. The contract now held by us in some categories is about $1 a week less than was granted last night.”
Gannon probably gritted her teeth remembering how male union leaders at national conventions had disparaged women telephone workers and in her mind the decision on the local level to split from the installers was vindicated.
In fact, Beirne had made a private verbal agreement with Craig that all previously signed contracts would have wages brought up to the national standard.
Beirne explained later, “We had stuck together and we did move the giant. But then to put frosting on the cake, we had more money put into the pockets of those who had signed off…” as quoted in Brooks’ book.
Interlude
Railroad workers at Potomac Yards in Alexandria, Va. walk off the job in May 1946 during the strike wave of 1945-47.
Internally, AT&T chaffed at the agreement they made and immediately began making preparations for the March 1947 contract expiration.
The political situation changed during the November 1946 elections when the Republican Party swept into power with a large majority in the House of Representatives and a slim majority in the U.S. Senate.
Many Republicans, along with some Democrats, had vehemently opposed the 1935 Wagner Act that put into law many union rights and helped lead to the unionization wave of the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Republican leaders in both houses began putting together the elements of a bill that would become the Taft-Hartley Act, outlawing sympathy strikes, secondary boycotts, leaving the open shop decision to the states, barring radical labor leaders from serving in official union positions, making it easier to issue injunctions against strikes and a number of other anti-union measures.
A car caravan against the Taft-Hartley Act drives around Washington, D.C. in 1947 with the U,.S. Capitol in the background.
The strike wave of 1945-47, where several million workers in the mines, oil industry, railroads, steel plants, electrical plants, meat packing and auto industry and dozens of local workplaces staged strikes for higher wages and benefits, also led to a backlash on Capitol Hill–and with some segments of the public–against unions.
Further public support of union power was eroded by the growing “Red Scare” and the alleged communist leadership of 11 national unions and the influential presence of left-leaning leaders in many others.
AT&T devised a strategy to walk-back their national negotiation that had resulted in the wage settlement of 1946,
This time they planned to break union power by refusing to to conduct negotiations on the national level, making unacceptable offers at the local level and forcing the union to strike. Their objective was to peel off weaker local unions to make sub-par settlements with the local phone companies after strikers began to miss paychecks.
On the Union Side
NFTW president Joseph Beirne in 1945.
Beirne had been strengthened by the 1946 wage agreement, but its weaknesses were also apparent. 17 unions had bargained for the 33 that went their own way. Beirne needed a stronger national union and went about trying to build it.
He campaigned to form a new union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) with a new constitution that would make the autonomous local unions “divisions” of the new union. Further it would grant the national union the power to approve or disapprove local contracts and strikes, appoint administrators in cases where fraud or insolvency had occurred within the local unions and designate local unions as trustees of the funds of the local union.
It set the power of the union in the national convention and the national executive board between conventions.
This meant that Beirne would have the power to lead a national strike without local unions cutting their own deals. He hoped to have the new union in place by November 1946 in order to take on AT&T in March 1947.
Beirne toured the country and pressed locals to authorize their convention delegates to approve the new union. Many local unions were persuaded by Beirne’s arguments that stronger organization was necessary to take on the AT&T monopoly, but were hesitant to give up their own power.
At the November 1946 Detroit convention of the NFTW, the vast majority of locals hadn’t yet voted on the issue. The convention voted to establish the CWA, but only on an interim basis until locals totaling at least 115,000 members had voted favorably and been issued charters.
The convention also empowered Beirne to name a coordinated bargaining committee that would determine the exact wage demands. Others such as improved vacations and pensions, union shop and dues check-off were voted favorably by the convention delegates.
Mildred Beahm of the Washington Telephone Traffic Union served on the bargaining committee appointed to formulate demands for 1947 bargaining.
Shortly after the convention the national union bargaining committee developed a 10-point demand list that included a $12-weekly across-the-board wage increase, shorter wage progression, uniform pay for job classifications across the country, along with improved pensions, vacations and union security provisions.
But Beirne seemed destined to prepare for his demand for national bargaining with the same loose structure of the NFTW.
Local unions were told to proceed with local bargaining, to hold strike votes and to file any legally necessary strike notices to be prepared for a national strike on April 7, 1947.
Negotiations
The WTTU conducts a strike authorization vote at Turner’s Arena March 20, 1947.
AT&T’s strategy quickly became apparent to the NFTW. Across the country the telephone company subsidiaries of AT&T refused to make a wage offer and instead offered to extend local agreements by 3-6 months.
The Washington Telephone Traffic Union opened negotiations February 17, 1947 and the District Federation of Telephone Workers—the D.C.-area installers affiliate of the NFTW—opened earlier on January 31st.
Legally necessary 30-day strike notices were filed with the federal government on March 1, 1947 by affiliates of the NFTW in 23 states, including the two Washington, D.C. C&P locals.
Negotiations Fruitless
“Mrs. Mary E. Gannon, president of the WTTU, said no wage proposal had been made by the company although the union had asked for $12 a week wage increase for all workers,” The Washington Star reported March 2nd.
The same article quoted Beirne:
“After more than a month of continuous bargaining, not one Bell telephone company has offered a penny of wage increases. They have rejected all our proposals for union shop, shortened apprentice periods, narrowing of wage differences between large and small towns, and have refused to consider improvements in vacations and pensions.”
Gannon’s negotiations were going nowhere.
“We’re just battling back and forth and we’re getting nowhere,” Gannon was quoted in The Washington Post March 4th.
By March 10th, Gannon broke off negotiations with the company, the Post reported:
“Mrs. Gannon charged the company with insisting upon a return to working conditions which existed ‘before the union came into being’ and with refusing all wage boosts ‘notwithstanding undisputed evidence respecting the tremendous increase in the cost of living since last spring.’”
“She contended the company has ‘taken an unreasonable attitude in bargaining’ but emphasized the union is willing to resume negotiations ‘when and if the company decides to make a realistic approach to the problem.’”
Negotiations would, in fact, resume later but with little change.
Strike Votes Across the Country
The C&P cafeteria at the Congress Heights exchange. About 500 members of Gannon’s union worked at 8 C&P cafeterias across the city.
Gannon called a meeting for Turner’s Arena March 20th to hold a strike authorization vote. The secret ballot vote was in favor of a strike by a 7-1 margin–2635-390. Gannon declared that the “WTTU has voted decisively to join in whatever nationwide action is taken,” according to the Star.
Ballots across the country were overwhelmingly in favor of following the recommendations of the national bargaining committee according to the union.
Gannon broke off talks with C&P again on March 22nd and again reiterated that “in the event of a change in attitude on the part of the company, the union would be willing to resume negotiations,” The Washington Post reported.
Beirne Worried
Behind the scenes, Beirne was worried. He attempted to persuade the national policy committee to hold off on the strike deadline. He was concerned that the union lacked organizational cohesion and felt that you shouldn’t call a strike when the company is trying to push you into one.
“We should not strike, that we should hold off any notion of a strike until we got our structure that would cause us to stay together…We are not equipped financially, and we are not equipped organizationally to maintain a unified strike…the other side will clobber us, and we’ll begin to fall apart,” Beirne recalled that he told the union’s national policy committee according to Brooks.
But with AT&T’s last minute 1946 settlement on wages, many of the NFTW leaders were more optimistic and they had even more local unions on board this time.
“I won’t speak for anybody but myself, but I’m satisfied most of the people in the union felt the same way and that was the company couldn’t stand a strike. I didn’t think it would last over three days, and I thought we’d get what we wanted within reason,” D. L. McCowen a union national policy committee member from Texas recalled later as quoted in Brooks’ book.
Beirne was outvoted almost unanimously.
Pressure on Both Sides
Pressure on both sides ramped up as the April 7th deadline approached.
U.S. mediators were sent to negotiations across the country to attempt to affect a settlement. U.S. Senator Wayne Morse (R-OR), urged the company and the union to “adopt voluntary peaceful procedures” to avoid a strike and suggested arbitration of the dispute
Beirne attempted to convene national bargaining with AT&T, by sending a telegram to the company, but was rebuffed again.
“Your telegram of March 24 has been sent to Bell System companies whose employees are represented by NFTW representatives for their consideration. As you know, labor agreements with the unions affiliated with NFTW are with operating telephone companies and all bargaining matters are handled by each company with its union,” AT&T replied.
C&P Telephone echoed the same response in a statement to reporters saying that they “consider negotiations for a contract a purely local matter.”
“We have always maintained wage levels that compare favorably with wages being paid for similar work in this community.”
Congress Weighs-In
U.S. Rep. Fred Hartley (R-NJ), while crafting the anti-labor provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, introduced legislation making it easier to issue an injunction against the pending NFTW strike.
While crafting the provisions that would become the Taft-Hartley Act to limit all U.S. unions, the Republican-controlled Congress also began looking at ways to blunt the NFTW and any strike.
U.S. Rep Gerald Landis (R-Ind.), ranking Republican member of the House Education and Labor Committee, said that Congress would quickly give the President the power to seize the telephone company in the event of a national strike.
Meanwhile U.S. Rep. Fred Hartley (R-N.J.), chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, introduced legislation to provide an injunction against a strike by the NFTW.
By the end of March, telephone subsidiaries of AT&T began offering arbitration of wages as a way to avert a strike. The offer only addressed one of the ten NFTW demands and was limited to a comparison of like local jobs, skills and training and excluded both any consideration of cost of living increases when inflation was then running at 8.3 percent and the ability of the company to pay higher wages while the company was enjoying substantial profit. Further there was no offer of national arbitration.
Both Gannon and Robinson, the leaders of the two D.C. area unions, separately offered to arbitrate all union proposals, but the offer was quickly rejected by the local phone company.
Strike Preparations
This 1951 photograph shows the main C&P building at 725 13th Street NW (the tallest) and the D.C. union strike headquarters (labeled) at 711 13th Street NW.
Both sides prepared to strike.
In Washington, D.C., C&P assigned 800 management personnel to handle plant, maintenance and operator work.
Cots were brought into each work place and food stocked for 24-hour operation by management personnel. Of the eight company dining rooms, the management planned to keep four open on a limited basis. Elevators in buildings with multiple floor would be reduced as the elevator operators would be on strike while restrooms would be cleaned by the management.
The union set up strike headquarters at 711 13th Street close to the company’s headquarters and pickets were assigned to 35 C&P Telephone locations. They planned for 24-hour picketing.
The union had no strike fund, but began soliciting donations of food and money to sustain the strikers.
The union offered to permit striking operators to staff emergency lines, but the offer was rejected by the company.
Virginia workers, including those represented by Gannon’s and Robinson’s unions in Northern Virginia, would not be immediately participating in the strike due to a state law requiring utility workers to undergo a waiting period before walking off the job and the intervention of the governor before any strike could be called.
Meanwhile federal conciliators attempted to move stalled negotiations across the country forward.
Move to CWA on Hold
As the strike deadline approached, the 49-member national union policy committee voted to put on hold any further moves to form the CWA.
There was a significant minority of local unions resistant to surrendering local control and some others that favored immediate alignment with the CIO. These unions included the strategic long lines division. The operators unit in Baltimore, Md. and the Pennsylvania Federation of Telephone Workers voted against joining the proposed stronger national union and the Connecticut Union of Telephone Workers left the NFTW in month of March during the runup to the strike deadline.
Labor Secretary Louis Schwellenbach (right) attempted to craft a settlement at the last minute like he had a year earlier, but failed.
The news media paid particular attention to the long-lines negotiations since they had provided the pattern for the 1946 wage settlement. But those negotiations went nowhere like the rest.
Religious leaders asked the union to postpone the strike for a week and continue bargaining, with nationwide arbitration on any items not settled by direct talks. Beirne rejected the proposal out of hand saying that the company had three months to put an offer on the table and thus far had not responded in a positive way to any of the union’s 10 demands.
U.S. Labor Secretary Lewis B. Schwellenbach got personally involved in the final days and conferred with both Craig and Beirne by phone seeking a solution and on April 6th asked the union to postpone the strike by 48 hours. The union’s policy committee turned down his proposal.
As the hours slipped by toward the 6:00 a.m. deadline on April 7th, Schwellenbach roused the 49-member union policy committee from their beds in local hotels at 4:30 a.m. for a meeting at the Labor Department in Washington, D.C.
With union officials gathered in the Labor Department, Schwellenbach telephoned Craig. When he hung up, he had nothing to offer the union and the strike was on.
The National Strike
NFTW president Joseph Beirne and WTTU president Mary Gannon walk the picket line at the main C&P building on 13th Street NW on the first day of the strike April 7, 1947.
Across the country about 65 percent of the nation’s local phone service was affected and about 80 percent of its long distance service.
With broadcast television in its infancy, radio was the main means of instant mass communication. It was largely unaffected by the strike because direct connections were available between networks and local affiliates. However remote programs in areas without direct connections were halted.
However telegraph, radio, teletype and any long-distance phone calls put through by the company’s management personnel would be vulnerable over time to breakdowns because of the walkout of maintenance personnel.
Government operations in Washington, D.C. were largely unaffected because of inter-office phone lines and the ability of the government to route outgoing long distance calls through military and other secure lines. However long distance calls from private numbers into government buildings were curtailed by the strike.
The one non-dial exchange in the city serving about 5,000 lines was staffed by management personnel, as were two suburban exchanges that also lacked dial service.
Round-The-Clock Picketing
In Washington, D.C. union members began round-the-clock picketing of C&P and Western Electric facilities. Only a handful of union members crossed the initial picket lines.
Picket signs included, “The voice with a smile will be gone for a while,” “Millions for profit but nothing for workers,” and “On Strike for Union Security.”
The Washington Afro American reported, “Twenty-six colored employees of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company joined the telephone strike in Washington Monday morning, leaving the company’s branch office at 14th and U Streets northwest to be operated by its colored manager, C. A. Robinson and his assistant, T.C. Newton.”
Black cafeteria workers, elevator operators and helpers joined other picket lines around the city.
Beirne & Gannon Join the Line
Beirne and Gannon, in the late stages of her pregnancy with her first child Tommy, paraded with the Washington pickets outside the company offices on 13th Street NW.
The strike began with 300,000 workers out—either through a strike or respecting another union’s picket line–causing delays in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The number of workers out rose to 340,000 in the next few days.
On the first day of the strike while long distance service was cut to about 20 percent of normal nationwide, it was estimated at 10 percent of normal in Washington, D.C.
Direct dial service was not impacted. However six million users across the country were still on operator-assisted local service compared to 20 million that had direct dial. The Washington area had only about five percent of local calls that were operator assisted.
The heady days early in the strike gave way to the drudgery of picket duty as time elapsed. There would be periodic rumors of progress in talks, but these gave way to the reality the company was not making any offer of substance at a national level or local level.
Managers Become More Proficient
A manager connects emergency calls at the main C&P building on 13th Street NW during the April-May 1947 nationwide strike by telephone workers.
Managers operating the switchboards became more proficient and a greater percentage of calls went through. Mechanical breakdowns in direct dial service were few and were handled by managers who had been former equipment workers.
C&P Telephone and other AT&T subsidiaries began running ads in daily local newspapers across the country pushing their side of the issues and slamming the union.
The first early contract offers by AT&T subsidiaries and their long lines department centered around proposals for local arbitration.
The first potential break in the strike came when the AT&T long lines division and the union reached a tentative agreement providing for arbitration of wages, length of schedules, vacations, and leaves of absence for union officials. The NFTW local union, which covered long lines nationwide, and the AT&T reached agreement to settle 87 other issues.
The AT&T long lines division had been the key to settling the 1946 contract as its wages were applied to AT&T local telephone company subsidiaries.
However this time, federal mediators announced that the company was only settling this one contract and was not obligating itself to apply any of its terms elsewhere.
The question remained, would the union roll the dice that a long-lines settlement could be used as a pattern anyway?
No Deal
The union’s 49-member national policy committee rejected the settlement April 11th, still believing they could attain a national agreement.
Both sides hardened their negotiating stance. Beirne demanded a meeting with national AT&T officials. Management of the local subsidiaries refused to seriously negotiate unless local union leaders would agree that they wouldn’t submit any settlement made to the national union.
Across the country, AT&T attempted to organize back-to-work movements as they telephoned individual members asking them to cross picket lines.
In Washington, D.C. as the strike entered its eighth day on April 14th, Gannon responded by holding a rally at Turner’s Arena and a march on the main offices of C&P Telephone on 13th Street NW.
Workers March on C&P
“More than 2,000 traffic department employees left the morning mass meeting [at Turner’s Arena] to form at Franklin Park, 13th & I Streets NW, and march to the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone headquarters at 725 13th Street NW,” reported The Washington Star.
Dancing on the picket line in front of C&P headquarters at 725 13th St. NW April 23, 1947..
“Singing and laughing they walked in single file until they formed a complete square around the company buildings. Led by Mrs. Mary Gannon, president of the Washington Telephone Traffic Union, the girls demonstrated for about 15 minutes and then withdrew as normal picketing resumed,” the Star continued.
On April 15th U.S. Labor Secretary Schwellenbach made a proposal to both sides to have a five-member national arbitration panel rule on wages and five other union demands for each of the bargaining units with the other issues to be settled in “intense negotiations,” with a return to work within three days.
Craig, the AT&T vice president, countered saying the proposal was “impractical” and offered instead 12 regional arbitrations. Bierne and the 49-member national policy committee of the union rejected the proposal saying that AT&T must make a wage offer.
At an April 17th rally at Turner’s Arena by the two C&P Washington NFTW affiliates, Bierne told the hundreds of union members present that he expected a settlement soon but to show “courage” if the walkout is prolonged.
“We’re working toward a settlement this week, but if we don’t win this year, we never will,” Beirne told reporters after the meeting.
Beirne Attempts to Call Off Strike
But behind the scenes, Beirne knew he could not hold the local unions together much longer. He urged the union national policy committee to abandon the strike and continue negotiations while threatening another strike. He received only one vote for his proposal.
On April 18th C&P Telephone made an offer to the two Washington unions that was identical to the one Craig laid out nationally, again showing Craig’s claim that each subsidiary acted independently as a sham.
The unions responded by demanding that C&P make a wage offer and making their own offer.
A C&P Telephone Co. ad in the April 14, 1947 Washington Star. AT&T subsidiaries ran ads in newspapers across the country.
“The union made an offer today which apparently was intended to cloud the issue and raise the hopes of its members in an effort to stem the tide of the back-to-work movement which is gaining momentum,” J. B. Morrison, vice president and general manager of C&P told reporters.
“We are willing to put the matter of our basic wages before such a board [of local arbitration]. We believe that the union hesitates either because they know that our employees are well paid or they cannot move without the approval of the National Federal of Telephone Workers, with which they are affiliated.
The same was heard by local union bargainers across the country and resulted in the NFTW taking out its first ads in local newspapers across the country laying out its case for a national settlement.
Meanwhile Gannon continued to rally her troops, visiting picket lines across the area and reporting “high morale.” By her count only six traffic union members had crossed picket lines since the strike began.
Flying Squadron
The following day she held another information meeting at Turner’s Arena. Out of that meeting came plans for a squad of “flying pickets” to travel by car, bus and streetcar to the different C&P facilities around the metropolitan area to bolster the morale of picket lines.
Gannon’s union, which had no strike fund, also organized a dance at the Silver Spring Armory to raise money for the union’s welfare fund that aided the strikers who were now nearly all in dire financial shape.
Across the country, aid to the NTFW began to arrive. The CIO pledged financial support and instructed affiliates not to cross picket lines.
Contributions came in from unions across the country—Cigar Workers, Ladies Garment Workers, Steel Workers, Teamsters, Clothing Workers, Machinists, United Auto Workers, Mine Workers and many others—totaling $128,000 or about $1.8 million in 2022 dollars.
At the national level, hope for a settlement began to rise during the third week of the strike when General Motors, U.S. Steel and Westinghouse Electric either made offers or reached agreement with their unions on $0.15 per hour wage increases—translating to about $6 per week.
While AT&T officials had indicated they would not set a pattern with their own bargaining, they never ruled out following a pattern set by other industries.
However, hopes were dashed when Edgar Warren head of the U.S. Conciliation service said that AT&T officials claimed other industry increases would have no effect on them.
“They tell us that the wage increases recently given do not affect them right now. They say these other increases have not yet affected the market price for labor and they cannot raise wages for the time being,” Warren told reporters.
Tempers Rise on Picket Line
Two-and-a-half weeks into the strike, tensions were rising on the picket lines as a few union workers began crossing the lines.
A windy day on the picket line in front of C&P headquarters April 28, 1947.
Brooks describes some of the turmoil in his book, “Rancor soured the unfolding spring. Two strikers were injured and 22 arrested after a picket line brouhaha with police in Detroit. Police dispersed a mass demonstration in San Francisco. Someone cut telephone cable in lower Manhattan” and a dozen other places, and 250 telephone circuits were slashed near Fort Worth, TX.
Locally, pushing and shoving between picketers and scabs occurred at the main office at 723 13th Street NW, resulting in one arrest.
“Sgt. Douglas said he saw Mrs. Mary E. Gannon, president of the Washington Telephone Traffic Union, kick one of the girls leaving the building on the shin,” reported the Star.
“Then he saw another picket jostle a second worker with her hip and knock her against the building, the policeman said,” according to the Star. That picketer was arrested.
Gannon denied the allegation.
“If I had kicked anyone it would have hurt me more than the person I kicked,” she told the Star. “I was wearing open-toed shoes.”
“Insisting that Mrs. Gannon started the affray with a kick, Sgt. Douglas said he would have arrested her except that ‘the kicked girl ran off and there was no complaining witness.’”
Other incidents were reported including an arrest at the Hyattsville, Md. picket line.
As the strike went on management personnel became more proficient and were supplemented by scabs.
C&P gave strike-breakers a whistle that could alert company officials in the event they had trouble crossing a picket line. In return, Gannon’s union gave pickets whistles to blow while they picketed to annoy management and scabs working inside.
Madge Giles of the D.C. telephone traffic union later said that the company had the police on their side.
“They’d go in the operating building, and the company was feeding them their lunch and dinners and breakfasts, what have you…I think the company had them right in the palm of their hand,” she recalled in Brooks’ book.
First Defection from Strike
The first defection from the NFTW occurred April 25th when the Baltimore, Md. installers’ union reached an agreement with C&P to arbitrate four items and negotiate the rest after returning to work.
The agreement covered 2,200 predominantly male workers while the predominantly female operators continued to honor picket lines. The Maryland installers withdrew from the NFTW after their agreement with C&P.
On April 26th, two more women were arrested for harassing a former employee who crossed picket lines to scab at the Franklin exchange at 120 7th Street NE. A third was arrested for disorderly conduct for cursing at police at the exchange on the 1400 block of Columbia Road NW.
The same day the NFTW cut its wage demand from $12 to $6 in line with other industry settlements.
Union Publishes Ad
The NFTW buys an ad in the April 27, 1947 Washington Star in an attempt to counter C&P Telephone’s ads.
Three weeks into the strike on April 27th, the union published its side of the story in an advertisement in The Washington Star while the two local Washington unions rallied again at Turner’s Arena.
The packed arena heard NFTW president Beirne tell them that he expected “a major break in the not too distant future” in the form of a wage offer from AT&T to the long lines division whose contract “would probably set a pattern” as it had a year earlier.
Beirne characterized the settlement and disaffiliation of the Maryland installers as a “stab in the back” at the Turner’s Arena rally. He urged the gathering to “keep the walkout in full force today…Once we get together on money issues the other issues should be easy. The end may be in sight,” the Star newspaper reported.
While other companies had unofficial discussions with their unions about wages, Northwestern Bell made the first wage offer to a NFTW affiliate on April 28th in the amount of a $2.50 increase per week.
Despite the company’s public relations push, a national Gallup opinion poll in early May demonstrated that the public backed the union by a 2-1 margin of those that had an opinion.
More Local Unions Break Away
But, independent unions in New York and Pennsylvania that had been coordinating their strikes with the NFTW, broke ranks and reached settlements with their companies on April 30th. Pennsylvania settled for $3-4 increases while New York settled for $4 across the board.
After the New York rank-and-file repudiated their leaders’ agreement and continued their strike and picketing, Beirne addressed a mass rally there and urged them on while hoping to discourage others from settling.
However other affiliates were reaching agreements on April 30th and submitting them to the union’s policy board. In Milwaukee, 7,000 telephone workers reached an agreement for wage increases from $3-5 per week and Fort Dodge, Iowa a small unit reached an agreement for increases of $4-6 per week.
Despite Beirne’s and the 49-member policy board’s best efforts, strike unity crack had begun to widen.
Number of Scabs Increases
Pickets look skyward after a management employee or scab dropped an egg on them outside of the main C&P building on 13th St. NW April 27, 1947.
In Washington another women striker was arrested May 1st for spitting on a scab at the telephone company’s headquarters.
The lengthening strike and the company-organized back to work movement had some success. Most of those strikers returning to work were installers. C&P reported about one-third of the 3,200 installers were back, while only 90 of 3,400 in the traffic union had returned.
While the women of traffic union were able to hold their strike together, the predominantly-male installers’ union did not.
Madge Giles recalled in Brooks’ book, “No, we didn’t shut the phone company down completely, no, because they had a lot of their management people who were working switchboards, and then at times, we had some fellow workers from the plant department that finished their tour and went into the traffic operators’ switchboard and worked. This was one of the things that caused the trouble between the traffic group and the plant group. We thought this was wrong. We saw no reason why, if they had to be strikebreakers, why they couldn’t go home at the end of their tour and leave the traffic operating board alone…We were quite a few years overcoming that feeling, but we have.”
NFTW Abandons Nationwide Bargaining
As an increasing number of local unions were beginning to reach settlements with local phone companies, the 49-member national policy committee of the NFTW abandoned their objective of national bargaining and left Washington, D.C. to return to their home bases on May 7th.
The same day the District Federation of Telephone Workers representing 3200 installers, accountants and sales representatives settled with C&P for $2-4 per week increases, undercutting the D.C. traffic union.
The D.C. installers settled by sacrificing three employees who had been fired for picket incidents, without addressing lost company service while on strike and losing maintenance of dues. The installers’ union recommended respecting the traffic union’s picket lines, but nearly two-thirds of the installers showed up for work.
The next day, the key Long Lines division of AT&T settled for a $4.40 per week increase and telephone unions around the country began falling like dominos.
Washington Operators’ Settlement
Strikers express their feelings when a scab crosses their picket line May 2,1947.
As the D.C. traffic union closed in on a settlement, Western Electric workers, 600 of whom were employed in the District and had been honoring strike picket lines, were ready to call a strike of their own.
Despite the increased pressure on Gannon to get her members back to work, Gannon held firm.
The Washington Star reported on May 10th, “Mary E. Gannon, WTTU president, said the union’s policy is to respect picket lines of other National Federation of Telephone Workers affiliates, and that the WTTU members would be advised of this.”
To strengthen her hand with the company, on May 12th, Gannon put the company’s latest offer up for a vote at Turner’s Arena by the traffic union members. Despite being on strike for five weeks, the group overwhelmingly voted down C&P’s latest offer.
Poison Pills
The offer contained wages of $2-4 per week increases, similar to most being settled for across the country, but contained “poison pills” that the members wouldn’t swallow.
Gannon explained, “The company asked us to give up our present seniority and grievance procedure as well as maintenance of dues,” as reported by the Star. She added that a clause giving the company the right to fire employees for picket line incidents was also unacceptable.
The following day, C&P announced that seniority for benefit and other purposes would not be affected by the strike, removing one obstacle to settling the operator’s strike.
While it is common today for many women to continue working up until the time they go into labor, it was unusual in the 1940s. However Gannon hardly missed a beat.
After giving birth to her son Tommy, she postponed the strike of her Virginia members that had been stalled by a Virginia law and returned to the bargaining table.
Gannon settled her contract May 17th, the 41st day of the strike. With the seniority issue already settled, adding extra steps to the grievance procedure resolved that issue and maintenance of dues was replaced by the company deducting union dues from those workers who volunteered to do so at no cost to the union.
Three Members Fired
The thorniest issue was about three of Gannon’s union members who were discharged by the company for incidents on the picket line. The union and the company accepted a federal mediator’s proposal to arbitrate whether the three should be returned to work.
A C&P clerk is shown at work circa 1930. C&P clerks were part of the traffic union.
Wages were a $4 increase for 90 percent of the unit, a $3 increase for some clerical employees, and a $2 increase for other cafeteria workers, general helpers and rest room attendants.
The contract also applied to Gannon’s members in northern Virginia, settling that issue.
The union had about 3,000 telephone operators, 500 cafeteria workers, 250 clerks, 55 rest room attendants and a few general helpers.
The contract was ratified by yet another mass meeting at Turner’s Arena where Gannon advised those present that they should report to work as scheduled the next day, but to respect any picket lines put up by Western Electric workers.
Sure enough, the pickets from the Western Electric installers were established at all C&P facilities and the operators refused to cross the picket line.
The Western Electric strike settled the same day for a $4.40 per week increase—one of the best settlements made—and the Washington Telephone Traffic Union went back to work the next day with their heads held high.
The Traffic Union
Gannon (center), in the late stages of pregnancy. when the strike was called, had her baby and returned to the bargaining table to conclude contract talks.
Gannon’s union was one of the last to return to work nationwide—fighting until the end to win as much as could be won and holding out an extra day in an expression of solidarity with the Western Electric workers.
Gannon undoubtedly thought back to the 1942 NFTW convention when men sought to limit the number of women on the national executive board in part because they were suspicious, thinking women weren’t real trade unionists.
She surely felt anger that men had led the back to work movement in Baltimore and the installers union in D.C. had 95 percent of the scabs between the two unions during the strike. But she also had to feel pride that the women unionists under her leadership fought until the end and went back to work together.
If the national strike failed in its objective, the Washington Telephone Traffic Union wasn’t to blame.
Solid, Unified, Militant Union
Gannon had accomplished building a solid, unified, and militant union by years of constant communication with members and the experience the members had with previous work stoppages. They trusted their leader and their leader could place trust in them.
Gannon had her finger on the pulse of the members at all times and knew the steps she could take—and what she couldn’t.
The tactics she used during the strike to hold her unit together included frequent mass meetings, regularly visiting picket lines, organizing a flying picket squadron to bolster morale and discourage scabs, staging a march on the company headquarters, making statements to the press that were aimed as much at the company and her members as they were to the public, and raising funds for member emergencies during the strike—all while dealing with the issues of her late term pregnancy.
National Strike Analysis
NFTW president Joseph Beiren walks the picket line behind Mary Gannon during the 1947 national strike.
The national strike was probably the most extensive in the country up until that point in time.
The June issue of the NFTW The Telephone Worker said, “The AT&T is the largest corporation ever to have been struck. The strike extended over more territory and into more communities than any previous strike in the history of the nation. Thousands of the smaller communities had their first experience with a strike through the telephone walkout. Very few strikes have involved so many workers.”
Few, if any, unions staged national strikes with a weaker federation of unions.
Beirne said shortly after the strike, “We were trying to make a federation of unions to do the kind of job which can only be done by one union in the telephone industry. The latter states of the strike demonstrated that the separate organizations composing the national federation would act separately and individually—based on their own autonomy—when the going got tough,” according to Brooks in his book.
Contrary to some union claims during the strike, AT&T did not set out to break the union—only to substantially weaken it. AT&T still feared that if the NFTW failed completely, they would be faced with an affiliate of the then left-leaning, militant CIO. They succeeded in the short term with their objectives—weaker unions and lower wage costs than other industries.
Alvin Loren Park wrote in a thesis on the strike:
“It was the feeling of the Conciliation Service that AT&T would accept as the final cash settlement approximately the pattern that had developed in manufacturing industries. This amounted to 11.5 to 12.5 cents per hour ($4.60 to $5 per week)( with 2.5 to 3.5 cents per hour extra for fringe issues.”
“AT&T would not accept these figures, however. It chose instead to exploit the situation [the fracturing strike] to the fullest extent, and through the subsidiary companies, it proceeded to work out, with relatively weak local unions, settlements that were lower than the manufacturing pattern,” he continued.
Telephone companies were already paying less than the national manufacturing standards and the pay structure fell further behind with the 1947 settlements.
Beirne looked at the glass as half-full when he gave a statement to telephone workers after the strike.
“The united front and singleness of purpose of the policy committee during the time of its existence served as an influence in breaking what would have been a $2 [per week] pattern,” Beirne said.
However, the defeat of the effort at national bargaining had immediate consequences for the NFTW.
CWA and the CIO
CIO Vice President Allan S. Haywood (center) shows off anti-Taft Hartley Act petitions in 1947. Haywood also headed the CIIO Telephone Workers Organizing Committee (1947-49).
The issues that had divided the union over the proposal to form a Communications Workers of America immediately came to the fore again after the strike. Some even doubted whether the founding CWA convention in June would even be held given the tenuous financial position of the NFTW.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) formed a Telephone Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC) in late May and organized a convention May 31-June 2 in an attempt to beat the CWA to the punch.
The American Federation of Labor was never a real serious contender for the loyalties of the NFTW locals since they would only offer a division within the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and not their own telephone union.
The TWOC was headed by CIO vice president Allen S. Haywood and soon announced that the key long lines unit and the Western Electric plant employees in New York/N.J. would be joining the CIO along with the Baltimore-based Maryland telephone traffic union. Northern California telephone workers were already part of the CIO before the strike.
Some of the unions felt that the strike demonstrated they needed direct affiliation with a more powerful national federation. Others were enticed by the CIO’s more liberal autonomy for local unions than the CWA was offering.
Forty-three union leaders of 19 telephone unions with a membership of about 200,000 met in Atlantic City, but many were not authorized by their local unions to bind themselves to the TWOC. For example, Glen Watts of the Washington, D.C. installers union attended as an observer, but the local had already affiliated with the CWA.
CWA Convention
Joseph Beirne, NFTW president, became the Communications Workers of America’s first president in 1947.
Beirne went ahead with the planned convention to launch the CWA on June 9th with 200 delegates from about 30 local unions representing about 177,000 members. Those included the two Washington, D.C. unions that represented employees at C&P Telephone.
The issue of affiliation with the CIO dominated the CWA convention. Two amendments were put forward to change the CWA constitution. The first was to permit a majority of votes cast to decide affiliation with a national labor organization instead of a majority of all eligible.
The D.C. traffic union represented by Mildred Beahm voted in favor while Robinson of the installers union voted against. Each local voted their number of members. The result was 63,900 in favor and 95,111 against.
The second amendment put forward called for a referendum of the membership to determine affiliation with a national labor organization. Again Beahm voted for the constitutional amendment and Robinson against. This time the vote was closer—71960 in favor and 85,055 against.
With the convention, the Washington Telephone Traffic Union passed out of existence and became CWA Division 50.
The CIO claimed it had recruited unions representing over 100,000 members, but Beirne says the numbers for the CWA approached 300,000 when counting local unions who affiliated, but didn’t send delegates.
“We have the members, the CIO has the claims. It is our firm belief that even those officers of phone unions who have been dickering with the CIO will eventually go along with the CWA, and will come back to the union representing most phone workers,” Beirne told reporters.
Over the next two years, the TWOC and the CWA waged representation battles across the country. CWA mostly held its ground against CIO encroachment, but the CIO picked up a number of unaffiliated unions. Instead of a single stronger union coming out of the strike, there were now two competing unions.
The bitterness of the competition for members between the two unions led to a lot of anger. Brooks writes that Washington, D.C.’s Madge Giles, who was on loan to the CWA during a representation battle in the Baltimore area, told a CIO organizer, “Mr. CIO…over my dead body would I ever be a part of the CIO.”
1948 Contract
A C&P line worker is shown in 1929. After the 1947 strike, the installers’ union was in shambles as about 1/3 had crossed picket lines during the strike and union membership was down from nearly 100% pre-strike to about 50% post-strike.
Gannon’s union began preparing the expiration of their contract in mid-May by opening bargaining with the company at the beginning of April 1948.
The loss of the long lines division to the TWOC left the CWA without a clear choice for a pattern-setting union. However Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company was a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T.
The installers union in the city was still in shambles. Before the strike, they had nearly 100 percent of the workers signed up in the union. After the strike, it was around 50 percent.
So the best choice to potentially bargain a pattern settlement was Washington D.C.’s Division 50.
Gannon’s union was still strong and had nearly 100 percent membership.
C&P may not have known it, but Gannon and Beirne both knew that after the long strike of the previous year that ended in defeat, there was little appetite for a strike by District of Columbia telephone operators or by telephone workers around the country.
Now there were two different fiercely competing national unions. There was no possibility of nationwide bargaining.
Further, industrial wage settlements had not yet been made for 1948 and left no clear guidepost for the weakened Bell Telephone unions.
Gannon set out to reach an agreement that would buy time to rebuild and wait for a more favorable time to challenge AT&T again.
Washington Sets the Pattern
After six weeks of nearly continuous bargaining, a three-year agreement was signed on expiration date of the old one-year agreement late in the evening on May 17, 1948.
It provided for no immediate wage hike, but contained provisions that permitted either side to re-open the contract for wage talks any time in the next year. And, provided an agreement on the first wage re-opener was reached, a second re-opener was permitted at any time after one year.
It also made some other improvements.
Gannon (center) with union members.
Gannon told reporters that the long-term contract, the first 3-year agreement with C&P, “gives workers more liberal termination pay, ties the pensions down to the union’s contract, improves the grievance procedures and a holiday differential and clarifies the wording of the contract in a number of ways.”
The increase in termination pay was a key issue as AT&T continued o expand the use of direct dial for local calls and cut operator positions. Gannon also knew it wouldn’t be too long before direct dial was introduced for long distance calls.
The contract also provided that if no wage agreement was reached before the end of the first year, either side could terminate the agreement. The same held true for the second re-opener.
It was the first contract signed with a Bell System company that year and the right contract for the time.
Beirne hailed it saying, “Terms of Division 50’s settlement can serve as a basis for settlement of other CWA contracts and prevent the possibility of a strike in the industry. This agreement, and many others like it that may be negotiated across the country, can provide long-term stability in the industry if proper wage adjustments are made within the next 12 months and thereafter in accordance with the wage provisions of the contract,” according to Brooks in his book.
Ten CWA divisions followed with 3-2 contracts similar to Washington. The CIO’s long lines division made noise about a strike, but ended up settling along similar lines.
The battle with AT&T for a national agreement had been postponed to rebuild the unions.
CIO Again
The CWA convention followed the Washington agreement in June and the primary question was affiliation with the CIO to create one telephone union again.
After an initial vote to affiliate lost narrowly, a substitute motion was made to have the union executive board investigate affiliation with the AFL, the CIO or John Lewis’s then independent Mine Workers union. The board could then recommend affiliation and conduct a referendum of the entire membership. The motion passed.
1949 Re-Opener
Glen Watts, 2nd from right, is shown in a 1952 meeting of Washington, D.C. CWA locals. Margaret Ross, president of the D.C. operators’s union is at far right.
The two Washington C&P unions started negotiations on the first wage re-opener in their agreement September 15, 1948.
The installers union was now CWA Division 36 and was under the new leadership of Glenn Watts, a future CWA national president. Watts had set about re-building the local and along with Gannon presented a united front to C&P on the wage re-opener.
As negotiations dragged on, both unions joined to hold a series of meetings at Turner’s Arena. These were informational meetings that workers attended before or after their shifts and didn’t pull workers off the job.
This time around Washington workers were growing impatient for a raise and there were job actions in other states around contracts, including a strike in the Detroit, Michigan area.
Installers Settle
Both unions rejected “final” offers by C&P in October. Watts broke the united front with Gannon in November as his members pressed him to accept the C&P offer and he agreed to settle.
The agreement provided $2 to $6 per week increases depending on classification and seniority.
Watts said the agreement was the best he could do under the circumstances where his members didn’t want to strike and the majority favored accepting the increases.
But he said the agreement “was entirely unsatisfactory in view of the increase of the cost of living since the last wage increase in May 1947,” as quoted in The Washington Star.
Watts also called the agreement a “shocking discrimination against low wage earners” and that the company “passed up an opportunity to enter into an era of good employee relations by its stubborn determination to have its own way.”
Gannon, however, held firm in her rejection of the October offer.
On February 1, 1949 Gannon reached an agreement. The contract still contained increases from $2 to $4 per week, but far more workers were covered by the higher numbers.
Only 719 workers had been included in the $4 increase offered by the company in October. The February settlement gave the vast majority of operators $4 along with some of the clerks. The wage increases were retroactive to January 16th.
One Union Again
A mass meeting of the Washington Telephone Traffic Union.
The executive board of CWA recommended affiliation with the CIO. The next step was to conduct a nationwide referendum that passed 71,312 for affiliation and 34,419 for remaining independent.
The results of the two-month canvass were announced May 7th by Bierne.
Washington’s Traffic Clerk Division 50 put its bitter feeling aside and voted in favor of affiliation by a margin of 601 in favor and 435 against while Division 36 made up of the installers, accounting and sales representatives voted 533 in favor and 819 against.
The CIO immediately issued a charter to the CWA, but the hard work of merging the TWOC and the CWA was just beginning.
The details of the merger were worked out prior to the CWA convention scheduled for June 13-17, 1949 in Chicago.
At the convention, TWOC delegates were seated and constitutional changes to combine the two unions were approved. Beirne was elected president and other officers included two women vice presidents.
Gannon nominated Frances Smith of Michigan, the former NFTW executive board member who was not at the convention, as the first woman vice president of CWA. However, Smith, who had two children and was reluctant to move to Washington, D.C., instructed the Detroit delegates to decline the nomination for personal reasons. It was later learned she was already ill and she died of cancer in 1951.
CWA-CIO now had 228,000 members after picking up 54,000 from TWOC. This was close to the numbers of affiliated members that the old NFTW had. There were still a number of unaffiliated telephone unions and a number of unorganized units that the union would focus on in the coming years.
Gannon
Mary Gannon, 2nd from right, walks the picket line during the 1947 national strike.
As Division 50 prepared for the second wage re-opener of their 3-year agreement, Gannon began to step back from day to day leadership of the union, went on leave, and relinquished the presidency to long-time compatriot Eleanor Jane Palmer in late 1949.
Gannon had fought for 15 years to uplift telephone operators and to build a union that could take on the AT&T monopoly. There is always more work to do, but Gannon had accomplished her goals—too many improvements for telephone operators to list and building a strong local and national union capable of taking on the Bell system.
The Washington Star published an article March 22, 1950 announcing that she was leaving the union and C&P Telephone altogether. Excerpts from the article:
“Mrs. Mary Gannon, for 15 years militant leader of the Washington telephone operators’ union has resigned to devote more time to being a mother—and possibly to launch a political career.
“The energetic, 38-year-old union leader made the decision on the eve of her scheduled return from a four-month leave, her first vacation in five years.
“It was a decision that also entailed quitting her job as supervisory time clerk with the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co.
“’It all has been very difficult,’ Mrs. Gannon said, ‘I was torn between two children, for I feel like the union was my child, too. But in the end I felt that I must give more attention to Tommy.’
“Tommy is her two-year-old son, born in May, 1947, at the close of the 6-week national telephone strike. Mrs. Gannon put in her usual long office hours during most of the strike. As in many other strikes—she led about 20 demonstrations of various types–Mrs. Gannon frequently appeared at the picket lines to cheer the strikers.
“Mrs. Gannon said she became interested in unionism ‘by accident’ in the early 1930s when a company-sponsored employee group was active. She stepped up when the nucleus of the present union was born in 1935.
Mary Gannon (left) passes picket signs to Eleanor Palmer during the 1947 national strike.
“Since then she has been spokesman for 2,500 operators and clerical workers, now identified as Division 50 , Communications Workers of America. Other union officials credit her with obtaining a long list of gains for traffic department workers, both here and nationally.”
Another tribute was given by her successor, Eleanor Jane Palmer.
Palmer described her as a “very dynamic woman, who commanded both respect and a following. She had the people working right with her, and we had so much regard for her that you might call it blind faith. I think if she said, ‘jump,’ we’d jump and then ask later.”
Another tribute to her leadership was a moniker bestowed on the union by the local radio and newspaper journalists. The term girl is rightly an insult today demeaning women, but back in the 1940s it was in common usage. C&P Telephone referred to operators as “Hello girls.” The news reporters called them “Gannon’s girls.”
Author’s Notes
I worked briefly at an AT&T office in Washington, D.C. as a clerk-typist during the summer of 1971 in between semesters at the University of Maryland.
The atmosphere gave me a taste of the oppressive conditions facing the Washington Telephone Traffic Union.
Everyone was seated at their desks at 9:00 a.m. and as the second hand on the clock we all faced reached 12, everyone started typing. There was no talking to co-workers permitted and the length of bathroom breaks were monitored. When it came time for lunch, typewriters ceased about five seconds before time to go and everyone was back at their seats and waited for the second hand to reach 12 before everyone resumed typing again.
I think when evaluating Gannon and the Washington Telephone Traffic Union, there probably aren’t enough accolades for what they accomplished—rising above their male compatriots to make improvements for workers in a rigidly male-dominated society.
Oliver Palmer circa 1958.
There are only two other local Washington, D.C. union leaders I would put in the same category as Gannon during that period—Oliver Palmer who led the Cafeteria Workers Union to organize hundreds of low-wage workers, steered the union, through a long, bitter 1948 strike that involved red-baiting and union busting, uplifted several thousand workers to obtaining living wages, health care, pension and other benefits and continued to head the union into the 1960s.
The other is Margaret Gilmore of the United Public Workers at the Bureau of Engraving who led hundreds of Black workers during her tenure heading the union in the late 1940s and early 1950s to take on the power of a white supremacist, right-leaning federal bureaucracy–and winning.
I think the power and unity of Gannon’s union can be seen in the debate over the Taft-Hartley Bill in 1947 over ending the “closed shop” – a union membership requirement.
Margaret Gilmore circa 1950.
Alfred Friendly wrote in the Washington Post about the debate and said,
‘There is a final practical argument [against legislating an open shop]. You can legislate indefinitely against the closed shop, it is said and still be unable to achieve the desired goal. This is because in many cases, the individual employees will simply decline to work alongside a non-union man and no laws can force them to work.”
“Mary Gannon’s telephone girls in Washington, for example, have no closed shop contract, but when a switchboard operator is employed who refuses to join the union, a remarkable state in inaction sets in on the part of the rest of the hello-girls.”
I think the only criticisms that can be made of the union are twofold.
Gannon and the union could have been more assertive on the rights of Black people. It wasn’t as if there were no other union voices speaking up at that time, including nearly all the local unions of the CIO and the AFL cooks, laborers and a few others.
Further, there was a great opportunity for the WTTU to advocate for their own Black members by championing their promotion from other jobs within C&P to telephone operator as a solution to the “imported operator” issue that led to at least two work stoppages in 1944. The “imported operator” issue arose during World War II while C&P was under pressure by the FEPC and a local civil rights committee to hire Black operators.
The union’s legacy is thereby tarnished by their failure to advocate uplifting their own Black union members.
The other criticism is one raised in Venus Green’s Race on the Line. Gannon never brought up the issue of how to mitigate technological advancements that would decimate the union by eliminating the telephone operator job over time.
Gannon did press and win greater termination pay for those laid off. However, the issue of retraining as direct-dial replaced operators was never raised in contract negotiations with C&P by Gannon’s union.
The fact remains though, that when it comes to training for other jobs, there were only a few clerical jobs that were equal in pay to operator. And it would have been near impossible to train women for installers jobs at that time due to cultural resistance and the conservative local union that represented them in Washington, D.C.
But it is fair to say that the failure to take this issue on would haunt the Communications Workers of America in the coming years. In Gannon’s defense it must be pointed out that no one in the NFTW or the CWA raised the issue during those years.
Taking these two issues into account, if union leaders and rank and file members can apply the lessons of the WTTU to their own unions today, their unions will be greatly strengthened.
CWA Division 50 would become CWA Local 2300, which continues to exist representing workers at NASA, Verizon, B’Nai B’Rith, and the National Center for Social Studies.
CWA president Joseph Beirne (2nd in line) joins pickets in front of C&P Telephone during the 1968 national strike.
True pattern bargaining between CWA and AT&T didn’t emerge until the 1958 and 1959 contract bargaining and the next national strike didn’t occur until 1968 when fully company-paid health insurance was obtained.
This post is hurt by two things. The first is that I was unable to review the records of the National Federation of Telephone Workers held at the Tamiment Library in New York because of the pandemic– which would surely shed more light on Gannon and the local union.
The second involves Mary Gannon’s early life and what happened to her after she left the union. My efforts to contact family members and find other records came up short.
Hopefully another researcher can fill in the blanks and widen and deepen the understanding of this remarkable woman and union.
Sources include:
Race on the Line by Venus Green, Communications Workers of America: The Story of a Union by Thomas R. Brooks, The Washington Post, The Washington Star, The Washington Afro American, CWA History by Communications Workers of America, 1953 Report by the Committee on Government Contract Compliance, 1988 Proceedings of the 50th Annual Convention of the Communications Workers of America, New York Amsterdam News, and The Other Women’s Movement by Dorothy Cobble.
Want to See More Images?
Washington Telephone Traffic Union images
D.C. Communications Workers of America images
Telephone Traffic Union Contract with C&P
1948 contract and 1950 wage re-opener between CWA Division 50 and C&P Telephone
1953 contract between CWA and C&P Telephone
Want to Check Out the NFTW’s The Telephone Worker?
Want to Read More About the 1940s?
Against the cold wind: The 1948 cafeteria workers strike
Strike wave at Washington, D.C.’s Capital Transit: 1945
A labor and D.C. civil rights leader remembered: Marie Richardson
Police raid 1948 fundraiser by Progressive Party supporters
The fight against Capital Transit’s Jim Crow hiring: 1941-55
The D.C. women streetcar operators of World War II
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