High Voltage Women: Breaking Barriers at Seattle City Light by Ellie Belew (review)

Today, when many of the gains made by workers in the twentieth century are being rolled back, stories such as that told in this book are an important reminder of how those rights were fought for. The first ten women utility electrical workers arrived in 1974 at Seattle City Light when it was an all-male and almost all-white workforce. But the context of the militancy of the civil rights movement, the radicalisation, beginning on the campuses, against the Vietnam War, and the emergence of women’s liberation and a range of other campaigns for civil and political rights mattered. It meant that even Seattle City Light’s management was forced to make moves towards affirmative action – even if of the most limited kind. Only in 1972 was the first Electrical Trades Trainee (ETT) programme for men of colour instituted. Very few of them ended up with jobs. The ETT programme for women was designed to break down City Light’s barriers to women in the electrical field crews.

All the women had joined the union branch, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) #77, but had to fight for their rights as workers there almost as much as against their bosses. Once they got on the job, the women trainees faced a barrage of harassment from supervisors and many fellow workers. In this environment, solidarity came most often from others whose road into these jobs had also been barred. As one of the later women trainees, Kathleen Merrigan, put it, “You could count on the Black men … to make life easier. They would teach you and show you how to do things. They didn’t hate you” (161).

Within a few months of the ETTs beginning in 1974, they and Clara Fraser, who had devised the programme, had each filed discrimination charges about their treatment at work. The ETTs won theirs in 1976. Fraser was sacked in 1976 and only won reinstatement in 1982. Eventually, in 1983, the human rights director at City Light himself filed a discrimination claim on behalf of the women, claiming seven years of unlawful employment practice due to sex. Not content with merely going through the mandated procedures, some of the women initiated the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL) in response. It included men and women working in all areas of the utility and raised a noisy public campaign in protest at the discrimination at City Light and in support of the women workers. Its existence, and the persistence of the women, eventually forced IBEW #77 to act more like a union of all its members.

Nonetheless, it is one of the weaknesses of the struggle that so much of it was conducted through the legal system. This skews Ellie Belew’s focus in recounting it to those more tedious arenas. The highlights of the book are the accounts of organising on the job and in protest campaigning such as the activities of CERCL. It is a pity there are not more of them. For example, although the union was not a militant one, it had its moments. When 700 electrical workers staged an 11-day wildcat strike against management authoritarianism, in 1974, it was Clara Fraser who led the 300 non-union clerical workers to join them.

This was a militant period for the US working class: 1965–75 had the highest rate of strikes in the post-war period, and between a quarter and a third of them were wildcats (officially unsanctioned walkouts). Candace Cohn’s participant observation account of working-class women’s liberation and rank-and-file rebellion in steel (International Socialist Review, no. 90, 2013) – an account of how women workers broke into another male-dominated industry – gives a feel for how existing unions saw an explosion of Black caucuses, women’s caucuses and rank-and-file groups as the strike rate grew.

Cohn also emphasises something often overlooked in...